Excellent piece by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball at Newsweek. U.S. intelligence officials appear to have obtained access to what could turn out to be a significant trove of phone numbers, photographs and documents detailing the links between Al Qaeda’s leaders in northwest Pakistan and the terror group’s increasingly menacing affiliate in Yemen, two counter-terrorism sources tell Declassified.
In late January, an Al Qaeda operative headed from Pakistan on his way to Yemen was arrested in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, a U.S. counter-terrorism official confirmed.
There has been no public announcement of the arrest. But in a possible indication of the operative’s importance, just a few days later, two postings on a jihadi web forum suggested that Al Qaeda leaders were worried and wanted their “commanders” to take immediate precautions.The postings stated that the “captured brother” — identified as a “field commander” named Abdullah Saleh al-Eidan who went by the name of “Barud”- – was “on his way back from Afghanistan” and had been turned over to Saudi authorities.
