CAIRO—A U.S. airstrike has killed Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, who commanded its powerful Yemeni affiliate, dealing the global network its biggest blow since the killing of Osama bin Laden and eliminating a charismatic leader at a time when it is vying with the ISIS for the mantle of global jihad.
Nasir al-Wahishi is the latest in a series of senior figures from al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch eliminated by U.S. drone strikes the past five months, including its top ideologue and a senior military commander. The United States has intensified its campaign, trying to push back the group as it has captured new territory in Yemen by taking advantage of the southern Arabian nation’s chronic chaos.
Al-Wahishi’s death is a major loss for al-Qaeda as it struggles to compete with the ISIS, a breakaway group that has seized vast swaths of Syria and Iraq and spawned its own affiliates elsewhere in the region. The ISIS has also gained loyalists in Yemen in competition with al-Qaeda.
Both groups are dedicated to bringing about Islamic rule by force, but al-Qaeda does not recognize ISIS’s self-styled caliphate and has maintained that the priority should be to wage jihad against America in order to drive it out of the Middle East.
Al-Qaeda has been able to make major gains in Yemen the past months as the country is torn by war between Shiite rebels known as Houthis who have taken over much of the country and their opponents, a mix of local militias, southern separatists, Sunni tribesmen, and backers of the president, Abed Rabbo Hadi Mansour, who was driven abroad by the fighting. Al-Qaeda’s terrorists have allied with some of the anti-Houthi forces in fighting the rebels. Batarfi said his group is fighting rebels and allied forces in 11 fronts.
Capture
The capture of Mukalla was the group’s biggest victory. It freed a number of prisoners, including Batrafi. It then struck a power-sharing deal with local tribesmen.
But Mukalla has proved something of a death trap. Besides al-Wahishi, U.S. drone strikes in and around the city have killed the group’s top military commander Nasr al-Ansi, its most senior religious ideologue Ibrahim al-Rubaish, and key operatives Mamoun Hatem and Khalwan al-Sanaani.
In recent years, U.S. strikes have also killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemeni militant preacher who was a major recruiter for the group, and Saeed al-Shihri, an ex-Guantanamo detainee from Saudi Arabia who was al-Wahishi’s deputy at the time.
The intensity of U.S. drone strikes comes despite the withdrawal earlier this year of U.S. counterterrorism personnel from the al-Annad air base in southern Yemen in addition to the closure of U.S. Embassy in the capital because of the country’s fighting. The Special Forces commandos at the base had played a key role in drone strikes and there had been major concerns that the withdrawal would undermine the fight against al-Qaeda.
Al-Wahishi was known as bin Laden’s “black box,” keeping the al-Qaeda leader’s secrets. It was not clear how much involvement al-Wahishi had in the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
During the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, al-Wahishi fought alongside bin Laden at Tora Bora before the al-Qaeda leader slipped across the border into Pakistan. Al-Wahishi fled to Iran, where he was detained and deported to Yemen in 2003.
He was among 23 al-Qaeda terrorists who broke out of a detention facility in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in February 2006. Three years later, al-Wahishi announced the creation of AQAP, which gathered together Yemeni and Saudi extremists following a sweeping crackdown on the extremist group by Riyadh.
According to the U.S. government’s “Wanted to Justice” program, al-Wahishi, “is responsible for approving targets, recruiting new members, allocating resources to training and attack planning, and tasking others to carry out attacks.”
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