Twilight Warriors by James Kitfield

Author:James Kitfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465096541
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2009, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was traveling in a convoy of cars in southern Somalia. A Kenyan and top al-Qaeda operative in Africa, Nabhan was wanted by the FBI for his involvement in an attack on a hotel and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002. He had also been linked to al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. As his convoy drove through an isolated track of land, US Special Forces helicopters swarmed in with .50 caliber machine guns blazing. When the shooting stopped, Navy SEAL commandos collected the bodies of Nabhan and another suspected terrorist for identification purposes, and then flew back to US warships patrolling off the Somalia coast.

On December 8, 2009, a car carrying Saleh al-Somali was tracked near the city of Miramshah, in Pakistan’s tribal region. The area was controlled by the Haqqani network, the deadliest of the Taliban factions. Saleh al-Somali was chief of al-Qaeda’s external operations, and along with Rashid Rauf he had been instrumental in devising the plot for Najibullah Zazi and his cohorts to bomb the New York subway system. Somewhere from overhead the loud shriek of two Hellfire missiles was heard before converging on al-Somali’s car. Tribal sources reported that his car disintegrated, scattering body parts in all directions. Rauf had already been reported killed by an earlier drone strike, a death that his family would later confirm.

Al-Somali and Rauf were among a number of top al-Qaeda’s commanders to be killed in a targeted killing campaign that shifted into a higher gear beginning in 2009–2010, and would in just two years eliminate fourteen senior al-Qaeda leaders, more than half of the CIA’s most-wanted high-value terrorist targets. Those already targeted and killed in Pakistan included another al-Qaeda bomb-maker, Abu Khabab al-Masri; senior leader and spokesman Abu Laith al-Libi; and senior trainer and explosives expert Abu Sulayman Jazairi. The roll call of deaths by drone also included Baitullah Mehsud, the ferocious head of the Pakistani Taliban, who had formed increasingly close ties to al-Qaeda. The Pakistan Taliban was connected to Connecticut resident Faisal Shahzad’s plot to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Time Square. In Pakistan, Mehsud was already public enemy number one, implicated in a host of terrorist attacks to include the 2008 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed fifty people, and the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

In a single 48-hour period on December 17 and 18, 2009, a barrage of Predator drone strikes killed twenty-two suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and allied militants in North Waziristan, heralding the controversial new tactic of “signature strikes,” with unidentified persons targeted because they exhibit suspicious behavior associated with militants. Signature strikes had begun in 2008 under President George W. Bush, but like other aspects of the targeted killing campaign they were expanded under the new Obama administration. According to the Long War Journal, a respected website that reports on counterterrorism operations and tracks the US

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