U.S. airstrikes on the terror group are sowing paranoia within the terror group’s ranks about who among them may spying for the Americans, intelligence officials and terrorism analysts say.
Jihadist social media accounts on Wednesday claimed that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror group’s Yemen division, had executed an alleged spy. Humam al-Hamid was blamed for the drone strike last week that killed AQAP’s top man. The claims that Hamid had tipped off the Americans to the leader’s location couldn’t be independently verified. But U.S. intelligence officials are aware of the allegations and say it shows how attacks on AQAP—which have increased in the last two months—are having a secondary effect: fomenting distrust inside the terror outfit.
“Reports of AQAP’s execution of purported spies suggests unease among the group amid high-profile losses,” a U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. From the American perspective, that’s a good thing, because it throws the group off balance and makes it harder to plan attacks.
“Such distrust is often difficult to overcome and can create friction at a critical time,” the U.S. official said.
U.S. intelligence officials have long said that AQAP poses the greatest threat to the United States because the group has built bombs that can be placed on airplanes without alerting security systems.
For several weeks now, terrorism analysts have been tracking jihadist suspicions, mainly expressed through social media, that AQAP had been penetrated by spies. These agents, the jihadists fretted, were tipping off the Americans and their allies to the locations of key figures, including the group’s spokesman, who was killed in a drone strike in April.
“Heightened fears of infiltration make AQAP and other groups enforce stricter security protocols, which can slow down their command and control apparatus,” Thomas Joscelyn, the the editor of the Long War Journal, which tracks the group’s inner workings and politics, told The Daily Beast. “In addition, it raises the possibility that they will suspect innocent members of spying, which can decrease morale.”
In a post Thursday, Joscelyn noted that AQAP has a history of executing accused spies, including last year, when the group killed four men whom it believed had implanted electronic tracking devices in vehicles that were later hit by U.S. drones.
Two for the price of one. In the future, whenever we kill some terrorist scumbag, find another guy whose bank account we know about and deposit $1,000,000 in it. Then watch the fun.
When you attract ”fighters” from all over the world, you automatically have the potential for a spy in your midst.
That’s partly why ISIS only uses its American and European fighters as cannon fodder, suicide missions and other expendable positions.
AQAP accepts ex-Taliban then has to execute them for applying a Taliban version of Sharia instead of an AQ style of Sharia.
But AQAP puts such men in positions where they are IN CHARGE of an area’s Sharia thus giving them a chance to prove loyal or not.
Sharia, in general, allows for such execution of ”apostates,” from Sharia.
So, these executions are no different from the burned alive Jordanian pilot, who was accused of that exact same crime.
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