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History > 2011 > USA > Drone war >
Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (I)
Iran
Shows U.S. Drone on TV,
and Lodges a Protest
December
8, 2011
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE
Seizing
on its capture of a downed C.I.A. stealth drone as an intelligence and
propaganda windfall, Iran displayed the first images of the aircraft on state
television Thursday and lodged an official diplomatic protest over its incursion
into Iranian airspace.
The 2.5-minute video clip of the remote-control surveillance aircraft was the
first visual proof to emerge that Iran had possession of the drone since Sunday,
when Iran claimed that its military downed the aircraft. American officials have
since confirmed that controllers of the aircraft, based in neighboring
Afghanistan, had lost contact with it.
The drone, which appeared to be in good condition, was shown displayed on a
platform, with photos of Iran’s revolutionary ayatollahs on the wall behind it
and a desecrated version of the American flag, with what appeared to be skulls
instead of stars, underneath its left wing.
Broadcast of the footage coincided with Iran’s announcement that it had formally
protested what it called the violation of Iranian airspace by the spy drone.
Because Iran and the United States have no direct diplomatic relations, Iran
made its complaint by summoning the ambassador from Switzerland, which manages
American interests in Iran.
American officials have identified the missing drone as an RQ-170 Sentinel, an
unarmed bat-winged aircraft used by the C.I.A. that can linger undetected for
hours at 50,000 feet, far higher than most aircraft can fly, with cameras and
other sensor equipment to monitor what is on the ground below. An RQ-170 was
used to gather intelligence for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a
Pakistan safe house earlier this year.
The loss of an RQ-170 in Iran is a potentially significant intelligence blow for
the United States, which has been stepping up efforts to monitor suspected
nuclear sites there. In early November, a United Nations report said that Iran
may be actively working on a nuclear weapon and a missile delivery system for
it. Iran insists its nuclear program is peacefu; it denounced the U.N. report as
a "fabrication" and a pretext for military intervention by the United States and
its allies.
Iran’s leaders, who have been increasingly isolated diplomatically over the
nuclear issue, point to the aircraft as evidence of American hostile intentions
toward Iran.
On state television, the video clip was narrated by a voice saying that Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard Corps and army had “collaborated to shoot down the plane.”
The unidentified narrator gave the drone’s dimensions as 26 meters (about 85
feet) from wingtip to wingtip, 4.5 meters (15 feet) from nose to tail and about
one meter (3 feet) in thickness. The narrator also said the aircraft had
“electronic surveillance systems and various radars” and was “a very advanced
piece of technology.”
In what appeared to be an attempt to explain the aircraft’s undamaged
appearance, a Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, identified as Amir Ali
Hajizadeh, says in the video that the drone “was detected by Iranian radars as
soon as it entered Iranian airspace and was brought down by Iran’s military
systems with the minimum damage possible.”
Nonetheless, it remains unclear how the American controllers of the aircraft
lost contact with it and how it ended up, seemingly intact, on the ground in
Iran. American officials have not specified where it was lost; Iran’s state-run
press has said that it landed near the town of Kashmar, about 140 miles from the
Afghanistan border.
RQ-170 flights were among the most secret of the C.I.A.'s intelligence gathering
efforts in Iran, according to American experts and officials who have been
briefed about them.
Artin
Afkhami contributed reporting from Boston, and Scott Shane from Washington.
Iran Shows U.S. Drone on TV, and Lodges a Protest, NYT, 8.12.2011?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/middleeast/iran-shows-us-drone-on-tv-and-lodges-a-protest.html
Coming
Soon: The Drone Arms Race
October
8, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
Scott Shane is a national security correspondent for The New York Times.
WASHINGTON
AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies
startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled
aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an
armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.
The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the
event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign
military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly
on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for
American security, international law and the future of warfare.
Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group
armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts
foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with
significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges
posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush
administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an
extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon
over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed
as a threat.
