US missile gets al Qaeda #4

NY Times:

A missile attack from a remotely piloted American aircraft is believed to have killed a senior member of Al Qaeda in South Waziristan on Thursday, a former member of a militant group in the region said in an interview.

The operative, Khalid Habib, an Egyptian who was chief of operations in Pakistan’s tribal region, is described by the Central Intelligence Agency as the fourth-ranking person in the Qaeda hierarchy.

The attack, on the village of Taparghai, killed four people, some of them Arabs, according to initial reports on Thursday.

A Pakistani intelligence official declined Friday to confirm the death of Mr. Habib. An American official involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas said he could not confirm the report that Mr. Habib had died. It often takes American officials some time to determine the success or failure of attacks by remotely piloted aircraft in the rugged and remote terrain of the tribal areas.

Mr. Habib recently moved to Taparghai from Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, which is in an area that the Americans have been attacking with increasing frequency. Their primary goal is to break the militant network there related to Sirajuddin Haqqani, a Taliban leader closely allied to Al Qaeda, the former member of the militant group said.

Mr. Habib had relocated to Taparghai expressly to avoid missile strikes, the former militant said. The area around Taparghai is near Makin, a base of Baitullah Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban.

Mr. Habib was in a parked Toyota station wagon, a favored vehicle of the militants in the tribal area, when he was hit by the missile, the former member of the militant group said.

A resident of the village said in a telephone interview that the man killed in the attack seemed to be “important.” He was known in the village as Zalfay, the resident said. The name means “long hair” in Pashto, the language spoken in the area.

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The missile campaign is obviously taking a toll on al Qaeda operations as demonstrated by the relocations in an effort to avoid the strikes. It is further taking a toll on the leadership of al Qaeda. One of the reasons why it is harder to confirm these deaths is that al Qaeda has lost 80 percent of its we operations in recent days according to a post below.