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Al-Yazid had little background in leading combat operations. But terrorism experts say his advantage was that he was close to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. As a fluent Pashto speaker known for impeccable manners, al-Yazid enjoyed better relations with the Afghans than many of the al-Qaida Arabs, whom the Afghans found arrogant and abrasive.
That suggested a conscious decision by al-Qaida to embed within the Taliban organization, helping the Afghan allies with expertise and training while at the same time putting an Afghan face on the war.
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He might be hard to replace....
I don’t trust the main stream media to get things right.
He WILL be hard to replace.
However, the drones are waiting for the new no. 3, pure speculation of course.
Apparently, he personally maintained a bunch of high-level relationships. Those groups don't operate like the US military, where senior officers might get rotated in and out periodically. They operate on long-term trust relationships, and unless this guy was actively grooming people to step in for him, his demise would leave those trust relationships dangling.
Thanks, I don’t doubt it. For one thing, the Afghans have been in a civil war for these past thirty years, and there has literally not been a break all that time, merely some periods where it got down to a low simmer. Getting the Afghans to turn on their Arab occupiers seemed to work for a while, maybe this joker is the reason our progress slowed.
No one — least of all the members of the Party of Treason here in the US — thought the US had the staying power to wear down the terrorists through attrition. According to the leftist a-holes everywhere, US losses in Iraq were a tiny fraction of terrorist losses, and in Afghanistan with its “brutal Afghan winter” it has been well in excess of ten to one (probably closer to thirty to one).