Thursday, January 19, 2006

NYT reports more on US missile strike in Pakistan

More good news. More dead terrorists.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 18 - Two senior members of Al Qaeda and the son-in-law of its No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were among those killed in the American airstrikes in remote northeastern Pakistan last week, two Pakistani officials said here on Wednesday.


The article goes in depth on who exactly was killed, but here's the summary. Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar (aka Abu Khabab al-Masri) is the explosive and chemical weapons expert; Abu Ubayda al-Misri is the chief of insurgents operations; Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi is the son-in-law of Zawahiri; Mustafa Osman is a Zawahiri associate and is suspected to have been killed as well as one or two others.

So that's three "confirmed" and three others "possible to likely." So six likely dead, maybe more. All this point to good intelligence, even if it turns out Zawahiri wasn't there. It's certainly not the snafu it was initially made out to be shortly after the missile strike was made public.