Latest news with #Qaeda
The National
31-01-2025
- Politics
- The National
Air strike kills senior Al Qaeda-linked militant in Syria as US continues ‘ninja missile' campaign
A US air strike has killed a senior operative of an Al Qaeda -affiliated group in north-west Syria, the US military said on Friday, as Washington continues an opaque drone and special forces campaign targeting militants in the region. The strike resulted in the death of Muhammad Salah Al Za'bir on Thursday, according to US Central Command, America's military headquarters in the Middle East. He was a prominent member of militant group Hurras Al Din, which was formed in Syria in 2018, two years after a split between Jabhat Al Nusra – now Syria's ruling Hayat Tahrir Al Sham – and Al Qaeda's central leadership. Since around 2015, the US has waged a shadowy drone and special forces programme in Syria led by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. Initially it targeted ISIS but Al Qaeda remnants have also become a significant target. In December last year, the US launched dozens of air strikes against ISIS in Syria after Bashar Al Assad 's regime collapsed. ISIS are now at a low ebb in the country, ground down by multiple opponents, from Hayat Tahrir Al Sham to Kurdish militias backed by the US and local tribes. 'The air strike is part of Centcom's ongoing commitment, along with partners in the region, to disrupt and degrade efforts by terrorists to plan, organise, and conduct attacks against civilians and military personnel from the US, our allies, and our partners throughout the region and beyond,' Centcom said. Last week, Hurras Al Din said it had disbanded, apparently on the orders of central Al Qaeda leadership. The group, which includes foreign fighters, had been under pressure in northern Syria for years after clashing with Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, who arrested and assassinated scores of its leaders, part of a brutal power struggle in Idlib. Idlib was the last Syrian rebel stronghold until the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in December. Before then, experts say Hurras Al Din and Hayat Tahrir Al Sham co-ordinated on some operations, before their power struggle began around 2021. Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, after it consolidated control of Idlib and allied with a number of smaller rebel groups, broke out in a lightning offensive last month that imploded Mr Al Assad's weak regime. 'Ninja missiles' Hurras Al Din has additionally been hit sporadically by a US drone campaign, which also targeted ISIS leaders, often in densely populated areas. To reduce civilian casualties, the US air campaign has sometimes relied on so-called 'knife bomb' Hellfire R9X missiles, also dubbed the 'ninja missile', which features an array of blades and no explosive warhead. Photos on social media of a destroyed car said to belong to Mr Al Za'bir suggest such a weapon may have been used in the attack that killed him, because the body of the vehicle is sliced and mangled and there are no signs of fire or shrapnel associated with explosively armed Hellfire missiles. The R9X is first thought to have been used in 2017 against Abu Khayr Al Masri, an Al Qaeda commander in Idlib. Since then, the 'kinetic' weapon has also been used to kill Al Qaeda commander Ayman Zawahiri in Afghanistan in 2022. That attack followed a disastrous US strike on a suspected ISIS hideout in Kabul, which killed 10 civilians during the city's fall to the Taliban in 2021.
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Appeals Court Refuses to Reinstate Confession in U.S.S. Cole Case
A Pentagon appeals panel on Thursday upheld a judge's decision in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case to forbid the use of the defendant's confession as derived from torture. The decision by the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review was still under seal. But Allison F. Miller, the lawyer for the defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, said the panel unanimously rejected a U.S. government request to reinstate use of the confession at his upcoming death penalty trial. Mr. Nashiri is accused of orchestrating the Qaeda suicide bombing attack on the warship in October 2000 in Aden harbor in Yemen. Seventeen soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded. The trial date is set for Oct. 6, one week shy of the 25th anniversary of that attack. The ruling was a blow to a prosecution strategy of seeking to build torture-free cases against former C.I.A. prisoners. Prosecutors believed that Mr. Nashiri's interrogations by federal law enforcement agents in 2007 — his fifth year in U.S. custody — were key pieces of evidence. Mr. Nashiri, who was arrested in 2002, had spent four years in secret C.I.A. prisons, where interrogators used violence, threats and punishment to get him to talk. He was transferred to Guantánamo Bay in September 2006. Four months after his arrival, he was questioned again, this time by federal law enforcement agents, and told his participation in the interrogations was voluntary. The agents testified that the atmosphere was cordial, and that he willingly answered questions about his role in Al Qaeda and his relationship with Osama bin Laden. But in August 2023, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., the judge at the time, suppressed the statements as the product of torture. 'Any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before,' Colonel Acosta wrote in his 50-page ruling. According to evidence in pretrial hearings, Mr. Nashiri was physically and emotionally tortured during an odyssey through the C.I.A.'s secret prison network — from Thailand to Poland to Afghanistan and then Guantánamo Bay. He was waterboarded, confined inside a cramped box, rectally abused and brutalized in other ways to coerce him to answer questions about future and suspected Qaeda plots. 'If there was ever a case where the circumstances of an accused's prior statements impacted his ability to make a later voluntary statement, this is such a case,' the judge wrote. 'Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, they were derived from it.' The chief prosecutor for military commissions, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, was reviewing the ruling. In the case involving the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, another judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, is deciding whether to similarly suppress the confession of one of the defendants, Ammar al Baluchi.