“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”
What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become
today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine
part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from
Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000
militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last
month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a
drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed
along with a second American, Samir Khan.
If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority
Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States
say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in
Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American
officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.
“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right
to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues
Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and
author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on
American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”
The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama
administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably,
to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes,
modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in
safety thousands of miles from the target.
To date, only the United States, Israel (against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas
in Gaza) and Britain (in Afghanistan) are known to have used drones for strikes.
But American defense analysts count more than 50 countries that have built or
bought unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, and the number is rising every
month. Most are designed for surveillance, but as the United States has found,
adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.
“The virtue of most U.A.V.’s is that they have long wings and you can strap
anything to them,” Mr. Gormley says. That includes video cameras, eavesdropping
equipment and munitions, he says. “It’s spreading like wildfire.”
So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of
unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly
unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or
remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force
officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to
operate drones than fighters and bombers.
Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company
that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and
procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94
billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.
Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia,
Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The
Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from
espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had
become a prime target for foreign spies.
Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had
been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even
Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design
capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the
Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic
combat.
Late last month, a 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested and charged
with plotting to load a remotely controlled aircraft with plastic explosives and
crash it into the Pentagon or United States Capitol. His supposed
co-conspirators were actually undercover F.B.I. agents, and it was unclear that
his scheme could have done much damage. But it was an unnerving harbinger, says
John Villasenor, professor of electrical engineering at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He notes that the Army had just announced a $5 million
contract for a backpack-size drone called a Switchblade that can carry an
explosive payload into a target; such a weapon will not long be beyond the
capabilities of a terrorist network.
“If they are skimming over rooftops and trees, they will be almost impossible to
shoot down,” he maintains.
It is easy to scare ourselves by imagining terrorist drones rigged not just to
carry bombs but to spew anthrax or scatter radioactive waste. Speculation that
Al Qaeda might use exotic weapons has so far turned out to be just that. But the
technological curve for drones means the threat can no longer be discounted.
“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was
unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was
armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”
Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race, NYT, 8.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html
Strike
Reflects U.S. Shift to Drones in Terror Fight
October 1,
2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON —
The C.I.A. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born
propagandist for Al Qaeda’s rising franchise in Yemen, was one more
demonstration of what American officials describe as a cheap, safe and precise
tool to eliminate enemies. It was also a sign that the decade-old American
campaign against terrorism has reached a turning point.
Disillusioned by huge costs and uncertain outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Obama administration has decisively embraced the drone, along with small-scale
lightning raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May, as the future
of the fight against terrorist networks.
“The lessons of the big wars are obvious,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied the trade-offs. “The cost in blood
and treasure is immense, and the outcome is unforeseeable. Public support at
home is declining toward rock bottom. And the people you’ve come to liberate
come to resent your presence.”
The shift is also a result of shrinking budgets, which will no longer
accommodate the deployment of large forces overseas at a rough annual cost of $1
million per soldier. And there have been improvements in the technical
capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft. One of them tracked Mr. Awlaki with
live video on Yemeni tribal turf, where it is too dangerous for American troops
to go.
Even military officials who advocate for the drone campaign acknowledge that
these technologies are not applicable to every security threat.
Still, the move to drones and precise strikes is a remarkable change in favored
strategy, underscored by the leadership changes at the Pentagon and C.I.A. Just
a few years ago, counterinsurgency was the rage, as Gen. David H. Petraeus used
the strategy to turn around what appeared to be a hopeless situation in Iraq. He
then applied those lessons in Afghanistan.
The outcome — as measured in political stability, rule of law and economic
development — remains uncertain in both.
Now, Mr. Petraeus (he has chosen to go by his civilian title of director, rather
than general) is in charge of the C.I.A., which pioneered the drone campaign in
Pakistan. He no longer commands the troops whose numbers were the core of
counterinsurgency.
