"One-Eyed" "Mr. Marlboro" missed by US in Libya?

[anatta]

prior reportage: 15 June 2015 he was (is?) a major long time player for AQ

Mr. Marlboro - Mokhtar Belmokhtar: Top Islamist 'killed' in US strike


◾]Known as "the One-Eyed", as he often wore an eye patch, also as "Mr Marlboro", as he used cigarette smuggling to finance his jihad
◾Fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s
◾A former leading figure in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), but left after falling out with its leaders
◾Went on to lead the Islamist militia group al-Murabitoun, which has attacked local and international forces in Mali



++

Officials at Joint Special Operations Command had found the uncatchable man — they were sure of it.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the legendary Algerian militant, had eluded capture across North Africa and the Sahel for a dozen years, defying reports of his death to continue his campaign of kidnappings and guerrilla attacks. The United States and its allies had missed him before.

But in June of last year, JSOC, the secretive military outfit tasked with hunting al-Qaeda, believed they had Belmokhtar in its sights as he made his way to a dusty farm outside of Ajdabiya, in eastern Libya, where a group of militants assembled for a meeting.

American officials had been on high alert for several days. Belmokhtar and his associates were famously disciplined in avoiding electronic communications and cloaking their movements, but someone had slipped up. When two American F-15 jets screamed across the sky and unleashed several 500-pound bombs, they demolished the farmhouse, killing at least five militants.

But eight months later, U.S. military and intelligence agencies remain unsure whether Belmokhtar was indeed killed in the operation. The internal debate that followed the strike illustrates the challenges inherent to targeted attacks in places where the United States has little military presence, such as Libya, Syria, Yemen or Pakistan.

We’ve been after this guy for a long time’

The June 14 strike was the culmination of a years-long international effort against Belmokhtar, also known as Mister Marlboro, the ‘Uncatchable’ and ‘One-Eyed’ for the disfigurement he suffered to his face handling weapons as a young man.

A native of Algeria, Belmokhtar trained in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and fought with an Islamist group in Algeria’s decade-long civil war before joining another group that became known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

He financed his militant activity by snatching and ransoming foreigners, including the kidnapping of two Westerners working for the United Nations, and was known for his prolific smuggling of cigarettes and other goods across the porous borders of North Africa and the Sahel. He gained local support by marrying into local tribes.

Charismatic, ambitious figure, the 43-year-old Belmokthar clashed with others in the African al-Qaeda outfit and twice helped form new splinter brigades, known as al-Mulathameen and, more recently, al-Murabitoun.

African allies had tried — and failed — to capture him. In 2013, the government in Chad announced his death in an operation in Mali, but he later resurfaced alive. There were other false reports of this death.

“We’ve been after this guy for a long time,” the former senior U.S. official said. “There were moments where we knew where he was, or thought we knew, but couldn’t get the bureaucracy together to act or to support allies” quickly enough.

According to a former Pentagon official, U.S. military leaders for years resisted going after Belmokhtar, who they then saw as a peripheral threat, as they struggled to manage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given his stature, intelligence officials thought Belmokhtar would be harder to replace than militants from groups with a deeper bench, such as the Islamic State. It made him an attractive target.

In 2003, the U.S. government considered trying to kill Belmokhtar from the air in northern Mali, but concerns about the political backlash stopped that attack.

A decade later, militants under his command laid siege to a gas plant in Algeria, killing three Americans. that prompted U.S. prosecutors to bring charges against Belmokhtar in a federal court in New York.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...mepage%2Fstory

[anatta]

FBI agents and prosecutors in New York had hoped to charge him prior to the refinery attack, but the criminal complaint sat at the Justice Department awaiting approval for years before he was finally indicted.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Belmokhtar “continued to push the envelope of jihadi activity in the Sahara and North Africa,” including pioneering the use of ransom and large-scale coordinated attacks in that area, said Geoff Porter, president of North Africa Risk Consulting.

A charismatic, ambitious figure, the 43-year-old Belmokthar clashed with others in the African al-Qaeda outfit and twice helped form new splinter brigades, known as al-Mulathameen and, more recently, al-Murabitoun.

African allies had tried — and failed — to capture him. In 2013, the government in Chad announced his death in an operation in Mali, but he later resurfaced alive. There were other false reports of this death.

