U.S. Drone Attack Kills Suspected Organizer of Attack on Secret CIA Base

Obama administration officials say they believe an Al Qaeda operative who played a key role in organizing the Dec. 30 suicide bombing of a secret CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, was killed in a drone-fired missile attack last week. The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, identified the target of the missile strike as Hussein al-Yemeni—a Yemeni native, described by one official as an “important Al Qaeda planner and facilitator based in the tribal areas of Pakistan.”

U.S. officials declined to specify precisely when they believe Yemeni was killed. But they did say that the attack was a pinpoint strike in the town of Miram Shah; news reports last week said that on March 8 two or three drone-fired missiles had struck a house, killing five people and wounding at least four.
 
One U.S. counterterrorism official said that Yemeni was in his late 20s or early 30s and that “he had established contacts with groups ranging from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Haqqani network to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. He was a conduit in Pakistan for funds, messages, and recruits, but his real specialty was bombs and suicide operations.” Another official confirmed that Yemeni’s alleged specialty was organizing suicide bomb attacks.

In this context, two counterterrorism officials noted, U.S. government experts believe that Yemeni played a key role in the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA’s secret Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan. One of the counterterrorism officials noted that Yemeni was a “vicious and dangerous figure who saw himself as an up-and-comer in the terrorist world [who is] … thought to have played a key role in the attack on December 30th at Khost.” The official said that that “The strike that appears to have gotten him was in Miram Shah, a clean, precise action that shows these killers cannot hide even in relatively built-up places.”

Obama administration officials are treating Yemeni’s demise, assuming it is 100 percent confirmed, as further evidence that their intensified use of drone-fired missiles to target militants in Pakistani tribal areas  is clearly producing results and taking a serious toll on Al Qaeda and its allies. Said one of the counterterrorism officials: “There’s been a precise and systematic campaign in the tribal areas to pound Al Qaeda and other violent terrorist groups. Everyone knows they’ve lost leaders, commanders, and operational planners, but they’ve also lost facilitators and foot soldiers. Their places of rest, refuge, and training have been hit—as have spots where they store weapons and assemble suicide bombs. They remain extremely dangerous, yet they’ve been badly shaken—not by one successful shot but by a sustained series of inevitably accurate shots. If these hostile, inaccessible places are the battlefield, the drone—powered by intelligence—is the artillery of this war."