A militant who acted as a senior operations organiser for Al Qaeda was targeted and killed in one of two US drone strikes launched against targets inside Pakistan last week, a US official said.
US and Pakistani sources told Reuters that the target of the attack was Aslam Awan, a Pakistani national from Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was killed last May by a US commando team. They said he was targeted in a strike by a US-operated drone on January 10 directed at what news reports said was a compound near the town of Miranshah in the North Waziristan Agency.
That strike broke an undeclared eight-week hiatus in attacks by the armed, unmanned drones that patrol Pakistan’s tribal areas and are a key weapon in US President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy.
The sources described Awan, who also was known by the nom-de-guerre Abdullah Khorasani, as a significant figure in the remaining core leadership of Al Qaeda, which US officials say has been sharply reduced by the drone campaign. Most of the drone attacks are conducted as part of a clandestine CIA operation.
Pakistani officials could not confirm that Awan was killed in the drone attack, but the US official said he was. One of the sources described Awan as an associate of Al Qaeda’s current chief of external operations, whose identity is known to intelligence officials but not to the general public. “Aslam Awan was a senior Al Qaeda external operations planner who was working on attacks against the West. His death reduces Al Qaeda’s thinning bench of another operative devoted to plotting the death of innocent civilians,” a US official said.
