Drones Turn Al Qaeda Killers On Each Other

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.

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“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.

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