Homeland Security News

American officials sought Tuesday to confirm reports that al Qaeda’s master bomb-maker, who was behind the failed plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009, was hurt in a U.S. drone strike over the weekend in Yemen.

Yemeni news reports said that the bomb-maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, was seriously wounded in a strike that targeted a car carrying four suspected members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemeni-based branch of the terror organization.  Two of the suspects were killed and a third wounded besides Asiri, according to the reports.

American officials told NBC News that they could not immediately confirm the reports and that it would take time to sort them out.

Read more:  MSNBC

A rebranded version of Iraq’s al-Qaeda affiliate is surging onto the front lines of the war in neighboring Syria, expanding into territory seized by other rebel groups and carving out the kind of sanctuaries that the U.S. military spent more than a decade fighting to prevent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the four months since the Iraqi al-Qaeda group changed its name to reflect its growing ambitions, it has forcefully asserted its presence in some of the towns and villages captured from Syrian government forces. It has been bolstered by an influx of thousands of foreign fighters from the region and beyond. 

The group, now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is by no means the largest of the loosely aligned rebel organizations battling to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and it is concentrated mostly in the northern and eastern provinces of the country.  But with its radical ideology and tactics such as kidnappings and beheadings, the group has stamped its identity on the communities in which it is present, including, crucially, ­areas surrounding the main border crossings with Turkey. 

Read more: Washington Post