The United States has killed the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), President Donald Trump said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Qasim al-Raymi, who has led the jihadist group since 2015, was killed in a US operation in Yemen, the White House said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The jihadist leader had been linked to a series of attacks on Western interests in the 2000s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He took over the leadership after his predecessor was killed by a US drone strike. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
AQAP was formed in 2009 from two regional offshoots of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, with the goal of toppling US-backed governments and eliminating all Western influence in the region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rumours of Raymi’s death began circulating in late January. In \nresponse, AQAP released an audio message with Raymi’s voice on 2 \nFebruary in which he said AQAP was behind a deadly shooting at a US naval base in Pensacola, Florida<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shooting took place in December, and the message may have been recorded earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The statement from the White House confirmed Raymi’s death but it did not say when he was killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “His death further degrades AQAP and the global al-Qaeda movement, and it brings us closer to eliminating the threats these groups pose to our national security,” the statement read. Yemeni fighters loyal to the government close in on a suspected location of AQAP in 2018 <\/p>\n\n\n\n “The United States, our interests, and our allies are safer as a result of his death.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raymi\n was a trainer at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in the 1990s . He \ntravelled to Yemen in 2004, where he was imprisoned for five years in \nconnection with a plot to attack five foreign embassies in the capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is believed to have overseen the formation of al-Qaeda in Yemen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n US officials once described AQAP as “the most active operational franchise” of al-Qaeda beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most\n of its attacks have been in Yemen, where it has taken advantage of \npolitical instability that has plagued the country for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It \nis thought to have been behind a large number of attacks in Yemen and \nSaudi Arabia, in which hundreds of people have have been killed, as well\n as a series of sophisticated airline bomb plots targeting the US that \nwere narrowly foiled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The United States has killed the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), President Donald Trump said. Qasim al-Raymi, who has led the jihadist group since 2015, was killed in a US operation in Yemen, the White House said. The jihadist leader had been linked to a series of attacks on Western interests in the 2000s. He took over… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4021,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4020\/revisions\/4021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}