Free Republic

SNIPPET: "An al Qaeda leader wanted by the US for a string of deadly attacks has been named the new leader of terror group's network in East Africa. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of several al Qaeda leaders charged with carrying out the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was appointed the leader of al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Fazul was "inaugurated" during an open ceremony in the southern city of Kismayo, according to a translation received by The Long War Journal of an article posted Waaga Cusub, a website operated by the Hawiye clan,...

U.S. war planes killed an Islamist rebel said to be al Qaeda's leader in Somalia and at least a dozen other people on Thursday in Washington's biggest blow against an insurgency raging since 2007. The rebels said Aden Hashi Ayro -- who led al Shabaab militants blamed for attacks on government troops and their Ethiopian allies -- died in the first major success for a string of U.S. air-strikes on Somali insurgents in the last year. "Infidel planes bombed Dusamareb," Shabaab spokesman Mukhtar Ali Robow told Reuters by phone, referring to a town in central Somalia, where body parts lay...