The al Qaeda affiliates

NY Times:

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“We think of core Al Qaeda in Pakistan as a very potent group, but not huge,” said Daniel L. Byman, a former intelligence analyst now at Georgetown University. “But if you add the affiliates that are actively targeting us, it becomes a much bigger number.”

Al Qaeda’s ties with its affiliates play out at different levels. This year, American officials began seeing the first evidence that dozens of fighters from Pakistan, along with a handful of the terrorist group’s midlevel leaders, were moving to Somalia and Yemen. The terrorist groups in all three locations are now communicating more frequently, and apparently are trying to coordinate their actions, the officials said.

“Al Qaeda in the tribal areas — Al Qaeda central — gives strategic guidance to its regional affiliates,” said an American counterterrorism official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the group publicly. “It’s not a hands-on, day-to-day, tactical relationship.”

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Al Qaeda is struggling to survive and it is sending people from its base in Pakistan to other regions so the organization will not collapse as Pakistan and the US assert greater pressure on its sanctuaries. While this dispersal of its assets creates some problems, it also creates some opportunities for us to destroy them through decapitation strikes.

It was the UAV Hellfire strikes that were decapitation al Qaeda along the Pakistan-Afghan border region that drove them out. Similar attacks in Yemen where they should be easier to find could be very effective in destroying this threat.