[YEMENONLINE.INFO] A senior holy man for al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen was killed along with three other people in a drone strike on their vehicle January 31 in Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula...the latest incarnation of various Qaeda and Qaeda-allied groups, including the now-defunct Aden-Abyan Islamic Army that boomed the USS Cole in 2000...
said Thursday.
The holy man, Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, was killed in Yemen's south-central Shabwa province, AQAP said.
The strike would be a further indication that a U.S.-led drone strike program is continuing following a pause during political upheaval in the majority Sunni Moslem nation.
The United States has long conducted drone strikes against AQAP targets under the B.O. regime. But the New America Foundation, which tracks the strikes, says there was a nearly two-month pause in the strikes in late 2014 and early 2015 as Shiite Moslem Houthi
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the
Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The Yemeni government has accused the Houthis of having ties to the Iranian government, which wouldn't suprise most of us. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is
God is Great, Death to Americaâ„¢, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews...
rebels moved against Yemen's U.S.-backed government.
That uprising culminated in the resignation of Yemeni government's top leaders in mid-January. A week later, the U.S. drone strikes resumed, with a strike east of the capital, Sanaa, three U.S. officials said at the time.
Al-Nadhari made headlines in November when he inserted himself into a rivalry between al Qaeda and ISIS, or the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
in Iraq and Syria.
ISIS has captured parts of Syria and Iraq for what it calls its Islamic caliphate. In mid-November, ISIS leader His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
issued an audiotape saying his Islamic State had expanded to Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries.
Al-Nadhari responded harshly in a video a week later, saying al-Baghdadi's declaration of an Islamic caliphate was illegitimate.
"Our brothers in the Islamic State ... surprised us with several steps, including their announcement of the caliphate (and) they announced the expansion of the caliphate in a number of countries which they have have no governance, and considered them to be provinces that belonged to them," al-Nadhari said, according to a translation by the SITE intelligence group.
"The announcement of the caliphate for all Moslems by our brothers in the Islamic State did not meet the required conditions," al-Nashari argued, because other jihadi groups were not consulted.
| Ynet shares the interesting fact of the holy man's age: |
...
A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe....