A FEW DAYS after it acknowledged that its agencies were monitoring online and other electronic chatter to know if a drone strike it coordinated was successful, confirmation that the United States government successfully located and eliminated the number two figure of the Al-Qaeda terror organization hierarchy finally arrived on Tuesday.
Abu Yahya al Libi, the Libyan-born top al Qaeda leader, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan earlier this week said a US official.
U.S. officials said that Abu Yahya had recently been considered by U.S. counter-terrorism experts as the No. 2 in the core al Qaeda group led by Ayman al Zawahiri.
Zawahiri has headed the group since al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden, was killed last year in a U.S. commando raid on his hideout in Pakistan.
A U.S. official said that Abu Yahya “was among al Qaeda’s most experienced and versatile leaders” and that he “played a critical role in the group’s planning against the West, providing oversight of the external operations efforts.”
The news of the elimination is happening in the face of similar challenges faced by the Nigerian government, whose interests continued to the threatened by offensives of the rag-tag but nevertheless deadly Al-Qaeda wannabe group in Nigeria, popularly known as Boko Haram.
Since it began its deadly campaigns of mass murder in the last year, the group has murdered almost a thousand Nigerian citizens in what it describes as a campaign to Islamize Nigeria and institute a sharia order in the society.
The government has been largely unsuccessful in containing the activities of the group and recent attempts to negotiate with the group has also met repeated brick-walls.
Nigerians, who have largely opposed the idea of negotiating with Boko Haram, have condemned the inability of the government to protect them from the deadly activities of the members of the group. Many leaders of thought in the country have called for a similar targeting of the group’s leaders in the same manner that the Obama Administration continue to decapitate the leadership of Al-Qaeda.
“Nothing stops the Nigerian government from identifying and eliminating at least 50 of the top leaders of Boko Haram in Nigeria,” said an online news editor based in the United States.
“If the government can successfully do this, the war against Boko Haram extremism will be won and the country will be better for it,” he concluded.