Al Qaeda

Esquire has a first-hand account given by an unnamed U.S. Navy SEAL (referred to as “the Shooter”) who killed Osama bin Laden. Obama administration officials have claimed that bin Laden would have been captured if that was possible. This account suggests otherwise. Given that bin Laden was shot while standing inside a pitch-black room — [...]

In a keynote address delivered this morning at the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations in Washington DC, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. (USFS, ret.) said: The fanatics who carried out the atrocities of 9/11 went out of their way to describe their motivations and outlined their objectives to anyone who would listen. America turned [...]

The Guardian reports: Five times a day for more than 15 years, Aphadi Wangara has led prayers at Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, one of three in the ancient Malian desert town. But the day after hardline Islamists attacked and damaged the 15th-century mosque, the softly spoken imam had no consoling words to offer. “I [...]

Here’s why Obama’s campaign to kill as many al Qaeda suspects as possible is ill-conceived: with every “success” the opportunities for gathering vital intelligence diminish. Obama’s biggest trophy — the death of Osama bin Laden — might have been the biggest failure of all. News of the capture of Naamen Meziche demonstrates why suspected terrorists [...]

ABC News reports: A new video surfaced online Tuesday featuring al Qaeda commander Abu Yahya al-Libi — the same terrorist that American officials declared dead last week — but the video doesn’t appear to reveal whether it was made before or after his reported death. In the new footage, which was posted in jihadi forums [...]

Faisal Devji writes about an aspect of al Qaeda and Taliban communications that most terrorism analysts overlook: the interest that bin Laden and others have in poetry. Readers going through the cache of letters that were released early this month from Osama bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan, may have been taken aback by a [...]

Barbara Slavin writes: Newly released correspondence from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan contradicts U.S. assertions that al-Qaeda has a close relationship with Iran. According to a U.S. analysis of letters found in the Abbottabad compound when U.S. Special Forces killed bin Laden a year ago, “the relationship is not one of alliance, but of [...]