WASHINGTON—U.S. officials said Monday they are looking into
reports that the leader of al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen,
considered one of the group's most dangerous spinoffs, was killed
in an airstrike there.
Twitter accounts used by militants have circulated claims that
Nasser al-Wuhayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or
AQAP, was killed in a U.S. airstrike, the SITE monitoring group
reported Monday.
"If confirmed, the death of AQAP's leader is a major blow to
Islamist terrorists who are plotting daily to attack America," said
Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chairman of the House Committee on
Homeland Security.
AQAP has been linked to numerous terrorist attacks, including
the killings earlier this year at a French satirical magazine in
Paris.
The U.S. government had offered a $10 million reward for
information leading to the death of Mr. Wuhayshi, making him one of
the U.S. government's most-wanted terrorists.
In 2013, al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri is believed to have
elevated Mr. Wuhayshi to the position of a "general manager," which
some U.S. officials believe makes him second in command of the
whole al Qaeda organization.
Mr. Wuhayshi was Osama bin Laden's personal secretary and has
long known Mr. Zawahiri. He escaped from a Yemeni prison in 2006
and assumed control of the Yemen group in 2009, drawing on al
Qaeda's defunct Saudi branch.
Among his early recruits was a Saudi bomb-maker Ibrahim Hassan
Tali al-Asiri, who became one of the terrorists most feared by the
U.S. for his creative bomb-making skills.
It couldn't immediately be learned whether a recent
U.S.-directed drone attack targeted Mr. Wuhayshi. Both the Central
Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military have conducted drone
strikes in Yemen in recent years, taking out some of AQAP's top
leadership. Yemen's recent political chaos and civil war have
disrupted some U.S. efforts, but American officials have said the
counterterrorism campaign there hasn't let up.
Max Abrahms, a terrorism expert at Northeastern University, said
al Qaeda has tried recently to present itself as a more moderate
force in Yemen in a multifaceted conflict involving Houthi rebels.
In Syria, the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front has battled against
Islamic State militants as well as Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad.
Some coalition partners have begun to view the group more
favorably, as a counterweight to Islamic State. The U.S. strike, if
confirmed, could represent the U.S. commitment to disrupting al
Qaeda, Mr. Abrahms said.
"The U.S. is partly trying to show we're anti-al Qaeda," he
said. "We're still going after their leaders."
Write to Damian Paletta at damian.paletta@wsj.com and Felicia
Schwartz at Felicia.Schwartz@wsj.com
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