By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 July 2023
The Death of Al-Qaeda’s Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: One Year On
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Tag Archives: Abu Ubayda al-Panjshiri
The Haqqani Network, Al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s Jihad in Afghanistan
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 September 2021
Anti-Taliban fighters watch U.S. airstrikes at Tora Bora, 16 December 2001 || REUTERS/Erik de Castro
The State Department spokesman Ned Price said, on 27 August, “The Taliban and the Haqqani Network are separate entities”. The next day, the Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby slightly modulated this, having first tried to dismiss the question, by conceding there was “a certain amount of … commingling … there’s a marbling … of Taliban and Haqqani”, before saying he was “pushing back … [on] the relevance of that discussion”.
What these officials were trying to do was two-fold: (1) to refute press reports that U.S. officials in Kabul had shared “a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies” with the Taliban, amounting to having “put all those Afghans on a kill list”, as one “defense official” put it; and (2) to deny that the U.S. coordination with the Taliban to evacuate people the jihadists wanted to kill—a surreal enough situation—had involved the additional political and legal problems of coordinating with a formally registered Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), as the Haqqani Network is. Continue reading
Examining Iran’s Long Relationship with Al-Qaeda
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 October 2018
At the beginning of September, New America published a paper, based on recovered al-Qaeda documents, which concluded that there was “no evidence of cooperation” between the terrorist group and the Islamic Republic of Iran. New America’s study lauds itself for taking an approach that “avoids much of the challenge of politicization” in the discussion of Iran’s relationship with al-Qaeda. This is, to put it mildly, questionable.
A narrative gained currency in certain parts of the foreign policy community during the days of the Iraq war, and gained traction since the rise of the Islamic State (IS) in 2014, that Iran can be a partner in the region, at least against (Sunni) terrorism, since Tehran shares this goal with the West. Under President Barack Obama, this notion became policy: the US moved to bring Iran’s revolutionary government in from the cold, to integrate it into the international system. Continue reading
Profile of a 9/11 Planner: Muhammad Atef
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2018
Al-Qaeda’s military leader Muhammad Atef at a press conference in Afghanistan, 26 May 1998 (image source: CNN)
Muhammad Atef, best-known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, but who also went by the names Taseer Abdullah or Taysir Abdullah and Subhi Abu Sitta, was al-Qaeda’s military leader between 1996 and 2001, and one of the three people most responsible for the terrorist attack in the United States on 11 September 2001. Continue reading
Al-Qaeda’s First Military Emir
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2018
Moments after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya on 7 August 1998 (picture source: UPI)
Ali Amin al-Rashidi (Abu Ubayda al-Banshiri or Abu Ubayda al-Panjshiri) was the first head of al-Qaeda’s military committee until his death in an accident in 1996. Continue reading
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