Drone Strikes on Al Qaeda Are Said to Take Toll on Leadership in Pakistan
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Revelations of new high-level losses among Al Qaeda’s top leadership in Pakistan’s tribal belt have underscored how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group’s upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia. While the C.I.A. drone strike that killed two Western hostages has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially to a reassessment of it, the American successes over the years in targeting and killing senior Qaeda operatives in their home base have left the militant group’s leadership facing difficult choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts say. That process of attrition has been accelerated by the emergence of the Islamic State, whose arresting brutality and superior propaganda have sucked up funding and recruits. In the tribal belt, a Pakistani military drive that started last summer has forced Qaeda commanders into ever more remote areas like the Shawal Valley, where two of them were killed alongside an American hostage, Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto, on Jan. 15. Even the death of Mr. Weinstein, a prized hostage whom Al Qaeda had long sought to exchange for prisoners or money, is emblematic of the state of siege. Whereas in Syria, the Islamic State has turned hostage execution into a macabre propaganda spectacle, Al Qaeda has seen any dividend from its captives snatched away, albeit inadvertently, by its American foes. “Core Al Qaeda is a rump of its former self,” said an American counterterrorism official, in an assessment echoed by several European and Pakistani officials. The Pakistanis estimate that Al Qaeda has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to American drone strikes in the past six months — a higher toll than other sources have tracked but indicative of a broader trend. Now, they say, Qaeda commanders are moving back to the relative safety, and isolation, of locations they once fled, like the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and Sudan. Yet militancy experts caution that it is too early to sound the death knell for Al Qaeda’s leaders, for whom patience and adaptability are hallmarks, and who, despite the adversity, remain the principal jihadist militants focused on attacking the West. “People always want to know when the job will be finished,” said Michael Semple, a militancy expert at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “I don’t think we can talk about that. They’re on the back foot, rather than being eliminated.” President Obama’s disclosure that an American counterterrorism operation had killed three Americans and an Italian in January — the two hostages, and two senior Qaeda leaders — offered a rare glimpse into the decade-old shadow war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, as well as a hint of how difficult it remains to get information about Qaeda activities there. Although the strikes that killed Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Lo Porto occurred several months ago, Mr. Obama said he could confirm their deaths only recently. Yet there is little doubt that the swooping valleys and deep forests have become a deadly refuge for Al Qaeda’s leadership. “The drones have left Al Qaeda in tatters,” said a Pakistani security official in Peshawar, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They are in disarray, trying to reorganize but struggling to find people capable of leading the organization.” The group had put hope for new leadership on Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, a local franchise begun in September by the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, ostensibly to counter Islamic State recruitment efforts. The deputy leader of the group was Ahmed Farouq, who was apparently seen as a rising star in militant circles for some time. In a letter to Osama bin Laden in 2010, which recently became public through a terrorism trial in New York, a militant of the same name was singled out as having potential leadership potential. “A good man,” wrote Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a senior Qaeda leader who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the new unit’s ability to impose itself has been constrained by drone strikes that have killed at least five of its leaders, including Mr. Farouq, who officials say was an American citizen, and who is said to have died in the strike that killed the hostages. As ever, though, new militants are emerging to fill the vacant places. Several American officials pointed to Farouq al-Qahtani al-Qatari, who is believed to be based in Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan. One American official described him as “one of the most important remaining figures in the region.” American officials said there was an upside to Qaeda operatives’ relocating to Afghanistan. The American military, despite its diminished presence in the country, still has far greater latitude to launch raids and strikes there than it does across the border. And the Afghan intelligence service and elite special operations forces are far more reliable allies than Pakistan’s spies. Another militant who may figure on American kill lists is Mansoor al-Harbi, a Saudi logistician who, the Pakistani official said, is currently based in the Shawal Valley. Shawal, a long valley walled by high peaks and snow-dusted mountains close to the Afghan border, has become a shelter of choice for many militant groups fleeing the Pakistani military operation in North Waziristan that started last June. Otherwise, Qaeda operatives are clustered in small pockets in South Waziristan and in the Tirah Valley, a militant bolt hole in the Khyber tribal region, Pakistani officials said. But American and European officials cautioned against overstating the troubles facing Qaeda’s leaders, who have a long record of enduring adversity. They started to disperse commanders from Waziristan to Africa and the Middle East starting in about 2008, when the drone campaign started in earnest. For now, Qaeda’s top leadership will probably be preoccupied with its survival rather than plotting attacks on the West, Mr. Semple said. “They have ways of surviving, and the guys who remain are good,” he said. “But can they get together to brainstorm attacks on the U.S.? I don’t think there are too many meetings.” More broadly, though, questions about Qaeda’s ability to bounce back are likely to find answers in its rivalry with Islamic State rather than in the valleys of Waziristan. Islamic State has dwarfed Al Qaeda’s media presence over the past year, through aggressive use of Twitter and a constant stream of news releases. To jihadist recruits, the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, looms as a more compelling figure beside the elderly, and relatively colorless, Mr. Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Yet from Yemen to Somalia and Syria, Mr. Zawahri retains the loyalty of committed jihadist commanders who say they prefer the Qaeda brand of militancy. Then there is the wider question of whether Al Qaeda’s strength lies in its network, or in the idea that it represents. “Even if Zawahri has gone silent, the network is not dead,” Aaron Y. Zelin, an analyst at the Washington Institute, wrote recently. “From the available information, it appears the network may have moved on.” |