“We’ve been after this guy for a long time,” the former senior U.S. official said. “There were moments where we knew where he was, or thought we knew, but couldn’t get the bureaucracy together to act or to support allies” quickly enough.

According to a former Pentagon official, U.S. military leaders for years resisted going after Belmokhtar, who they then saw as a peripheral threat, as they struggled to manage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before the June strike, U.S. officials said, they had been tracking Belmokhtar on and off for several years, including in southwest Libya. In that hunt, the United States worked closely with France, drawing on its historic military and intelligence presence in that region.

Before the June strike, U.S. officials said, they had been tracking Belmokhtar on and off for several years, including in southwest Libya. In that hunt, the United States worked closely with France, drawing on its historic military and intelligence presence in that region.

“We are very, very careful about doing these properly,” a Defense official said. “There’s no appetite to make a tactical gain to risk a strategic loss.”

Officials thought that the others at the Ajdabiya meeting that June night — fewer than 10 — were militants and legitimate targets. The strike went ahead.

As soon as the American fighter jets dropped their lethal cargo, the scramble began to determine the operation’s outcome.

[How the United States hunts militant targets overseas]

U.S. officials say that, ideally, they would use DNA analysis retrieved from an attack site to establish a militant’s identity, as they did following the raid that killed al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

In most cases, though, their “battlefield damage assessment” is done using intelligence means. To get to jackpot, officials require multiple, high-confidence sources. It is uncertain work: Officials sort through clues relayed in private communications and public statements by militant groups, trying to slice through misinformation.

In such cases, a senior defense official said, the bureaucracy is “trying to balance across all the evidence.”

Usually, a definitive conclusion can be reached quickly. In November, after U.S. planes targeted Abu Nabil al-Anbari, the head of the Islamic State’s Libya cell, the Pentagon was able to confirm his death in a matter of weeks. Officials reached a conclusive determination in a similar time frame after a strike in Syria last fall targeting Mohammed Emwazi, the British militant known as “Jihadi John.”

But occasionally, it is more difficult. In 2007, the Pentagon sent a small team of U.S. forces into Somalia to determine whether Aden Ayrow, a senior Somali militant, had been killed in an airstrike; several months later, he was named head of al-Qaeda operations and called for foreigners to be slain. Another operation killed him the following year.

In 2009, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan was thought to have killed Saad bin Laden, the al-Qaeda’s founder’s son, but it took intercepted family communication to confirm it.

“

If we don’t get [confirmation] right away it becomes very hard,” another defense official said. “And it becomes harder with time.”

Jaffer, of the ACLU, said that was even more true with so-called signature strikes, in which officials authorize attacks based on patterns suggesting militant activity rather than information about a specific suspect.

In those cases, “they don’t know the identities before, and they don’t know the identities after,” he said.

The human cost of erroneous targeting is high. In 2014, the United States paid over $1 million in compensation to families of a wedding party killed in an errant strike in Yemen.

The difficulty of confirming outcomes in many places may be one reason why U.S. officials have sometimes opted for Special Operations raids instead of drone strikes.

‘He’s a wily character’

After the strike in Ajdabiya, officials were encouraged when they learned that at least one of Belmokhtar’s wives, a woman who had recently given birth to his youngest child, had returned home to her family. Even more tantalizing, an individual close to Belmokhtar called people to attend a gathering mourning his death.

In October, an Algerian TV channel carried a message from an al-Qaeda spokesman that implied Belmokhtar was dead.

Based in part on those clues, officials at the State Department and FBI felt confident that Belmokhtar had been killed. Early this year, the State Department went as far as to quietly remove him from its “most wanted” list; the FBI followed suit.

Equally confident were officials at JSOC, who were satisfied that they had been built an accurate case for the strike in the first place.

In the days following the strike, a Pentagon spokesman told news organizations that initial reporting suggested the Algerian was dead.

[In Libya, Islamic State’s black flag rises on the Mediterranean]

For those officials, the fact that Belmokhtar’s body had not been recovered was unsurprising, given the size of the bombs dropped on the desert compound. Some officials thought Belmokhtar may have survived the initial attack but died later of his wounds.

“When we get to 100 percent, we’ll make a 100 percent-level statement,” the senior defense official said.

