This extraordinary account of the murky CIA-Pakistani relationship would seem to indicate that the Pakistanis and the Americans had buried the ax following the Salala incident and agreed to continue to work together against their common enemy. It also indicated that the drones were once again operational, and after an almost two-month lull, the CIA’s hunt for Taliban and al Qaeda militants in the hills of Pakistan’s FATA region was on once again. The winter and spring 2012 campaign was halted briefly for two weeks in April after the Pakistani parliament voted to end the strikes, but it continued apace soon thereafter despite repeated Pakistani condemnations.
The strikes picked up in the late spring of 2012, after a brief lull. This period saw the dramatic killing of the new number two in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al Libi. Libi, a charismatic propagandist who had mocked the Americans on many videotapes calling for jihad, oversaw the day-to-day running of al Qaeda’s external operations while bin Laden and Zawahiri kept a low profile. Libi had actually been captured previously in Afghanistan, but he had escaped from jail in 2007. After surviving several close drone calls, Libi was finally killed early in the morning on June 4, 2012, in a strike on the village of Hassu Khel in North Waziristan. On hearing the welcome news of Libi’s death, an American official stated, “Zawahri will be hard-pressed to find any one person who can readily step into Abu Yahya’s shoes. In addition to his gravitas as a longstanding member of A.Q.’s leadership, Abu Yahya’s religious credentials gave him the authority to issue fatwas [decrees], operational approvals and guidance to the core group in Pakistan and regional affiliates. There is no one who even comes close in terms of replacing the expertise A.Q. has just lost.”150
The death of the skilled al Libi was only the latest killing in the drone war of attrition that had largely dismantled al Qaeda in Pakistan by the spring of 2012. But even as al Qaeda’s core group was systematically taken out in hundreds of strikes in Pakistan, the organization’s regional franchises began to emerge, especially in Yemen, posing a new threat to America.
DRONE STRIKES IN SOMALIA, YEMEN, AND THE PHILIPPINES
The spring 2012 drone campaign was not limited to Pakistan’s tribal regions. Ten days after the failed attempt to kill Hakimullah Mehsud, a CIA drone struck and killed an al Qaeda terrorist in the northeast African country of Somalia. There a militant group known as al Shabab, which had publicly aligned itself with al Qaeda, was trying to take over the country and enforce strict sharia law. Al Shabab had carried out scores of suicide bombings in Somalia; sent a suicide bomber to Uganda, where he killed seventy-six soccer fans watching the World Cup, including an American; and dispatched terrorists to neighboring Kenya, where they killed scores. The group’s interest in projecting terrorism beyond Somalia alarmed the CIA.
Many foreigners, including some Americans of Somali descent from Minneapolis, and Arabs had come to fight alongside al Shabab militiamen and to help them create a strict Islamic state in Somalia and export terrorism. Among them was Bilal al Berjawi, a British-Lebanese Arab who was number two in al Qaeda’s Somali operations, next in rank after an operative who had directed the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was in charge of the al Shabab’s overseas recruitment, training, and tactics and responsible for the Uganda bombing.
But Berjawi’s career with al Qaeda and al Shabab, which began in 2006, did not last long into the new year. On January 22, 2012, three missiles fired from a drone hit his car near the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Al Shabab issued a statement on the death of this valued operative: “The martyr received what he wished for and what he went out for, as we consider of him and Allah knows him best, when, in the afternoon today, brother Bilal al-Berjawi was exposed to bombing in an outskirt of Mogadishu from a drone that is believed to be American. He was martyred immediately.”151 The UK’s Guardian added a fascinating detail about Berjawi’s assassination: “The 27-year-old’s wife is understood to have given birth to a child in a London hospital a few hours before the missile strike, prompting suspicions among relatives that his location had been pinpointed as a result of a telephone conversation between the couple.”152 In all likelihood the drone that killed Berjawi was flown from a new CIA air base in either the nearby Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, or Arba Minch, Ethiopia (although one source claimed the actual drone was flown by JSOC).153
The strike that killed Berjawi was not the first drone strike in Somalia, nor was it the first JSOC operation in the country. Two al Qaeda leaders had previously been killed in a special operations raid and a bombing there.154 The first reported drone strike in Somalia had occurred on June 23, 2011, and was aimed at two al Shabab/al Qaeda members linked to American-Yemeni al Qaeda leader Anwar al Awlaki. This strike, which was carried out by JSOC, did not kill its intended targets but wounded them. According to the Washington Post, the strike was aimed at a Shabab convoy near the group’s southern base at Kismayo and might have killed a senior al Qaeda leader named Ibrahim al Afghani, who had not been on the original target list.155 In September 2011 local Somalis reported that three Shabab targets were again hit in the area of Kismayo by either CIA or JSOC drones.156
Interestingly enough, these two reports of drone attacks in Somalia led the Iranian Press TV to publish an exaggerated report that fifty-six drone strikes in Somalia had supposedly killed a total of 1,370 people. Although the Press TV reports were uncritically picked up and published as fact by other networks, they were either a flight of fantasy or Iranian propaganda aimed at inciting anti-Americanism.157 Regardless, the strikes in Somalia increased the number of countries where the CIA or JSOC carried out drone operations to seven (the others being Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Libya). It is worth noting that the killer Reaper and Predator drones operating in Somalia have been aided by smaller observation drones, such as Ravens, Scan Eagles, and Fire Scout remote-controlled helicopters, as well as massive Global Hawks.158 In the future unarmed drones may work in conjunction with killer drones to hunt and kill targets.
Following the lull in strikes after the Salala incident, there was an uptake in drone surveillance and strike operations in Yemen in the spring of 2012. These strikes were largely a response to AQAP’s four attempts to blow up jetliners with hidden bombs (including the infamous underwear bomber incident) and successful assassination of almost a hundred Yemenis with a suicide bomb that spring. AQAP had become the most lethal al Qaeda threat following the destruction of most of al Qaeda Central’s membership in the Pakistani drone campaign, and the CIA felt the need to respond.
To compound matters, the chaos in Yemen after President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February 2011 allowed al Qaeda militants and an allied group known as Ansar al Sharia to seize power in much of Yemen’s coastal Abyan Province. Their ultimate aim was, like that of al Shabab in Somalia, to overthrow the country’s secular government and to establish strict sharia law.