http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/asia/30qaeda.html

August 29, 2011

Al Qaeda Affiliates Growing Independent

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON -- At some point in coming days, a shadowy group of Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan who make up the network's "General Command" is likely to announce a replacement for Atiyah abd al-Rahman, the Libyan chief of operations who was killed last week in a drone strike launched by the Central Intelligence Agency.

But as the 10th anniversary of the group's most successful strike approaches, the key question is: Does it matter?

In many ways, a successor to Mr. Rahman would have a familiar role in the terrorist group. He would be in charge of coordinating attacks against the United States and Europe, delivering messages from the new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, to the rank and file, and managing sometimes strained relations between Al Qaeda's Pakistan-based leadership and the group's far-flung affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But even as Al Qaeda's leadership continues to project an image of control, many terrorism experts and American intelligence officials say that the members of this circle of maybe a dozen operatives -- many of whom served for years as Osama bin Laden's closest confidants -- are at risk of being marginalized not only by the global jihad movement but by the Qaeda affiliates they helped spawn. With their ranks thinned by a relentless barrage of drone strikes, some experts believe, Al Qaeda's operatives in Pakistan resemble a driver holding a steering wheel that is no longer attached to the car.

"With the death of guys like Atiyah, it's increasingly likely that the Al Qaeda affiliate groups are just going to start doing their own thing," said Brian Fishman, a terrorism analyst at the New America Foundation. "At some point, the guys in Pakistan might be reduced to issuing a lot of public statements and hoping for the best."

Even with the network's operatives in Pakistan under siege, Al Qaeda's wings in Yemen and North Africa have had little difficulty continuing a wave of violence. The chaos and power vacuum in Yemen have allowed operatives there to gain control over large swaths of the country's southern territories, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed 16 soldiers and two civilians on Friday at an Algerian military academy. The same day, a Nigerian terrorist group that has cultivated ties to Al Qaeda killed dozens of people when it blew up the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria's capital, Abuja.

"For the past two years, the affiliates have been gaining in stature while core Al Qaeda has been declining," said a senior American counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence assessments of Al Qaeda are classified. "Bin Laden's death accelerated this trend, and Atiyah's death is the icing on the cake."  

The drone attack that killed Mr. Rahman came just weeks after President Obama's top adviser on Pakistan said that the United States had just six months to deliver "a knockout blow" to Al Qaeda's senior leadership in Pakistan -- while the group was still in turmoil after the killing of Bin Laden. Making veiled references to the C.I.A.'s drone campaign, the adviser, Douglas E. Lute, said at a security conference that the United States needed to escalate strikes in Pakistan to take advantage of the disarray within Al Qaeda's senior ranks.

Now, Al Qaeda will have to dig into its ranks to replace Mr. Rahman, which many experts said will not be easy. American officials said that one candidate is Abu Yahya al-Libi, another Libyan operative who became more prominent after he escaped from the American military prison at Bagram in Afghanistan in 2005.

While Mr. Rahman was hardly among Al Qaeda's most well-known figures, American officials said that his importance to the network came from the close ties he had forged with militant leaders during the 1990s, a time when Al Qaeda was a more centralized organization based largely in Afghanistan. Even after the network dispersed after the Sept. 11 attacks and affiliate groups emerged in countries like Iraq and Yemen, he relied on these longstanding relationships to help Bin Laden maintain control over the affiliates.

The senior American official said that Mr. Rahman acted as Al Qaeda's "human Rolodex," an assessment bolstered by documents seized from Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

For instance, in late 2005, Mr. Rahman chastised Abu Musab al Zarqawi -- the leader of Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq -- for carrying out attacks against Shiite Muslims, which he worried would fracture the insurgency against American troops in Iraq. Mr. Rahman wrote a letter to Mr. Zarqawi, whom he had known for years, threatening to remove him from the top of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia if he did not change his ways.

More recently, according to the Abbottabad documents, Mr. Rahman weighed in about who should be in charge of Al Qaeda's group in Yemen, and he even helped broker the partnership between Al Qaeda and a North African militant group that eventually agreed to rename itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

But some American officials said that the group is now largely independent of Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, and that there is even evidence that various affiliated groups across Northern Africa might increasingly be acting in league with one another.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the military's Africa Command, said in a telephone interview last week that the group that claimed responsibility for the recent attack in Nigeria, Boko Haram, has said publicly that it plans to tether itself more closely to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and to the Shabab, the militant group operating in Somalia.

Recent American intelligence assessments have found that Boko Haram has trained with Qaeda-linked militants in camps in the deserts of Mali, and may seek to expand its campaign of violence beyond Nigeria.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.