Mohammed Atef, apparently killed by air raid; he was bin Laden's son's father-in-law. Was killed a few days ago. Pentagon is saying not yet confirmed, just hearing intelligence.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001

Answers

Apparetly Atef is the head of military stuff. I had thought there was some doctor OBL considered his No. 2 (sort of like Rasputin), but I think that must be someone else.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001

http://www.boston.com/news/daily/16/attacks_atef.htm

U.S. official says credible evidence that top bin Laden aide killed by airstrike

By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press, 11/16/01

WASHINGTON -- Mohammed Atef, a top deputy of Osama bin Laden accused of helping plan the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, is believed to have been killed by a U.S. airstrike in the last two days, U.S. officials said Friday.

"This guy was bin Laden's military specialist since the early 1990s, widely thought to be bin Laden's successor in the event of his death," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The airstrike took place near Kabul, the Afghan capital, said the official, who added U.S. intelligence has credible evidence Atef was killed. But another official said Atef's body has not been located.

Atef, an Egyptian, has been indicted for involvement in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998.

The death of bin Laden's operational planner is expected to hurt the ability of the al-Qaida network to launch terrorist attacks. The group's members are being pursued in Afghanistan by U.S. special forces and rebels opposed to the Taliban regime.

Earlier this year, Atef's daughter married bin Laden's son. TV footage of the wedding was broadcast on an Arab satellite station in January.

The focus of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has shifted more toward tracking down bin Laden and al-Qaida leaders, who are thought to be hiding in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban still retain some control. Along with spiritual adviser Ayman al-Zawahiri, Atef was said to be one of bin Laden's top two lieutenants.

Pentagon officials have said some senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders have been killed in recent days, but have offered no names.

"We are tightening the noose," Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. forces in the region, said Thursday at the Pentagon.

The State Department was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of Atef.

In October 1999, the FBI charged Atef and other al-Qaida members in a conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals. The indictment pointed to the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as being part of the conspiracy.

Atef, who is also known as Sobhi al-Sitta and Abu Hafs el-Masry, is believed to be a former Egyptian police officer. His affiliation with bin Laden dates back to the early 1980s, when he helped bin Laden recruit fighters for the Afghan war with the Soviet Union.

He later helped establish al-Qaida and took charge of its security. He was principally responsible for operational planning and terrorist training for al-Qaida members.

The British government says Atef traveled to Somalia several times in 1992 and 1993 to organize violence against U.S. and U.N. troops then stationed in that African nation. On each occasion he reported back to bin Laden, who was based at the time in Khartoum, Sudan.

Atef was the commander of the military wing of the International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusades, which was formed by the 1998 merger of bin Laden's al-Qaida group with Islamic Jihad of Egypt, and two Pakistani militant groups and a Bangladeshi unit.

The military wing, known as the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Sites, claimed responsibility for the 1998 embassy bombings.

Last month, the London-based Islamic Observation Center, which acts as a public relations contact for Islamic fundamentalist groups, quoted Atef as saying U.S. troops would suffer the same fate in Afghanistan as they did in Somalia, where bodies of slain U.S. soldiers were dragged through the streets in 1993.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001

Yes, I thought that Egyptian doc was No. 2 also. But the report said this guy was 2 or 3, so that still leaves the doc near the top.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001

NRO

by Rich Lowry

Good and Martyred

Reports say we may have killed Mohammed Atef, a top bin Laden lieutenant.

November 16, 2001 4:20 p.m. eports say we may have killed Mohammed Atef, a top bin Laden lieutenant.

This is one of those moments when history seems to come together, when two warring sides achieve a strange confluence of interests across all that separates them. To wit: bin Laden and his associates, on the one hand, constantly say how they are willing to be killed for their cause, and we, on the other, are willing to kill them for their cause.

Isn't that kind of nice? It's a real "We Are the World" kind of moment.

There should be, if we take their words seriously, great rejoicing in the bin Laden camp at the excellent martyrdom of Atef. We don't know what kind of bomb he was dispatched with, but we do know that he did a spectacular job of being dispatched. Congratulations, Mr. Atef, and may your splendid example be followed by your colleagues very soon!

It would be easier to take seriously the bin Ladenites' call to martyrdom, of course, if they would just stand still and let themselves be martyred, instead of running into the hills like nothing is so important to them as avoiding a few 1,000-pounds dropped from a B-52. But why should such a corrupt excrescence of Western culture, such a banal and "cowardly" weapon, faze these fearsome warriors?

