Al-Qaida appoints bin Laden successor
The Arab satellite channel said Saif al-Adel was named interim leader and Mustafa al-Yemeni, whose surname hints he is from Yemen, would direct operations.
The channel is seen as having good contacts with militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was the main conduit for bin Laden to release messages to the media.
“I think it’s more for show than anything else. It is to illustrate to the world that they have a temporary leader,” Dubai-based security analyst Theodore Karasik said of the appointment.
“Adel clearly has operational experience but he does not have the intellectual or charismatic side that bin Laden had.”
United States special forces killed bin Laden in his hideout outside the capital of Pakistan earlier this month, almost 10 years after the September 11 attacks that killed around 3,000 people in the US.
US prosecutors say Adel is one of al-Qaida’s leading military commanders and helped plan the bomb attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
They also say he set up al-Qaida training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.
But reports suggest Adel viewed the September 11 attacks as a mistake and criticised bin Laden over them.
Mustafa Alani, a political analyst based in Dubai, said he doubted Adel had taken on a temporary leadership role, citing past disputes between Adel and the charismatic Saudi leader.
“This man was an opponent of bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. He criticised bin Laden personally, describing him as a dictator who took decisions without referring to his colleagues,” he said.
Alani also said bin Laden was a symbolic leader who did not need to be replaced.
“I am questioning the credibility of the need to replace him,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is not a leader, he’s an ideologist. The idea of replacing bin Laden as a manager — it doesn’t work this way.”
Adel was believed to have fled to Iran after the US invasion of Afghanistan following the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and was subsequently held under a form of house arrest there, according to some reports.
Arab media reports said Iranian authorities released him from custody a year ago, after which he moved back to the Afghanistan- Pakistan border region. Some analysts say Adel may have returned to Iran or Afghanistan in recent weeks.
Noman Benotman, a former bin Laden associate who is now an analyst with Britain’s Quilliam Foundation think-tank, said Adel was already a kind of “chief of staff” who took on the role to assuage concerns by al-Qaida activists about the group’s future.
“This role he has assumed is not as overall leader, but he is in charge in operational and military terms,” he said, adding that Adel was on good terms with Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida’s number two figure.
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