Al-Qaeda Militants Leaving Pakistan for Yemen, Somalia

Military helping government retake capital from insurgents

(NEWSER) - Worried about Somalia's growing role as a sanctuary for al-Qaeda, the US is helping the government prepare for a major offensive to retake its capital after a decade of fighting, writes Jeffrey Gettleman at the New York Times . So far, most of the help has been in the form of training and surveillance, but Special Ops could move in to Mogadishu for quick strikes once the fighting begins in the next few weeks. More»

Finding leader remains 'major priority,' he says

(NEWSER) - Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan and his arrest remains a top priority for the US, CIA Director Leon Panetta said today, adding that joint operations with Pakistani forces could finally net al-Qaeda’s top leader. The CIA has Pakistani informants that keep it abreast of terrorist targets there, and continues to monitor safe havens in Somalia and Yemen, Reuters reports. More»

(NEWSER) - Fifty people, including a group of children stranded aboard a school bus, have been killed in fighting between al-Qaeda terrorists and local tribesmen in one of Pakistan’s lawless regions on the border with Afghanistan. Taliban leaders, who have ties to both groups, are trying to broker a truce, according to this report by the BBC. More»

It may be creating more terrorists than it's killing: Gary Kamiya

(NEWSER) - Before 9/11, if the US president had announced that the government was going to "play God, reaching down from our high-tech heaven to kill whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want"—including US citizens, without a trial—the news would have been met with uproar. But that is indeed what we are doing today with our drones, "and nobody cares," writes Gary Kamiya in an extensive piece on Salon . As long as the government kills for the good of national security, the majority of Americans apparently have no problem with it, Kamiya writes. But how did this come about? He traces the shift in attitude back to the war in Afghanistan—which he calls "justified" in the wake of 9/11. Once the US established a precedent of killing Taliban members wherever they were found in Afghanistan or Pakistan, "it was a small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya." More»

New bases to target Islamic militants, pirates

(NEWSER) - The Obama administration is creating an expanded network of drone bases in Africa, which officials say will help the US target Islamic militants in Somalia and Yemen. A new drone base is being built in Ethiopia, and the US is already deploying drones over Somalia and Yemen from its base in Djibouti, reports the Washington Post . A drone base in the Seychelles will be used to target Islamic militant groups, as well as pirates that plague the Indian Ocean island nation. More»