And the defense secretary is Leon E. Panetta, who oversaw the escalation of
drone strikes in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area as the C.I.A. director. Mr.
Panetta, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, must find a way to
safeguard security as the Pentagon purse strings draw tight.
Today, there is little political appetite for the risk, cost and especially the
long timelines required by counterinsurgency doctrine, which involves building
societies and governments to gradually take over the battle against insurgents
and terrorists within their borders.
The apparent simplicity of a drone aloft, with its pilot operating from the
United States, can be misleading. Behind each aircraft is a team of 150 or more
personnel, repairing and maintaining the plane and the heap of ground technology
that keeps it in the air, poring over the hours of videos and radio signals it
collects, and gathering the voluminous intelligence necessary to prompt a single
strike.
Air Force officials calculate that it costs $5 billion to operate the service’s
global airborne surveillance network, and that sum is growing. The Pentagon has
asked for another $5 billion next year alone for remotely piloted drone systems.
Yet even those costs are tiny compared with the price of the big wars. A Brown
University study, published in June, estimates that the United States will have
spent $3.7 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time the wars are over.
The drones may alienate fewer people. They have angered many Pakistanis, who
resent the violation of their country’s sovereignty and the inevitable civilian
casualties when missiles go awry or are directed by imperfect intelligence. But
while experts argue over the extent of the deaths of innocents when missiles
fall on suspected terrorist compounds, there is broad agreement that the drones
cause far fewer unintended deaths and produce far fewer refugees than either
ground combat or traditional airstrikes.
Still, there are questions of legality. The Obama administration legal team
wrestled with whether it would be lawful to make Mr. Awlaki a target for death —
a proposition that raised complex issues involving Mr. Awlaki’s constitutional
rights as an American citizen, domestic statutes and international law.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel eventually issued a lengthy,
classified memorandum that apparently concluded it would be legal to strike at
someone like Mr. Awlaki in circumstances in which he was believed to be plotting
attacks against the United States, and if there was no way to arrest him. The
existence of that memorandum was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post.
The role of drones in the changing American way of war also illustrates the
increasing militarization of the intelligence community, as Air Force drone
technologies for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — and now armed
with Hellfire missiles for strikes on ground targets — play a central role in
C.I.A. operations. The blurring of military-intelligence boundaries includes
former uniformed officers assuming top jobs in the intelligence apparatus and
military commando units carrying out raids under C.I.A. command.
As useful as the drones have proved for counterterrorism, their value in other
kinds of conflicts may be more limited. Against some of the most significant
potential threats — a China in ascendancy, for example, or a North Korea or Iran
with nuclear weapons — drones are likely to be of marginal value. Should
military force be required as a deterrent or for an attack, traditional forces,
including warships and combat aircraft, would carry the heaviest load.
Of course, new kinds of air power have often appeared seductive, offering a
cleaner, higher-tech brand of war. Military officials say they are aware that
drones are no panacea.
“It’s one of many capabilities that we have at our disposal to go after
terrorists and others,” one senior Pentagon official said. “But this is a tool
that is not a weapon for weapon’s sake. It’s tied to policy. In many cases,
these weapons are deployed in areas where it’s very tough to go after the enemy
by conventional means, because these terror leaders are located in some of the
most remote places.”
In some ways, the debate over drones versus troops recalls the early months of
George W. Bush’s administration, when the new president and his defense
secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, envisioned how a revolution in military
technology would allow the Defense Department to reduce its ground forces and
focus money instead on intelligence platforms and long-range, precision-strike
weapons.
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars, first in Afghanistan and
then in Iraq, in which ground forces carried out the lion’s share of the
missions.
Mr. Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, worries about the growing
perception that drones are the answer to terrorism, just a few years after many
officials believed that invading and remaking countries would prove the cure.
The recent string of successful strikes has prompted senior Obama administration
officials to suggest that the demise of Al Qaeda may be within sight. But the
history of terrorist movements shows that they are almost never ended by
military force, he said.
