Al-Qaeda’s Yemen leader dies in unclear circumstances

The Yemeni branch of the terrorist group al-Qaeda said that leader Khalid al-Batarfi had died on Sunday. The group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, did not provide details surrounding his death.

Who was this al-Batarfi? The United States had placed a bounty of up to $5 million for information on Batarfi, who is believed to be in his mid-40s. He had received training from al-Qaeda in 1999, and by 2001 was fighting alongside the Taliban against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In 2020 he became “emir,” or chief, of AQAP in Yemen, according to his bounty website. In 2018, the U.S. State Department marked him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under an executive order signed after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The State Department designated AQAP as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2010.

Dig deeper: Read A.S. Ibrahim’s column in WORLD Opinions about how a TikTok video campaign rooted in ignorance is setting out to promote the Quran.