But at the U.S. Africa Command, the regional command in charge of Libya, some officers were less sure. Officials there knew they would be held accountable if there was a hasty declaration and Belmokhtar resurfaced. They wanted to hold off, and requested more analysis from intelligence agencies.

Both AFRICOM, U.S. Special Operations Command — which oversees JSOC — and the CIA declined to comment on the operation.

There were reasons to doubt that Belmokhtar was killed. According to local reports, at least five wounded people were pulled from the rubble and taken to a local hospital. Another three were found dead.

Ansar al-Sharia, a local Islamist group, released the names of seven of its militants whom it said were killed, but Belmokhtar was not among them. Several other groups denied that Belmokhtar had been killed; AQIM said he was “alive and well.”

Ibrahim Jathran, an influential militia leader in Ajdabiya, said the wounded, known to authorities, were mostly locals and perhaps one Tunisian. “We wish Belmokhtar had been killed, but there’s no proof this was the case,” Jathran said in an interview last fall.

Rudolph Atallah, a former Africa counterterrorism director at the Pentagon, said another reason for skepticism was the fact that the strike was not followed by statements from Belmokhtar’s followers celebrating his death.

“That’s their ultimate graduation,” he said. “Martyrdom is important to these people — it’s what they live for.”

As time went on, there were other reasons to doubt. Later last summer, al-Murabitoun released a statement saying Belmokhtar had been selected as the leader of the latest iteration of its jihadist group. Such reports have fueled increasing doubt about the operation’s outcome for many U.S. intelligence officials.

In November, after militants killed at least 20 people at a Mali hotel in what appeared to be a joint operation by al-Murabitoun, AQIM and another militant group, France’s defense minister said Beltmokhtar was thought to be alive and was probably behind the bloody assault.

In mid-January, militants associated with al-Murabitoun launched an attack on a hotel and cafe in Burkina Faso.

For now, American officials continue to watch for definitive signs he is dead — or alive.

"There is room for error, and he’s a wily character,” one U.S. official said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he popped back up.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...mepage%2Fstory

[anatta]

Despite the growing threat from the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Libya, the Obama administration has turned down a U.S. military plan an assault on ISIS’ regional hub there, three defense officials told The Daily Beast.

In recent weeks, the U.S. military—led by its Africa and Special Operations Commands— have pushed for more airstrikes and the deployment of elite troops, particularly in the city of Sirte. The hometown of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s, the city now under ISIS control and serving as a regional epicenter for the terror group.

The airstrikes would target ISIS resources while a small band of Special Operations Forces would train Libyans to eventually be members of a national army, the officials said.


Weeks ago, defense officials told the New York Times that they were crafting military plans for such strikes, but needed more time to develop intelligence so that they could launch a sustained air campaign on ISIS in Sirte. But those plans have since been put on the back burner.


“There is little to no appetite for that in this administration,” one defense official explained.

Instead, the U.S. will continue to do occasional strikes that target high value leaders, like the November drone strike that killed Abu Nabil al-Anbari, the then-leader of ISIS in Libya.

There’s nothing close to happening in terms of a major military operation. It will continue to be strikes like the kind we saw in November against Abu Nabil,” a second defense official explained to The Daily Beast.


For Europe, Libya is uncomfortably close and already a jumping off point for migrants willing to take on the rough Mediterranean waters in search for asylum. ISIS pronouncements have previously point out that Rome is near.


For the United States, there are major concerns about allowing another ISIS hub to emerge in the region. The Libyan city of Sirte is currently under ISIS control and some believe the terror group seeks to turn Sirte into a center of operations, like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.


Leaders across Europe have hinted that more should be done in Libya but have fallen short on specifics. In an interview with Der Spiegel last month, the German envoy to Libya said: “We simply cannot give up on Libya.”


According to U.S. military figures, there are roughly 5,000 ISIS fighters in Libya, a spike from 1,000 just a few months ago. Defense officials believe that ISIS supporters are moving toward Libya, having found it increasingly difficult to travel to Iraq and Syria.


Perhaps because of that, Sirte, and areas around it, are increasingly falling victim to ISIS’s barbaric practices. And some are urging the international community not to wait until Sirte falls further under ISIS control, and filled with fighters mixed in with civilians.


