Drone kills Al Qaida man in Libya

Dawud trained recruits in Libya for operations in the region and provided them with money, arms

AUS military drone strike over the weekend in southern Libya killed a top recruiter and logistics specialist for Al Qaida’s branch in northwest Africa, the Pentagon said Wednesday, and a senior military official warned of more attacks on extremists there.

The military’s Africa Command said in a statement that the attack killed two militants, one of whom was identified as Mousa Abu Dawud, a highranking official in Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM.

Dawud trained Al Qaida recruits in Libya for strike operations in the region, and provided logistics, money and weapons that enabled the group to threaten and attack US and Western interests, the military statement said.

Until now, the Pentagon had focused its counterterrorism strikes in Libya — eight since President Donald Trump took office — almost exclusively on Daesh terrorists and operatives farther north. Over several months in 2016, the military conducted nearly 500 air strikes in the coastal city of Sirte to destroy Daesh’s stronghold there. The missile fired by the US drone on Saturday was the first in southern Libya.

It struck a house in Ubari, 435 miles south of Tripoli, in the country’s southwest, a notorious haven for a deadly mix of Al Qaida and other extremist groups that also operate in the Sahel region of Niger, Chad, Mali and Algeria.

The area is also close to major oilfields that were crippled by violent ethnic feuding in 2015.