Intelligence officials reportedly confirm al Qaeda's second-in-command killed in Iran

Intelligence officials have confirmed that Israeli operatives, at the behest of the United States, assassinated Abu Muhammad al-Masri, al Qaeda's second-highest leader, in Iran in August, The New York Times reports.

Al Qaeda has not announced al-Masri's death, and Iran, which considers al Qaeda a bitter enemy, denies the claims he was killed in Tehran, warning media outlets not to fall for the "Hollywood script." It's unclear why Iran would have been harboring al-Masri, but the Times reports some terrorism experts have suggested keeping al Qaeda leaders in the country would provide some insurance that the group would not conduct operations within its borders, while American counterterrorism officials have theorized Iran may have allowed them to stay to carry out operations against the U.S, a common adversary. Regardless, the Shiite Muslim nation has been "willing to overlook the Sunni-Shia divide" before "when it suits Iranian interests," Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Center, told the Times.

Per the Times, al-Masri was driving his car with his 27-year-old daughter and Hamza bin Laden's widow, Miriam, when two gunmen drew up beside him on a motorcycle and fired five shots. At the time, Iran identified the victims as Habib Daoud, a Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese history professor, and his daughter, Maryam, but intelligence officials told the Times those were aliases provided by the Iranian government, and an education researcher with access to lists of all history professors in Iran told the Times there was no record of anyone by that name. One of al Qaeda's founding members, al-Masri was a mastermind behind the 1998 attacks on American embassies in multiple African countries and considered the likely successor to the groups's current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri; experts believe his death, if true, "further cuts links between old-school al Qaeda and the modern Jihad." Read more at The New York Times and Al Jazeera.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up