The killing in Somalia of a top al-Qaeda militant deepens the group’s woes a month after Osama bin Laden’s death, but Fazul Mohammed’s recent role as a trainer of aspiring operatives may have left a menacing legacy.
Somali police said on Saturday that Mohammed, one of the world’s most wanted men and a master of attack planning, disguise, evasion and languages, had been killed in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Tuesday last week.
Washington says Mohammed, also known as Harun, is a key suspect in the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 240 people.
The elusive Comoran, believed to be in his late 30s, also masterminded an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya in November 2002 that killed 15 people, Western officials say.
However, in recent years he is believed by some academics and security experts to have spent as much time training militants as directly plotting against the West, sharing his expertise with young Somalis and with Muslims who traveled to Somalia to gain paramilitary experience.
“He was probably la creme de la creme of al-Qaeda in operational terms,” said Nelly Lahoud, an associate professor at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
“His death is a loss for al-Qaeda, but I think his more recent role as a trainer must have given it a great investment,” said Lahoud, who has studied Mohammed’s 2009 autobiography War on Islam: The Story of Fazul Harun. “He’s one of those success stories of al-Qaeda. He felt he had a duty to teach everything he knew ... He was the gift that kept on giving.”
The Somali government says hundreds of foreign fighters have joined the insurgency from countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf region and Western nations such as the US and Britain. Some of the foreign jihadists have taken up leadership positions in militant groups including al-Shabaab.
In the past five years, -Mohammed forged ties with the al-Shabaab Somali armed group fighting to topple the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia and he is said by Western security officials to have acted as one of the Somali rebels’ links to al-Qaeda’s core leadership in South Asia.
Western security officials say they suspect Mohammed also coordinated with militants in al-Qaeda’s Arabian Peninsula branch based in Yemen — the branch responsible for the network’s boldest attacks on Western targets in recent years.
Security specialists who have studied Mohammed say he emerges as highly pragmatic, cool-headed and calculating. His languages include Arabic, Comorian, Swahili and English.
Australian academic Leah Farrell, a leading authority on al-Qaeda, said Mohammed’s death would impact on al-Qaeda’s “presence and external operations capacity in the region.”
“As a longstanding and senior al-Qaeda member who had a lengthy presence in the region and had cultivated deep links, he will not be easily replaced,” Farrell said. “However, in terms of al-Qaeda’s relationship with al-Shabaab, this relationship is multi-faceted.”
“There are other figures within al-Shabaab who have links to al-Qaeda-central and its Arabian Peninsula branch and there are other al-Qaeda emissaries present in the region. In this respect, communications and facilitation will continue,” Farrell added.
Some security experts suspect Mohammed’s training may have lent expertise to a bomb attack last year by al-Shabaab on the Ugandan capital Kampala that killed 79 people while they were watching the soccer World Cup final.
The strike, the group’s first on foreign soil, was in revenge for Uganda’s contribution to the 6,300-strong African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in Somalia.
In another such attack in September 2009, al-Shabaab insurgents struck the main AU military base in Mogadishu with twin suicide car bombs and killed 17 peacekeepers.
According to his autobiography, Mohammed himself was trained by Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian veteran of the network who remains at large and is believed to be in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. Security experts say Adel is now in interim command of al-Qaeda.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was