Foreign analysis: Decapitating al-Qaeda, head by head

At SOME point in the coming days, a shadowy group of al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan who make up the network’s “general command” is likely to announce a replacement for Atiyah abd al-Rahman, the Libyan chief of operations who was killed last week in a drone strike by the US’s Central Intelligence Agency.

But as the tenth anniversary of the group’s most successful attack approaches, the key question is: does it matter?

In many ways, a successor to Rahman would have a familiar role in the terrorist group. He would be in charge of co-ordinating attacks against the US and Europe, delivering messages from the new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, to the rank and file, and managing sometimes strained relations between al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership and the group’s far-flung affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But even as al-Qaeda’s leadership continues to project an image of control, many terrorism experts and US intelligence officials say the members of this circle of maybe a dozen operatives – many of whom served for years as Osama bin Laden’s closest confidants – are at risk of being marginalised not only by the global jihad movement but also by the al-Qaeda affiliates they helped spawn. With their ranks thinned by relentless drone strikes, some experts believe al-Qaeda’s operatives in Pakistan resemble a driver holding a steering wheel that is no longer attached to the car.

“With the death of guys like Atiyah, it’s increasingly likely that the al-Qaeda affiliate groups are just going to start doing their own thing,” said Brian Fishman, a terrorism analyst at the New America Foundation. “At some point, the guys in Pakistan might be reduced to issuing a lot of public statements and hoping for the best.”

Even with the network’s operatives in Pakistan under siege, al-Qaeda’s wings in Yemen and North Africa have had little difficulty continuing a wave of violence. The chaos and power vacuum in Yemen have allowed operatives there to gain control over large swaths of the country’s southern territories, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed 16 soldiers and two civilians last Friday at an Algerian military academy. The same day, a Nigerian terrorist group that has cultivated ties to al-Qaeda killed dozens of people when it blew up the UN headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.

“For the past two years, the affiliates have been gaining in stature while core al-Qaeda has been declining,” said a senior US counter-terrorism official.

The drone attack that killed Rahman came just weeks after President Barack Obama’s top adviser on Pakistan said the US had just six months to deliver “a knockout blow” to al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan.

Now, al-Qaeda will have to dig into its ranks to replace al-Rahman, which many experts said will not be easy. US officials said that one candidate is Abu Yahya al-Libi, another Libyan operative who became more prominent after he escaped from the US military prison at Bagram in Afghanistan in 2005.

While al-Rahman was hardly among al-Qaeda’s most well-known figures, US officials said that his importance to the network came from the close ties he had forged with militant leaders during the 1990s, a time when al-Qaeda was a more centralised organisation based largely in Afghanistan.

The senior US official said Rahman acted as al-Qaeda’s “human Rolodex,” in a reference to the business contacts system.

For instance, in late 2005, Rahman chastised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – the leader of al-Qaeda’s wing in Iraq – for carrying out attacks against Shiite Muslims, which he worried would fracture the insurgency against US troops in Iraq. Rahman wrote a letter to al-Zarqawi, whom he had known for years, threatening to remove him from the top of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia if he did not change his ways.