U.S. Strikes Al Qaeda In Syria, Pakistan

By James Gordon Meek

After a Sunday broad daylight strike inside Syria, questions remain about the special operations mission’s success. As we reported in today’s New york Daily News, the operation a few miles inside Syria’s border from neighboring Iraq resulted in the killing of Abu Ghadiyah, an Al Qaeda in Iraq senior facilitator from a well-known family of smugglers in Iraq’s Al Anbar province.

Wire service reports also suggest the American operators may have snatched two individuals after killing Ghadiyah and seven others in a farmhouse and adjacent tent near a Syrian village. But it’s still unclear who the prisoners are - or their significance to AQI, if any.

“Ghadiyah was one of the leading - if not the leading and most prominent - facilitators moving foreign fighters across the border” from Syria to Iraq, a U.S. intelligence official told me yesterday. “The removal of this individual would be a plus.”

Iraqi-born security scholar Nimrod Raphaeli told me that Syria’s internal security service, the Mukhabarat, is complicit in ensuring the border remains porous for AQI. “No one enters Iraq across the border without the Mukhabarat knowing about it,” Raphaeli says.

Syria’s protests over the U.S. incursion “just aren’t credible,” he adds.

The operation likely was carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, intelligence officials said, whose elite counterterror commandos are drawn from the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEALs’ Development Group.

As I recently blogged, the SEALs’ “DEVGRU” lost three members somewhere in Afghanistan between August 30 and September 11. A fascinating, detailed and clearly well-sourced report in Air Force Times last month explained that a CIA-led offensive inside Pakistan’s tribal areas targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership - namely Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj - has been partly curtailed after diplomatic backlash stemming from a September JSOC cross-border raid.

While almost 20 missile attacks by unmanned drones have occurred in Waziristan since August, ground incursions were largely halted after Pakistan threatened to shoot down American choppers. Intelligence officials say there has been little blowback from the missile strikes, however, since the targets have been foreign Arabs and Afghan Taliban.

No bigshot leaders have been killed in the ongoing airstrikes, but one U.S. official said: “If you’re a soldier on the ground in Afghanistan, the mid-level insurgent leader we killed in a missile strike in Waziristan is a real big deal to you.”

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