The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Al Qaeda

  • Four al Qaeda members killed in suspected U.S. drone strike

    Four members of al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, including a local commander, were killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike on a vehicle traveling east of the capital Sanaa, two local officials said on Saturday.

    They said the attack in Marib province, controlled by forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, occurred late on Friday. A local commander of the militant Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), known as Abu Khaled al-Sanaani, was killed along with three associates, they said.

    It was the second drone strike in two days to target a local commander of the Islamist militant group regarded by U.S. officials as one of the most dangerous branches of al Qaeda.

    A drone strike on a vehicle in al-Bayda province in central Yemen killed a senior AQAP leader known as Abdallah al-Sanaani, identified as a regional commander of the group, on Thursday.

    The United States has been using drones to target the Islamist militant group which has exploited Yemen’s civil war to carve out a foothold in the impoverished country. Several leaders of the group have been killed by drone strikes in recent years.

    U.S. officials have said AQAP is one of the most potent security threats in the Middle East. The group, whose attacks have mainly targeted the Yemeni government and the Iran-allied Houthi group, claimed responsibility for an attack last year on the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

     

  • Death toll in Somalia beach restaurant attack rises to 10

    Somali police said the death toll from an attack late on Thursday by the Islamic militants on a seaside restaurant in Mogadishu had risen to 10.

    A Police Officer, Ali Abdullahi, said on Friday in Mogadishu that the attackers set off a car bomb at the Banadir restaurant at the city’s Lido beach before engaging security forces in a fight for several hours.

    He said that the casualties comprised six civilians, two members of the security forces and two of the attackers.

    Abdullahi said that the Al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab had claimed the attack, which ended at about 3.a.m.

    The group has carried out a series of deadly attacks in Somalia to try to topple the Western-backed government.

  • Cote d’Ivoire arrests two soldiers for suspected links to al Qaeda

    Two soldiers have been arrested in Cote d’Iviore accused of failing to denounce suspected members of an al Qaeda cell that killed 19 people in a March attack on a beach resort town, military officials said on Thursday.

    The raid on Grand Bassam, 40 km (25 miles) from the commercial capital, Abidjan, by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the jihadist group’s North African affiliate, was the furthest yet from its traditional desert base.

    Authorities in Cote d’Iviore and neighbouring Mali have arrested a number of suspects since the attack.

    The country’s military prosecutor Colonel Ange Kessi said the soldiers were not accused of participating directly in the Grand Bassam plot.

    “The two soldiers knew certain members of the unit that attacked the beach in Grand Bassam and did not signal that to their hierarchy, which is a serious offence under the military code of justice,” he said.

    They are due to stand trial at the end of August, Kessi added.

    The attack in Grand Bassam, during which gunmen shot swimmers and sunbathers before storming into several hotels, also harmed French-speaking West Africa’s largest economy, a rising star on the continent.

    AQIM has killed dozens of people in a series of attacks against high-profile civilian targets in Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Iviore since late last year. It says they are intended as revenge for a 2013 French-led intervention against Islamist groups in Mali.

  • Al Qaeda leader pledges allegiance to new Taliban leader

    Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, in an online audio message, pledged allegiance to the new head of the Afghan Taliban, who was appointed last month after his predecessor was killed in a US drone strike.

    The veteran Islamist militant became al Qaeda’s leader after U.S. Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, and he is thought to be hiding in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, having been based there since the late 1990s.

    “As leader of the al Qaeda organization for jihad, I extend my pledge of allegiance once again, the approach of Osama to invite the Muslim nation to support the Islamic Emirate,” al-Zawahri said in a 14 minute recording.

    During its years in power, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and it has been fighting an insurgency since to regain control of the country.

    The authenticity of the recording could not be immediately verified.

    HaibatullahAkhundzada, Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour’s deputies, was appointed a few days after Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone attack in a remote border area just inside Pakistan.

    Since al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor-turned-militant, succeeded bin Laden, al Qaeda has lost ground to Islamic State in the leadership of the global jihadist movement.

  • U.S widens sanctions on Islamic State, al-Qaeda

    The United States has expanded sanctions against affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group operating across the Middle East and North Africa, reflecting the spreading threat of extremism far beyond the groups’ traditional strongholds in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

    The State Department designated the IS branch in Libya as a foreign terrorist organization, freezing its assets and restricting its members from entering the U.S.

    The U.S also named IS branches in Libya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia as global terrorists, joining other IS branches in Algeria, Nigeria and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula already on the list.

    The action prohibits Americans from doing business with the groups and targets any property they may have within U.S jurisdiction.

    The State Department said they became branches in 2014 when their oath of allegiance was accepted by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader.

    In a related move, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on six individuals for supporting or fundraising for IS or al-Qaeda, including al-Qaeda’s branch operating in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

    Those sanctions also targeted the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that — like the U.S — opposes Syrian President Bashar Assad.

  • Abuja, Lagos likely Al Qaeda targets – Safety expert

    Abuja, Lagos likely Al Qaeda targets – Safety expert

    The president of the Association of Industrial Security and Safety Operators of Nigeria (AISSON), Dr. Ona Ekhomu, has warned that an attack from terror group, Al Qaeda, is imminent in Nigeria.

    Ekhomu, in a statement yesterday, said that the recent wave of terrorist attacks in West Africa showed that Nigeria was the probable next target.

    “The most likely cities are Abuja or Lagos,” he added.

    The security expert said that intelligence analysis conducted by the School of Management and Security, Lagos, from open source materials on the current phase of Jihad mounted by Al Qaeda on West African nations, showed that “Nigeria was in the next logical target for an active shooter attack by a six-man team of terrorists.”