“What gets lost are all the other instruments of national power,” including
diplomacy, trade policy and development aid, Mr. Zenko said. “But these days
those tools never get adequate consideration, because drones get all the
attention.”
Charlie Savage
contributed reporting.
Strike Reflects U.S. Shift to Drones in Terror Fight, NYT, 1.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/awlaki-strike-shows-us-shift-to-drones-in-terror-fight.html
C.I.A.
Drone Is Said to Kill Al Qaeda’s No. 2
August 27,
2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON
— A drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed Al Qaeda’s
second-ranking figure in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, American and
Pakistani officials said Saturday, further damaging a terrorism network that
appears significantly weakened since the death of Osama bin Laden in May.
An American official said that the drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a
Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational
planner. Mr. Rahman was in frequent contact with Bin Laden in the months before
the terrorist leader was killed on May 2 by a Navy Seals team, intelligence
officials have said.
American officials described Mr. Rahman’s death as particularly significant as
compared with other high-ranking Qaeda operatives who have been killed, because
he was one of a new generation of leaders that the network hoped would assume
greater control after Bin Laden’s death.
Thousands of electronic files recovered at Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, revealed that Bin Laden communicated frequently with Mr. Rahman. They
also showed that Bin Laden relied on Mr. Rahman to get messages to other Qaeda
leaders and to ensure that Bin Laden’s recorded communications were broadcast
widely.
After Bin Laden was killed, Mr. Rahman became Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader under
Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Bin Laden.
There were few details on Saturday about the strike that killed Mr. Rahman. In
the months since Bin Laden’s death, the C.I.A. has maintained a barrage of drone
missile strikes on mountainous redoubts in Pakistan, a bombing campaign that
continues to strain America’s already turbulent relationship with Pakistan.
The C.I.A almost never consults Pakistani officials in advance of a drone
strike, and a Pakistani government official said Saturday that the United States
had told Pakistan’s government that Mr. Rahman had been the target of the strike
only after the spy agency confirmed that he had been killed.
The drone strikes have been the Obama administration’s preferred means of
hunting and killing operatives from Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups. Over the
past year the United States has expanded the drone war to Yemen and Somalia.
Some top American officials have said publicly that they believe Al Qaeda is in
its death throes, though many intelligence analysts are less certain, saying
that the network built by Bin Laden has repeatedly shown an ability to
regenerate.
Yet even as Qaeda affiliates in places like Yemen and North Africa continue to
plot attacks against the West, most intelligence analysts believe that the
remnants of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan have been weakened considerably.
Mr. Rahman’s death is another significant blow to the group.
“Atiyah was at the top of Al Qaeda’s trusted core,” the American official said.
“His combination of background, experience and abilities are unique in Al Qaeda
— without question, they will not be easily replaced.”
The files captured in Abbottabad revealed, among other things, that Bin Laden
and Mr. Rahman discussed brokering a deal with Pakistan: Al Qaeda would refrain
from mounting attacks in the country in exchange for protection for Qaeda
leaders hiding in Pakistan.
American officials said that they found no evidence that either of the men ever
raised the idea directly with Pakistani officials, or that Pakistan’s government
had any knowledge that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.
Mr. Rahman also served as Bin Laden’s liaison to Qaeda affiliates. Last year,
American officials said, Mr. Rahman notified Bin Laden of a request by the
leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to install Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical
American-born cleric, as the leader of the group in Yemen.
That group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, apparently thought Mr.
Awlaki’s status as an Internet celebrity, for his popular video sermons, and his
knowledge of the United States might help the group’s fund-raising efforts. But
according to the electronic files in Abbottabad, Bin Laden told Mr. Rahman that
the group’s leadership should remain unchanged.
After Bin Laden’s death, some intelligence officials saw a cadre of Libyan
operatives as poised to assume greater control inside Al Qaeda, which at times
has been fractured by cultural rivalries.
