Update: Since people wanted to link to the previous post, which was friends-only, I decided to move the more unofficial stuff to a separate post and secure that. Basically, this is stuff gleaned from a lot of reading through foreign press and so on; there seems to be some decent reason not to yet publicly discuss all of it, so I’m talking about it here and not in the general-public post.
Random post for those of you interested in politics, a summary of key things from non-US media and various “unofficial sources:”
There has been a major al Qaeda regrouping, probably including all senior people (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri included), in the deserts in the southwest of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Those two governments have nominal sovereignty over those regions, but realistically those areas are the domain of certain Bedouin tribes who have familial alliances to the organization.
US forces based out of Djibouti (apparently some hybrid of CIA and Army special forces; details are, of course, very hush-hush) are hunting for people and occcasionally acting. The carful of al Qaeda operatives that got hit by a Predator drone a few weeks ago was part of their work; bet money that they’re actively hunting for some of the big fish, and are hoping to pull of a coup by gibbing one or two of them in some dramatic and public fashion.
The unofficial funding game is a bit more interesting. There’s a succession fight going on in Saudi Arabia between the families of Prince Sultan (the current defense minster) and Crown Prince Abdullah. Prince Naif, the interior minister and a relative of Sultan’s, has apparently been funneling a great deal of cash into al Qaeda, and is probably providing the unnoficial cover for their setup in the desert. Also, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (Prince Sultan’s son) just bought a 25% stake in the al-Jazeera media network – this is part of more of this rather complicated plot. More Machiavellian scheming on this front detailed here.
So there’s a very complicated Saudi involvement in this, a major refortification of al Qaeda, and secret operations going on on both sides.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 