Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda's leader, confirmed the death of his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video message posted on jihadist Internet forums late Monday, The Associated Press reports.
As my colleagues Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt reported, American officials said in June that the senior militant had been killed by a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike in Pakistan's tribal belt, along the Afghan border.
Mr. Libi, a charismatic, Libyan Islamist who escaped from an American military prison in Afgh anistan in 2005, was considered a particularly important figure because of his use of video messages to spread Al Qaeda's ideology. In a Foreign Policy article on Mr. Libi's importance in 2009, Jarret Brachman, the former director of research at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, explained that Mr. Libi had formed his impressions of Americans firsthand. At Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Mr. Brachman reported, Mr. Libi “passed time by intimately studying his American captors as they aimlessly surfed the Internet or complained to him about their dysfunctional childhoods.â€
The Qaeda leader statement on “the martyrdom of the lion of Libya,†came in a 42-minute video, according to SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization in Washington that tracks militant Web sites. (SITE, or the Search for International Terrorist Entities, was founded by Rita Katz, an Arabic-speaking Israeli researcher who was born in Iraq and now lives in Washington.)
The video was apparently recorded during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended in August, Reuters reports. In the message, Mr. Zawahri calls President Obama a “liar†who “is trying to fool Americans into believing that he will defeat Al Qaeda by killing this person or that person.â€
As Agence France-Presse reports, Mr. Zawahri “also mentions Warren Weinstein, an elderly U.S. aid worker kidnapped in Pakistan by Al Qaeda just over a year ago, vowing to keep him in captivity until U.S.-led forces release Qaeda followers held in Afghanistan.â€
In an interview with CNN in Cairo broadcast on Tuesday, the Qaeda leader's brother, Mohamed, suggested that he could broker a truce between the Islamist militants and the West. Mohamed al-Zawahri, who was released from prison after the Egyptian revolution in 2011, also suggested that Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landma rks in 1995, should be freed by the United States as part of the truce agreement.
