Head of al-Qaida in Yemen killed in US airstrike

A U.S. airstrike has killed al-Qaida's second most powerful figure and head of its Yemeni branch, dealing the terror network its biggest blow since the killing of Osama bin Laden at a time when it is vying with the Islamic State group for the mantle of global jihad.

Nasir al-Wahishi was the latest in a series of senior figures from al-Qaida's powerful Yemeni branch eliminated by U.S. drone attacks over the past five months, including its top ideologue and a senior military commander.

Al-Wahishi was known as bin Laden's "black box," keeping the al-Qaida leader's secrets. During the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he fought alongside bin Laden at Tora Bora before the al-Qaida leader slipped across the border into Pakistan. Al-Wahishi fled to Iran, where he was detained and deported to Yemen in 2003.

He was among 23 al-Qaida militants who broke out of a detention facility in the Yemeni capital in February 2006. Three years later, al-Wahishi announced the creation of the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula group, which gathered together Yemeni and Saudi militants following a sweeping crackdown on the extremist group by Riyadh.

According to the U.S. government's "Rewards for Justice" program, al-Wahishi, was "responsible for approving targets, recruiting new members, allocating resources to training and attack planning, and tasking others to carry out attacks."

The U.S. activity against al-Qaida has not been limited to Yemen. Over the weekend, a U.S. airstrike in Libya targeted an al-Qaida-linked militant commander, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who led a 2013 attack on an Algerian gas complex that killed 35 hostages, including several Americans. U.S. officials are still trying to confirm whether he was killed in the raid.

Al-Wahishi's death is a major loss for al-Qaida as it struggles to compete with the Islamic State group, an al-Qaida breakaway that has seized vast swaths of Syria and Iraq and spawned its own affiliates elsewhere in the region. The Islamic State group has also gained loyalists in Yemen in competition with al-Qaida.

Amid fierce competition with the Islamic State group for recruits and prestige across the Middle East, the successive blows to al-Qaida in Yemen have raised questions of whether they would only serve the Islamic State group as fighters from the al-Qaida affiliate defect and join Islamic State ranks.

However, Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Defense of Democracies think tank and managing editor of the Long War Journal, which chronicles the U.S. war on terror, predicted the impact would be limited to the short-term morale of the group's fighters and would not hurt its strength and strategy.

"The group will move on," Roggio said. "If you had a single strike that decapitated senior leaders and chopped off the top leaving it headless, then I would say fighters will look for a more organized group. But this was not the case. They were killed over time."

A senior operative in Yemen's al-Qaida affiliate eulogized al-Wahishi in a video statement released online Tuesday and said his deputy, Qassim al-Raimi, had been tapped to replace him.

"Our Muslim nation, one of your heroes and masters has departed to God," Khaled Batarfi said of al-Wahishi's killing in the southern Yemeni port city of Mukalla, which al-Qaida captured in April. Two other militants also died in the strike, according to Yemeni security officials.

Al-Raimi, the new AQAP leader, is thought to have masterminded a 2010 plot in which bombs concealed in printers were shipped to the U.S. on cargo planes before being detected and defused. He is believed to direct training camps in Yemen's remote deserts and mountains, where he organizes cells and plans attacks.

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