According to this report, residents there cannot leave the city freely as ISIS fighters – many of them from Egypt, Chad, Niger, and Tunisia – inspect outgoing cars for signs of residents trying to escape. As in Raqqa and Mosul, residents do not have access to cell phone or Internet networks and live under an ISIS judicial system that issues death sentences to those who do not practice the terror group’s brand of Islam.


Moreover, in nearby cities like Ras Lanouf, ISIS is destroying oil installations, cutting off a key potential source of revenue for any newly cobbled unified Libyan government. ISIS has set its sights across the country, from Misrata in the west to Derna in the east.


Some fear the terror group is hunkering down in places like Sirte in preparation for a potential U.S. offensive.


The administration had said that it would not intervene until Libya, which now is governed by two rival governments on opposite sides of the country, had created a single entity to govern the state.


At a press conference Tuesday, during this year’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, President Obama referred to United Nations efforts to help build a government in Libya, suggesting any military effort could create even more political fractures. On Sunday, a member of Libya's Presidential Council announced that a list of 13 ministers and five ministers of state had been sent to Libya’s eastern parliament for approval.


But while the president said the U.S. would go after ISIS “anywhere it appeared,” he stopped short of saying the U.S. would expand its effort in Libya unilaterally.


“We will continue to take actions where we've got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them. At the same time, we're working diligently with the United Nations to try to get a government in place in Libya,” the president said. “And that's been a problem.”



Some military officials believe Obama feels that France and Italy, which both have hinted at intervention, should take the lead on any military effort. Both countries were key to the NATO-led campaign in 2011 that led to Gadhafi’s fall. Still others believe the United States wants to limit its war against the Islamic State to Iraq and Syria.


Since Gadhafi’s death in October 2011, the state has become especially susceptible to outside extremists. With no traditional of an independently strong state military, militias have served as security forces and now are unwilling to disarm.


With no stable government or security forces, parts of Libya have become vulnerable to groups like ISIS looking for territory to set up a self-described caliphate.
As many as 435,000 of the country’s 6 million are internally displaced, according a recent U.N. report. An estimated 1.9 million require some kind of humanitarian aid. And as of August, 250,00 migrants had entered, turning Libya into a key hub for those seeking to enter Europe.


Tuesday marked the five-year anniversary of Libya’s Arab Spring. It’s now considered a bittersweet day, rather than the beginning of a democratic movement the protests launched that day once promised.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...n-capital.html

it's a fine time to be reticent about bomb ing Libya, now that the 2011 war created the fractured terrorist state that exists now
^my comments

[evince]

what crap

[anatta]

what crap

ISIS in Libya?

[anatta]

WAPO editorial
The principal reason for delay cited by administration officials is a wish to forge a new government in Libya prior to any military intervention. A U.N. mediator has been trying to coax the rival governments in the west and east to endorse a “unity” cabinet, which would then seek to patch together a national army to take on the jihadists. Western governments have discussed plans for a force, perhaps led by Italy, to protect the new regime, while trainers work with the army. Sirte, meanwhile, could be targeted with airstrikes.

The problem has been resistance to the new government from both sides — and in particular from supporters of Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a polarizing would-be strongman who commands forces in the east and has the backing of the repressive ruler of Egypt, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. The general’s exclusion from the cabinet caused the eastern parliament to vote it down last month, though another vote is expected in the coming days. While approval would be a step toward re-creating the Libyan state, the process will necessarily be a long one at best. In the meantime, Islamic State forces are building up.


Ultimately, a Libyan political solution should not be a prerequisite for action against the terrorist threat. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama acknowledged the problems in forming a government and added that “as we see opportunities to prevent [the Islamic State] from digging in in Libya, we [will] take them.” Those opportunities exist now: The United States and its allies could conduct airstrikes against Sirte and help a Libyan protection force that has been trying to guard oil facilities. Mr. Obama has tried waiting on the sidelines in Iraq and Syria. He should not make the same mistake in Libya.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...mepage%2Fstory

[anatta]

^ serious crunch ( decision time). The chances for a successful "unitary gov't" in Libya are remote with the 2 governments vying for national power -
but also the various militias. some allied, but many Islamic ( Shura councils) - or localized in geopgraphy.
But think of Syria with a bunch of "rebel forces" with a civil war going on.

