Pentagon Confirms Kill of al Shabaab Chief

On February 10^th, the Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby confirmed that a drone strike on January 31^st successfully killed al-Shabaab commander Yusef Dheeq and an associate. In an early February press briefing, Kirby announced the January 31^st strike but couldn’t yet confirm that the strike had killed its intended target. Kirby described the target, Yusef Dheeq, as al-Shabaab’s “chief of external operations and planning for intelligence and security.”

This strike came as Somali official Mohamed Osman told the Turkish Anadolu Agency that the Somali National Army had captured al-Shabaab commander Olow Barow after a firefight. Somali Col. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi also reported to local media that several al-Shabaab camps had been targeted by airstrike this week.

Dheeq is the latest of several al-Shabaab leaders to be killed by US forces in the past six months. A September drone strike killed the organization’s leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane who led al-Shabaab’s’ transition from a locally-focused group to a regional al-Qaeda affiliate with international aspirations. Former al-Shabaab intelligence chief Zakariya Ismail Ahmed Hersi surrendered to Somali authorities days before his successor, Abdishakur Tahliil, was killed by a drone strike in late December.