    “The odds are in the favour of the terrorists to cause mass deaths in these attacks,” Ekhomu added, and advised the government and corporate security executives to take urgent proactive steps in preventing the attack.

    He said: “I urge the government to increase police visibility and also inject plain clothes police assets into high risk facilities.

    “The Al Qaeda threat is more serious than the Boko Haram threat and it is hoped that the government and corporate security will take this threat more seriously and act to prevent spectacular attacks against soft and unprepared targets.”

     

  • Al-Qaeda frees 16 Lebanese soldiers in swap deal

    Al-Qaeda frees 16 Lebanese soldiers in swap deal

    The al-Qaeda branch in Syria has freed 16 Lebanese soldiers who were abducted in August 2014, in a swap deal, a Lebanese security source close to the negotiations said.

    “The soldiers have been set free in a swap deal during which the Lebanese government handed over 13 prisoners, including five women, who have links with al-Nusra in return for the release of the 16 soldiers,” the source said.

    The soldiers were taken captive last year during fighting between militants from al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front and Islamic State in the eastern Lebanese town of Arsal, located on the border with Syria.

    The servicemen were released near the Lebanese-Syrian border.

    A Qatari negotiator was involved in securing the swap deal-the Lebanese source said that nine soldiers believed to be held by Islamic State were not included in the exchange.

    Some 15 trucks loaded with food supplies entered the outskirts of Arsal, where al-Nusra has bases, as part of the agreement.

    Negotiations to free the Lebanese soldiers suffered a setback on Sunday when al-Nusra escalated its demands.

    Before the exchange took place, the body of Lebanese soldier Mohammed Hammiyeh had been handed over marking the first phase of the deal.

    Hammiyeh, a Shiite Muslim, was among four soldiers executed in captivity

     

  • Mali arrests three Islamist militants

    Mali arrests three Islamist militants

    Mali’s military said it had arrested three suspected members of a new Islamist militant group who it claimed were behind a series of recent armed attacks on security forces.

    Army spokesman Modibo Traore said that the militants belonged to the Massina Liberation Front (MLF), a group responsible for wave of attacks in the north of Mali.

    A statement by Traore listed the militants as Hassan Dicko, MLF’s second in command, and Ali Sangare, a taxi driver.

    It also included Ayouba Sangare, an Ivorian, who is responsible for the group’s logistics.

    According to the statement, authorities discovered large quantities of weapons, ammunition and grenades during a search of Sangare’s house.

    Islamist fighters, some with links to al Qaeda, seized the northern two-thirds of Mali in 2012 but a French-led military intervention scattered them the following year.

    However, remnants of the insurgency continue to carry out attacks.

    The MLF recruits mainly among central Mali’s marginalised Fulani ethnic minority.

    Security experts fear that the rise of a jihadist group among the Fulani, whose 20 million members are spread across West and Central Africa, could regionalise the violence

  • Top al Qaeda commander confirmed dead

    Top al Qaeda commander confirmed dead

    Al-Qaeda has confirmed that Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of its offshoot in the Arabian Peninsula, has been killed in a United States drone strike in Yemen.

    His death was announced by the AQAP group in an online video. His successor was named as military chief Qasim al-Raymi.

    Wuhayshi was seen as al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and was a former private secretary to Osama Bin Laden, the BBC reports.

    He built one of the most active al-Qaeda branches, U.S officials said.

    In Yemen, resurgent al-Qaeda militants have seized territory and infrastructure – indirectly assisted by Saudi-led air strikes on the rebel Houthi movement, their Shia Muslim foes.

    But the deaths of a number of leading figures in AQAP in recent months have reportedly fuelled rumours among supporters that it has been successfully targeted by intelligence agencies.

    The Yemeni news group al-Masdar Online previously reported (in Arabic) that Wuhayshi was killed in an attack in Hadramawt province last Friday.

    “We in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula mourn to our Muslim nation that Abu Baseer Nasser bin Abdul Karim al-Wuhayshi, may God have mercy on his soul, passed away in an American strike which targeted him along with two of his mujahideen brothers,” Khaled Batarfi, a senior member of the group, said in the video.

    The Pentagon has previously said it would not comment on the killing – which the Site intelligence group has said would constitute the biggest strike on al-Qaeda since Bin Laden’s death in Pakistan in 2011.

  • Bin Laden’s son-in-law sentenced to life

    Bin Laden’s son-in-law sentenced to life

    Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, who was an al-Qaeda spokesman after 9/11, has been sentenced to life in prison for terrorism-related charges at a trial in New York.

    Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, 48, is the highest-ranking al-Qaeda figure to face trial on US soil since the attacks.

    The Kuwaiti clergyman was captured in Jordan last year and brought to the US.

    In March, a jury found Abu Ghaith guilty of conspiracy to kill Americans and aiding al-Qaeda.

    Addressing him directly, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan said it was his “assessment that you are committed to doing everything you can to carry out al Qaeda’s agenda to kill Americans”.

    Videos showing Abu Ghaith threatening America with no end to the “storm of airplanes’’ were shown to jurors.

    Abu Ghaith argued his role was a purely religious one, aimed at encouraging all Muslims to rise up against their oppressors.

    He testified that Bin Laden had asked him to be al-Qaeda’s spokesman on the night of the 9/11 attacks.

    Abu Ghaith repeatedly claimed al-Qaeda responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, in his videos

    Abu Ghaith, who is one of the highest-ranking al-Qaeda linked figures to face a civilian jury on terrorism-related charges, is married to Bin Laden’s eldest daughter Fatima.

    Bin Laden, a founder of al-Qaeda, was killed by US forces in May 2011 at his hideout in Pakistan.