US drone attacks are not slowing down AQAP

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has released a video eulogizing Nasir al Wuhayshi, the leader of AQAP and second in command for al-Qaeda, who was killed in a US drone strike earlier this month. Wuhayshi, born in Yemen, was named al-Qaeda’s general manager in 2013. Before he assumed the #2 position, he was a close associate and personal secretary of Osama bin Laden, and led one of al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan. While imprisoned with 22 other al-Qaeda militants, Wuhayshi successfully developed and executed a plan to escape from the prison through a tunnel. After bin Laden’s death, Wuhayshi was quick to openly support Ayman al-Zawahiri, who eventually named Wuhayshi general manager in 2013.

AQAP was quick to emphasize the speediness of its Shura council’s selection of new leader Qasim al Raymi. Raymi has an extensive resume with AQAP, serving as the group’s military commander since 2009. Raymi, who has been one of the State Department’s most wanted terrorists since 2010, also has links to various attacks by the group, including a 2007 suicide bombing in the Yemen that killed ten people, and the 2009 “underwear bomb” plot in which an al-Qaeda militant hid explosives in his underwear with hopes of bringing down a plane over Detroit. The US’s hunt for Raymi has been long lasting, with rumors of his death arising multiple times since 2007.

The most recent strike is just one of a number of recent US drone strike that have killed various AQAP leaders. In April, Ibrahim al-Rubaish, AQAP’s ideological leader and Islamic law interpreter was killed in Yemen by a US drone strike. Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, a senior AQAP leader and al-Qaeda’s global deputy general manager, was also killed in April by a US drone strike. On June 17, al-Qaeda militants publically executed two Saudi men accused of assisting the US to find AQAP leaders who have recently been killed in drone attacks. After the men were shot to death, their bodies were hung from a bridge with a banner that read, “The House of Saud directs American planes to bomb the holy warriors.” Al-Qaeda reportedly charged the two men with planting tracking devices that signaled the locations of AQAP leaders. Despite the deaths of multiple of its senior leaders, AQAP is showing no signs of slowing down its operations, being the most successful branch of al-Qaeda in recent years. In March, Saudi Arabia launched a coalition to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen which AQAP has used the choas in Yemen to its advantage by seizing lawless areas in eastern parts of the nation. It is likely AQAP will continue to take advantage of the war in Yemen, and will continue its operations as it has shown how quickly the group can rebound from US drone attacks killing it’s top leaders.