The United Nations this week recognized a brand new de facto chief of the terrorist group Al-Qaida, a former Egyptian particular forces officer and shut affiliate of Osama bin Laden with a $10 million bounty on his head.
A Monday report named Seif al-Adel, a high-ranking Al-Qaida official, because the working and uncontested chief of the group, as acknowledged by members of the United Nations.
In late July, a U.S. drone strike ordered by President Biden struck and killed Al-Qaida’s former chief, Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri, in Afghanistan. However his dying was not acknowledged by the group.
Al-Qaida has not formally named a successor to al-Zawahiri and al-Adel just isn’t formally acknowledged because the chief, based on the UN.
“Most judged a key issue to be the continued presence of [al-Adel] within the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the UN report reads. “This raised tough theological and operational questions for Al-Qaida.”
The FBI has placed a $10 million bounty on al-Adel, who is needed for the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 224 residents and injured 1000’s of others.
Based on publicly identified info, al-Adel is an Egyptian citizen who served within the nation’s military earlier than he grew to become a key navy coach for Al-Qaida within the Nineteen Nineties. He skilled the fighters concerned within the ambush of U.S. helicopters and troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, which grew to become the premise for the favored e book and film “Black Hawk Down.”
He additionally helped prepare among the hijackers concerned within the lethal 9/11 assaults on the Twin Towers in New York.
In 2003, Iranian authorities positioned al-Adel on home arrest, however he was launched from custody in 2015 throughout an trade for an Iranian diplomat captured by Al-Qaida.
The U.S. government says al-Adel was additionally key to the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).