The United States and the Policy of Targeted Killing

United States policy on targeted killings in the war on terror made headlines with the May 2011 raid by the Navy SEALs in the heart of Pakistan that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. The SEALs were previously involved in commando actions of this type against other senior al-Qaeda figures. In September 2009, a SEALs team killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an al-Qaeda commander in Somalia, in a land operation that was carried out in Somalia. Nabhan was the partner of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who was killed two weeks ago by Somali security forces.

Fazul was sought by the United States for his involvement in the 1998 al-Qaeda suicide attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as the operational chief on the ground, and for his involvement as a commander, alongside Nabhan, in the coordinated al-Qaeda terror attack in Kenya in 2002. This attack included the attempted use of an anti-aircraft missile to shoot down an Arkia passenger plane departing from Kenya to Israel, at the same time that a suicide attack, which killed fifteen people, including three Israelis, was underway in the Mombasa Paradise Hotel. Another important object of US targeted killings was Ilyas Kashmiri, who was killed in early June in an aerial operation. Kashmiri was also in al-Qaeda’s external branch unit and was a senior operational commander in a Pakistani jihad organization. His name was tied to fatal terrorist attacks executed and planned in India, Pakistan, and Europe. CONTINUE READING