We do bomb ISIS there. Why not do it in Sirte at least?
Because it would be a new escalation, and it would be western intervention ( again) - but not like the 2011 Libya civil war
where we decided to take sides in the war (GAdaffi must go)

In short any small benefits of 'neutrality' in the Libyan civil war, is far outweighed by going after ISIS.
The west/NATO created this mess in Libya -we should at least go after real terrorists, after screwing up the country beyond recognition

Libyan Civil War 2014 - Present

^ please visit my blog, for browsing or study -lots of photos too!

[anatta]

U.S. airstrikes target suspected Islamic State base in Libya
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...mepage%2Fstory

U.S. airstrikes Friday hit a suspected Islamic State training camp in Libya, leaving at least 40 dead — possibly including a senior leader — in an attack that followed Western calls for stepped-up pressures against militant strongholds in North Africa.

The Pentagon press secretary, Peter Cook, said a key target was a senior Tunisian militant linked to deadly commando-style attacks last year in his homeland.

Earlier, a U.S. defense official said the militant, Noureddine Chouchane, was “likely killed” in Friday’s airstrikes. But Cook said full details were being assessed. Authorities in Libya and Tunisia said at least 40 people were killed, but had no immediate reports on Chouchane.

It was the first major U.S. air raid in Libya since November and followed increased alarms by Western leaders about a widening Islamic State presence there, which could open new oil-linked funding sources and give militants footholds along migrant routes to southern Europe.

The airstrikes destroyed a large farmhouse outside Sabratha, a city in western Libya near the Tunisia border, where suspected militant fighters had gathered to hear a religious leader, said Jamal Naji Zubia, the head of the foreign news media office in Tripoli, in a telephone interview.

A key target in the attack was Chouchane, also known as Sabir, an Islamic State operative who was believed to be a key plotter in at least one of two Tunisian attacks against popular tourist sites.

Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, described Chouchane as an “experienced facilitator” involved in recruitment, planning and attempts by the Islamic State to establish more bases in Libya.
Zubia — who described the Friday airstrikes as an “accurate hit” — said most of the victims were Tunisian, but at least one was Jordanian.

“They are believed to be from Daesh,” said Zubia, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “They had gathered at the house to hear a speech from one of their Tunisian imams

.”

Sabratha Mayor Hussein Dawadi told Libya TV that the site was occupied by suspected Islamic State fighters, including some who had only recently arrived.

The news website Libya Herald, citing hospital officials, said at least 41 bodies were found. The report added that the injured were all Arabs from a variety of countries, but none were Libyan.

In Tunisia, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Noufal el-Obaidi placed the death toll at 40 — a mix of Tunisians and Algerians — and said six Tunisians were injured, the state-run TAP news agency reported. None of the reports carried any immediate word on Chouchane.

Last year’s attacks appeared aimed at crippling the vital tourism industry in Tunisia, a popular spot for Europeans and others. In March, gunmen killed 22 people at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis. In June, attackers stormed a beach in the resort of Sousse, killing 38 people.

In recent months, the group has strengthened its presence in Sabratha, a port city whose proximity to the Tunisian border made it a way station for smugglers and militants moving between the two countries.

The Libyan militant group Ansar al-Sharia had previously established a base in Sabratha, where the United Nations declared ancient Roman ruins a world heritage site in 1982.

In other Libyan cities, fighters for Ansar al-Sharia have been mostly absorbed into the ranks of the Islamic State. Tunisian jihadists make up one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters among Syrian rebel groups and Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, according to researchers.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS, had previously secured a foothold in Sirte — the home town of former Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi — in the country’s east. But its fighters have also been known to operate in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

On Wednesday, Obama said the United States and allies were focused on strategies to “make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them.”

“With respect to Libya,” he told reporters at the end of a summit with Southeast Asian leaders in California, “I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al-Qaeda wherever they appeared.”

As everybody here knows, that country has resources,” Kerry said at a conference of 23 foreign ministers in Rome. “The last thing in the world you’d want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars in oil revenue.”

Islamist group is expanding its presence in Libya, as fighters pushed out of Iraq and Syria relocate there and are joined by others new to the battle



Overview of ancient Sabratha, with some of the buildings of modern Sabratha in the background

[anatta]

OK. no more bumping this thread. I was going to let it die -but I thought US airstrikes in Libya was worth posting..

see my blog if you want to keep upto date with Libya --> Libyan Civil War 2014 - Present