The Pakistani Taliban confirmed today that Qari Muhammad Yasin, a senior al Qaeda military commander, was killed along with three of his “companions” in a US drone strike on Mar. 19. The airstrike was carried out in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province. Yasin was a member of the Punjabi Taliban, which includes jihadists from various other Pakistani terrorist organizations who are aligned with al Qaeda.
Hundreds of Tehrik-e-Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP) militants overran the headquarters of a rival militant faction, Ansar-ul-Islam, in Khyber Agency. Clashes between the two factions have raged since January.
The Taliban website has uploaded a 35-minute-long video depicting a series of attacks against Afghan security forces in the Kamdesh district in Nuristan province.
Al Qaeda has released a biography of Atiyah Abd al Rahman, a senior al Qaeda operative who served as Osama bin Laden’s chief-of-staff. Rahman “engineered” the December 2009 terrorist attack on Combat Outpost Chapman that killed seven CIA officials and a Jordanian intelligence officer.