Libyan operatives like Mr. Rahman, they said, had long bristled at the
leadership of an older generation, many of them Egyptian like Mr. Zawahri and
Sheikh Saeed al-Masri.
Mr. Masri was killed last year by a C.I.A. missile, as were several Qaeda
operations chiefs before him. The job has proved to be particularly deadly,
American officials said, because the operations chief has had to transmit the
guidance of Bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri to Qaeda operatives elsewhere, providing a
way for the Americans to track him through electronic intercepts.
Mr. Rahman assumed the role after Mr. Masri’s death. Now that Mr. Rahman has
died, American officials said it was unclear who would take over the job.
C.I.A. Drone Is Said to Kill Al Qaeda’s No. 2, NYT,
27.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/world/asia/28qaeda.html
U.S.
Expands Its Drone War Into Somalia
July 1,
2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON
— The clandestine American military campaign to combat Al Qaeda’s franchise in
Yemen is expanding to fight the Islamist militancy in Somalia, as new evidence
indicates that insurgents in the two countries are forging closer ties and
possibly plotting attacks against the United States, American officials say.
An American military drone aircraft attacked several Somalis in the militant
group the Shabab late last month, the officials said, killing at least one of
its midlevel operatives and wounding others.
The strike was carried out by the same Special Operations Command unit now
battling militants in Yemen, and it represented an intensification of an
American military campaign in a mostly lawless region where weak governments
have allowed groups with links to Al Qaeda to flourish.
The Obama administration’s increased focus on Somalia comes as the White House
has unveiled a new strategy to battle Al Qaeda in the post-Osama bin Laden era,
and as some American military and intelligence officials view Qaeda affiliates
in Yemen and Somalia as a greater threat to the United States than the group of
operatives in Pakistan who have been barraged with hundreds of drone strikes
directed by the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years.
The military drone strike in Somalia last month was the first American attack
there since 2009, when helicopter-borne commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan,
a senior leader of the group that carried out the 1998 attacks on the American
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Although it appears that no senior Somali
militants were killed in last month’s drone strike, a Pentagon official said
Friday that one of the militants who was wounded had been in contact with Anwar
al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen. The news that
the strike was carried out by an American drone was first reported in The
Washington Post this week.
American military officials said there was new intelligence that militants in
Yemen and Somalia were communicating more frequently about operations, training
and tactics, but the Pentagon is wading into the chaos in Somalia with some
trepidation. Many are still haunted by the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle, in
which 18 elite American troops were killed in Mogadishu, the Somali capital,
battling fighters aligned with warlords. Senior officials have repeatedly said
in private in the past year that the administration does not intend to send
American troops to Somalia beyond quick raids.
For several years, the United States has largely been relying on proxy forces in
Somalia, including African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, to
support Somalia’s fragile government. The Pentagon is sending nearly $45 million
in military supplies, including night-vision equipment and four small unarmed
drones, to Uganda and Burundi to help combat the rising terror threat in
Somalia. During the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2007, clandestine
operatives from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command initiated
missions into Somalia from an airstrip in Ethiopia.
Even as threat warnings grow, American officials say that the Shabab militants
are under increasing pressure on various fronts, and that now is the time to
attack the group aggressively. But it is unclear whether American intelligence
about Somalia — often sketchy and inconclusive — has improved in recent months.
This week, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, who was until recently in charge of the
Joint Special Operations Command, told lawmakers that planners were “looking
very hard at Yemen and at Somalia,” but he said that the effectiveness of the
missions there was occasionally hampered by limited availability of surveillance
aircraft like drones.
One day later, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan,
said that Al Qaeda’s badly weakened leadership in Pakistan had urged the group’s
regional affiliates to attack American targets. “From the territory it controls
in Somalia, Al Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United States,”
Mr. Brennan said.
Over the past two years, the administration has wrestled with how to deal with
the Shabab, many of whose midlevel fighters oppose Somalia’s weak transitional
government but are not necessarily seeking to battle the United States.
