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I'm crying really big crocodile tears. Aside from the fact that the President of Pakistan has chosen to stay quiet indicating his approval, this is what we know so far:
Two senior trainers with Al Qaeda and the son-in-law of Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were among those killed.
The Pakistani officials agreed that the deaths would be a strong setback to Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas.
At least one of the men believed by the Pakistani officials to have been killed, a 52-year-old Egyptian, known here as Abu Khabab al-Masri, is on the United States most-wanted list with a $5 million reward for help in his capture. His real name is Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, who according to the United States government Web site rewardsforjustice.net, was an expert in explosives and poisons.
Abu Khabab, the Web site says, operated the Qaeda training camp at Darrunta, near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, and trained hundreds of fighters. He was responsible for putting together a training manual with recipes for crude chemical and biological weapons, the Web site says.
Among those Abu Khabab trained was Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's No. 3 operative, who was captured in 2002 in the Pakistani town of Faisalabad, one of the Pakistani officials said.
Another Egyptian, known by the alias Abu Ubayda al-Misri, was also believed killed, the Pakistani officials said. He was the chief of insurgent operations in a region near the area where the airstrikes occurred, according to one of the Pakistani officials.
As chief of operations, Abu Ubayda commanded attacks on American forces in his part of southern Afghanistan, and gave training and support to the insurgent groups active in the area. He also served as a liaison for senior Qaeda leaders, and provided logistics and security for the top Qaeda people in the region, the official said.
After the fall of the Taliban, Abu Ubayda moved to the Pakistani town of Shakai, in South Waziristan, where he commanded a small group of Arabs, but left the area when the Pakistani military mounted operations against the foreign militants there in February 2004, the officials said.
The third man believed to have been killed was a Moroccan, Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi, who is the son-in-law of Mr. Zawahiri, the officials said. Mr. Maghrebi was in charge of Qaeda propaganda in the region, and may have been responsible for distributing a number of CD's showing the activities of Taliban and Qaeda fighters in southern Afghanistan in recent months.
A fourth man, Mustafa Osman, another Egyptian and an associate of Mr. Zawahiri's, may also have been killed, one Pakistani security official said. But he was less certain of his fate. There may have been one or two more foreign militants killed as well, he said.
-Rudey
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