December 19, 2013 | Quote
US Adds al Qaeda-Linked Lebanon Militant Leader to Global Terrorist List
The State Department named a key leader of a Lebanon-based militant group with ties to al Qaeda factions in Syria as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on Tuesday, shedding fresh light on evidence that Islamic extremists operating in Syria may be eager to expand their operations regionally.
Usamah Amin al-Shihabi was recently “appointed head of Syria-based al-Nusrah Front’s Palestinian wing in Lebanon,” according the State Department, which noted in a statement that “al-Nusrah Front was formed by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in late 2011 as a proxy for AQI’s activities in Syria.”
The department said that al-Shihabi has previously been an associate, and at times key leader, of Fatah al-Islam, a Lebanon-based “militant group formed in 2006, whose ultimate goal is the institution of Islamist sharia law in the Palestinian refugee camps and the destruction of Israel.”
That the group has close ties to the al-Nusrah Front should not come as a surprise, according to Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow focusing on al Qaeda and North Africa at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Members of Fatah al-Islam, which is linked to al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq, have been killed while fighting in Iraq and Syria,” Mr. Joscelyn wrote Tuesday in The Long War Journal, a project promoted by the foundation. “Some of Fatah al-Islam’s earliest leaders are known to have been close to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the deceased head of al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Mr. Joscelyn also points to “leaked State Department cables” alleging that al Shihabi had been accused by Jordanian authorities in 2006 of “training a group of men who ‘plotted to attack American citizens, nightclubs, liquor shops, and hotels in Amman and Aqaba.”
The plot was foiled, however, after four members of the cell were arrested in September 2005, Mr. Joscelyn wrote.