Attacking them — not just their leaders — could push those militants to join Al
Qaeda, some officials say. “That has led to a complicated policy debate over how
you apply your counterterrorism tools against a group like Al Shabab, because it
is not a given that going after them in the same way that you go after Al Qaeda
would produce the best result,” a senior administration official said last fall.
American officials said this week that they were trying to exploit the Shabab’s
recent setbacks. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s leader in East Africa and
the mastermind of the 1998 bombings, was killed on June 7 in a shootout at a
security checkpoint in Somalia.
Somali clan militias, backed by Kenya and Ethiopia, have reclaimed Shabab-held
territory in southwestern Somalia, putting more strain on the organization, said
Andre Le Sage, a senior research fellow who specializes in Africa at the
National Defense University in Washington.
Still, American intelligence and military officials warn of increasing
operational ties between the Shabab and the Qaeda franchise in Yemen, known as
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or A.Q.A.P. The group orchestrated a plot to
blow up a jetliner headed to Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009, and another attempt
nearly a year later to destroy cargo planes carrying printer cartridges packed
with explosives. Both plots failed.
American intelligence officials say that the Shabab so far have carried out only
one attack outside of Somalia, a series of coordinated bombings that killed more
than 70 people in Uganda as crowds gathered to watch a World Cup match last
year.
In statements in recent months, the Shabab have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda
and its new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. American officials said that Mr. Awlaki
had developed close ties to senior Shabab leaders.
“What I’d be most concerned about is whether A.Q.A.P. could transfer to Shabab
its knowledge of building I.E.D.’s and sophisticated plots, and Shabab could
make available to A.Q.A.P. recruits with Western passports,” said Mr. Le Sage,
referring to improvised explosive devices.
More than 30 Somali-Americans from cities like Minneapolis have gone to fight in
Somalia in recent years. Officials say they fear that Qaeda operatives could
recruit those Americans to return home as suicide bombers.
“My main concern is that a U.S. citizen who joins, trains and then gains
experience in the field with organizations such as Al Shabab returns to the U.S.
with a much greater level of capability than when he left,” said a senior law
enforcement official. “Coupled with enhanced radicalization and operational
direction, that person is now a clear threat.”
Souad
Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt, Germany.
U.S. Expands Its Drone War Into Somalia, NYT, 1.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/world/africa/02somalia.html
Drone
Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki
May 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — A missile strike from an American military drone in a remote region
of Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical
American-born cleric believed to be hiding in the country, American officials
said Friday.
The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but
may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
It was the first American strike in Yemen using a remotely piloted drone since
2002, when the C.I.A. struck a car carrying a group of suspected militants,
including an American citizen, who were believed to have Qaeda ties. And the
attack came just three days after American commandos invaded a compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda.
The attack on Thursday was part of a clandestine Pentagon program to hunt
members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group believed responsible for
a number of failed attempts to strike the United States, including the thwarted
plot to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet on Dec. 25, 2009, as it was preparing to
land in Detroit.
Although Mr. Awlaki is not thought to be one of the group’s senior leaders, he
has been made a target by American military and intelligence operatives because
he has recruited English-speaking Islamist militants to Yemen to carry out
attacks overseas. His radical sermons, broadcast on the Internet, have a large
global following.
The Obama administration has taken the rare step of approving Mr. Awlaki’s
killing, even though he is an American citizen.
Troops from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command are in charge of the
mission in Yemen, with the help of the C.I.A. Over the past two years, the
military has carried out strikes in Yemen using cruise missiles from Navy ships
and munitions from Marine Harrier jets.
Thursday’s strike was the first known attack in the country by the American
military for nearly a year. Last May, American missiles mistakenly killed a
provincial government leader, and the Pentagon strikes were put on hold.
More recently, officials have worried that American military strikes in Yemen
might further stoke widespread unrest that has imperiled the government of
President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Drone Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki, NYT, 6.5.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html
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