The assassination of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid inside Pakistan with missiles fired from an unmanned drone last month was greeted as a great success by Nato. The veteran Egyptian born jihadist was one of the founder members of al-Qa'ida and was regarded the third most powerful figure in the organisation.The Wall Street Journal has more here.
Yazid, also known as Sheikh Sa'id al-Masri, is believed to have been killed at the village of Boya near Miranshah in North Waziristan, a frontier region which had been a stronghold of both the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban and foreign fighters.
An al-Qa'ida statement posted on an Islamist website said 54-year-old Yazid's wife, three daughters, and a granddaughter also died when a missile struck the compound where he was staying. "His death will only be a severe curse by his life upon the infidels", said the message.
Yazid was arrested over the killing of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and spent time in jail with Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fellow Egyptian who would become al-Qa'ida's deputy chief, before going to Afghanistan to join the fight against the Russians. By 1991 he was travelling with Bin Laden when he moved from Afghanistan to Sudan, worked as an accountant in Bin Laden's construction company, before both returned to Taliban-controlled Kabul in 1996. He became a close confidant of Bin Laden and is reported to have been the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks in New York.
In the milleu of an historic environmental Gulf oil catastrophe with no end in sight, runaway government spending, and an undeniable shift toward a statist government, this is a welcome glimmer of really good news which should be applauded.
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