The debate over the bravery or cowardice of the suicide hijackers always seemed a no-brainer: It is not a courageous act to sneak onto an airliner full of unsuspecting people, and slit the throats of women. (See Jonah's excellent column on this point.) But anyone who had illusions about the courage of bin Laden and co. should look at what they do when confronted with a real military: They run and hide, and run some more.

The success of the Afghanistan campaign over the last week is testament to the efficacy of killing your enemies. It was something we had been awfully chary about during most of the 1990s. Even the early part of this campaign seemed to have been stifled by a "gentle war" restraint.

But over the last two weeks or so Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seemed to get steadily more blunt about our aim: to kill the Taliban. He would actually use the word "kill." This was refreshing stuff, since we had almost none of it from the previous administration.

A Nexis search of all of 1999 — when we fought a war in Kosovo — doesn't turn up one instance of Bill Cohen using the word "kill" to refer to what we were doing to the Serbs. That apparently would have been much too impolite.

The few times the word does show up is in statements like this: "We are attacking the military infrastructure that President Milosevic and his forces are using to repress and kill innocent people."

Well, you can't kill military infrastructure, as we learned during the first few weeks of the Afghan war when we tried to impress the Taliban by blowing up their buildings. What gets their attention — what prompts defections, betrayals, and groveling surrender — is the sort of thing that was happened to Mohammed Atef, now apparently good and martyred.

Dowd Footnote Maureen Dowd wrote the other day about how "embarrassed" the U.S. should be by the "savage force" of the Northern Alliance. Before she apologizes for America, however, Dowd should at least read her own newspaper. This is from the New York Times yesterday:

Alberto Cairo, who has worked for the International Red Cross in Afghanistan for 12 years, said the shift in power was the most peaceful he had seen in a country ruined by 22 years of almost continual fighting and fast-shifting alliances among rival clans and warlords.

He said his organization had collected the bodies of 10 Afghan and Pakistani fighters in the capital, but could not say whether they had died in fighting or in reprisals as the Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul on Tuesday.

He praised the general lack of violence and looting in the city and the work so far of the roughly 2,000 alliance policemen and soldiers securing it.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/320/world/Atef_a_key_bin_Laden_lieuten an:.shtml

Atef, a key bin Laden lieutenant, wrote the manual on terror and ran the training camps

By Salah Nasrawi, Associated Press, 11/16/2001 18:15

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) Mohammed Atef, the key lieutenant to Osama bin Laden believed killed in Afghanistan, wrote al-Qaida's terrorism manual and ran the organization's training camps.

Often seen at bin Laden's left or right hand in photographs and video tapes taken in Afghanistan in the last three years, Atef an Egyptian was part of the terrorist leader's Arab command.

Atef, whose real name was Mohammed Sobhi Abu Sitta, also was related to bin Laden by marriage. Atef's daughter wed bin Laden's son in January.

He is suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the downing of a U.S. helicopter in Somalia in 1993.

Intelligence reports accuse him of organizing the mob that dragged the body of one of the dead American servicemen through the streets of Mogadishu which helped persuade Washington to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia.

Atef was born in Minoufia, about 55 miles north of Cairo. His year of birth, while not certain, was believed to have been 1944. According to some accounts he joined the Egyptian police force; others say he served two years of obligatory service in the Egyptian army.

He joined Islamic Jihad, a militant group that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, but is not known to have played a leading role in the underground group.

Atef came to prominence after he moved to Afghanistan in the mid- 1980s when he met Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden's strategist. Al-Zawahri and bin Laden were then fighting alongside Afghan guerrillas against the Soviet occupation forces.

After the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Atef and bin Laden moved to Sudan where they organized al-Qaida cells in Africa, Egyptian security sources believe.

Atef reportedly directed the training of al-Qaida terrorists and also supposedly wrote a 180-page training manual called ''Military Studies in the Holy Struggle against Tyrants.''

In the early 1990s, Atef was sent by bin Laden to Somalia to train Muslim guerrillas who were resisting U.S. troops in the United Nations' Operation Restore Hope.

His name next surfaced in the August 1998 when truck bombs blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within minutes of each other.

Three months later, the FBI accused Atef and other al-Qaida members of instigating the bombing and charged them with conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals.

He was convicted in absentia in Egypt in 1999 on charges of plotting subversion and sentenced to seven years in prison for belonging to an outlawed group, Islamic Jihad, and training its members in exile in the use of explosives.

Days after the U.S began its airstrikes on Afghanistan, Atef warned that U.S. troops would suffer the same fate in Afghanistan as they did in Somalia.

''America will not realize its miscalculations until its soldiers are dragged in Afghanistan like they were in Somalia,'' Atef was quoted as saying by the London-based Islamic Observation Center.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001