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– YUSEF AL-AYERI

 


* Yusef Al-Ayeri
or Yusuf Bin Saleh Al-Ayeri, alias “Swift Sword”, was a Saudi member of Al Qaeda, a former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden and involved in coordinating the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, on 09/09/2001.  Yusef Al-Ayeri headed Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, up to mid 2003. He directly ordered Abdel Karim Mejjati.

 

Yusef Al-Ayeri was behind a Web site, al-Nida, one of Al Qaeda websites used to transmit codes and manuals to its activists all over the world.

 

In 02/2003, some radical militants were arrested in Bahrain (see – BAHRAIN Cell). A joint US-Saudi raid of an apartment in Saudi Arabia owned by one of them, probably Muhammed Saleh Ali Muhammad, revealed the designs for a bomb called al-Mubtakkar. This bomb is made of two widely available chemicals, sodium cyanide and hydrogen, which combine to create hydrogen cyanide. When turned to gas, it is lethal, and counterterrorism experts are highly alarmed at this technical breakthrough.

 

According to a CIA informant, Yusef Al-Ayeri visited Al Qaeda number two leader Ayman Al Zawahiri in 01/2003. He told al-Zawahiri of an already advanced plot in the USA. Operatives loosely linked to Al Qaeda had traveled to the US in the fall of 2002 and thoroughly cased locations in New York City. They would place the Mubtakkar bomb in subway cars and remotely activate them but Al Zawahiri called off the attacks.

 

Yusef Al-Ayeri was also the anonymous author of two extraordinary pieces of writing. The first was ‘The Future of Iraq – the Arabian Peninsula after the Fall of Baghdad’, written as the United States prepared its attack in 2002. In the book Yusef Al-Ayeri said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Qaeda, stoking extremism throughout the Persian Gulf and South Asia, and achieving precisely the radicalizing quagmire that Osama Bin Laden had hoped would occur in Afghanistan.

 

A second book, Crusaders’ War, outlined a tactical model for fighting the American forces in Iraq, including “assassination and poisoning the enemy’s food and drink,” remotely triggered explosives, suicide bombings and lightning strike ambushes”.

 

Yusef Al-Ayeri was killed in mid 2003 in a gun-battle with Saudi security forces right after the Riyadh Suicide Attacks. In 12/2003, Norwegian intelligence discovered an Al Qaeda treatise on the Internet called “Jihadi Iraq, Hopes and Dangers.” Completed in 09/2003, it is dedicated to Yusef Al-Ayeri. The document suggested to concentrate the efforts against USA allies in Iraq but to abstain from attacks inside USA. 

Yusef Al-Ayeri was replaced as the head of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia by Khaled Ali Haj and as a top ideologue of Al Qaeda by Attiya Allah .

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* Related topics – 
05/2003 -19 MOST WANTED IN SAUDI ARABIA 
PROFILE -ABDUL AZIZ MUQRIN  
PROFILE -ABDUL HADI AL-IRAQI

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