Posted on 11/10/2006 5:47:31 AM PST by Perdogg
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN A strike by a U.S. Predator drone in Pakistan's tribal areas in January missed al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, by just two hours, an intelligence official here says, revealing that the hunt for al-Qaida's leaders had come much closer to killing him than was previously thought.
Al-Zawahiri left a dinner in the village of Damadola at 10:30 on the night of Jan. 12, with a local supporter, Maulavi Liaqat, an intelligence official with knowledge of the incident said. The house where they had eaten was hit at 12:30 that night.
At the time, amid an angry public backlash in Pakistan over the strike, which killed a reported 18 people, U.S. and Pakistani officials said only that al-al-Zawahiri was expected at the dinner, but failed to appear.
The details emerged in the aftermath of a new strike on Oct. 30 on a madrasa, or religious school, in the same district of the tribal region of Bajaur. That strike killed a reported 83 people. Among them was Liaqat, the madrasa's leader, and three of his sons.
Despite the Pakistani government's announcement that it had conducted the precision-guided strike on the madrasa, residents of the area said that they believed it was also carried out by a U.S. Predator drone.
The airstrike is believed to have prompted a revenge attack on Wednesday, when a suicide bomber killed at least 42 army recruits and wounded 20 more at a military training ground.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
You can run but you can't hide.
Its a bird, its a plane.
Its Uncle Sam, Ayman.
fyi
Sort of sounds like just before we got Zarqawi. We kept "just missing" him by a couple hours. Then Whomp!
ping
Oh really. Then why haven't we heard from them?
It's HellFire!
Reload!
Please, just tell us when you have killed the SOB, who wants to know about a near miss, enough.
Just knew it was close the last time. Al Qaeda lashes out and strikes a "soft" military target in Pakistan.
So someone in the Pakistani government will endorse the next dime dropped.
Notice you don't see any bragging now from Zawihiri. He's still trying to clean up the mess in his pants. Hard to do when you are a shaking hulking mass of nerves.
Nail'em.
But, of course, no news means we aren't trying.
Two hours isn't a near miss. Two feet is a near miss. You can go along way in 2 hours. Of course when we finally get this slime mold, the Rat party will take the credit.
I want to know, sign me up on that list.
I think the country should know as well, especially those idiots who voted DemonRAT.
It should be blasted into their iPods until it fries what little is left of their presumably drug addled, certainly liberal propagandized brains.
This kind of news effectively negates the RAT argument that "boohoohoo, we should be in Afghanistan, not Iraq, waaaaaah".
This kind of news reminds us we are at war. A GLOBAL war against Suicidal Islamofacist Terrorists who want to kill YOU.
If someone is trying to kill me, I want to know that our troops are out there trying to kill them first. Gives me a warm fuzzy.
I want to know and so do others ....see Amanda these reports tell us how close we are to him.
It means we have a pretty good bead on him, and eventually we'll get him. Of course he knows how close we've been, but it is good for us to know it. If there were good opsec reasons for not divulging this information, I would understand not letting this word out, but Z knows only too well how close we are.
2 weeks?
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