New Question About Drone Strike That Killed Missing American

More than three weeks after the White House announced that a U.S. drone strike that killed a high-ranking al Qaeda figure had also taken the lives of two Western hostages, experts are still puzzling over why a senior terrorist was sharing a compound with hostages in the first place.

The answer to that question, which remains unknown, holds significant implications for the prospects of future strikes and hostage-rescue missions.The collocation of a senior al Qaeda figure with the hostages could be a sign, for instance, that the militants are losing basic operational-security skills. That, in turn, could make it easier for the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to target them from the air and the ground. If al Qaeda leaders have taken to using hostages as human shields, on the other hand, the CIA and JSOC will need to take the prospect of accidentally killing a missing Westerner into account as they weigh new strikes against the group.

The hostages — American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto — died Jan. 15 in a drone strike in the South Waziristan agency of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The strike also killed Ahmed Farouq, a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was the deputy emir of al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), a new division of the terrorist group that was established in September 2014 when several separate jihadi groups merged. It claimed credit for the assassination of a Pakistani brigadier general and an attack on a Pakistani naval vessel that month.

First, staying in the same compound as the hostages would put leaders at unnecessary risk if the United States found the hostages and launched a special operations raid to free them. In the cold calculus of the terrorist group, it would be better for lower-ranking militants to be killed in such a strike. Second, in the event that al Qaeda made a deal to trade the hostages for cash or prisoners held by the United States or its allies, the former hostages could alert U.S. intelligence officials to the presence of the senior terrorist leaders in the compound — and potentially help identify them. “If you think you’re going to actually successfully trade this hostage for somebody, the last thing you want is for him to potentially be released and go, ‘Oh yeah, I saw this guy and this guy,’” said a former counterterrorism official from President Barack Obama’s administration.

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Not all experts agreed with this view. “They may have believed that if the Americans were going to strike, they would never strike their own hostages,” he said. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, an al Qaeda expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said, “It makes sense to use hostages basically as human shields.” In other words, he said, al Qaeda might have put the hostages in the same compound as Farouq “precisely because someone of rank was there.”

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