For the jihadists of Yemen, and beyond, the blow promised to be terrible. For intelligence agencies, the “catch” is unexpected. On Thursday, February 4, the publication of a report, sent to the UN Security Council by the analytical support team and monitoring sanctions against jihadist organizations, further attested to the arrest of the Emir of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Khalid Batarfi, known as “Abu Miqdad Al-Kindi”, was thus captured in October 2020, according to the UN group report, without further details. Today coordinated by the British Edmund Fitton-Brown, former ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017, this committee of experts regularly reports to the Security Council on the nature of the jihadist threat, based in particular on information provided by member states.
Khalid Batarfi had been appointed new emir of the Yemeni and Saudi franchise of the jihadist network in early 2020. A veteran of Al-Qaida, whose training camps he attended in Afghanistan before 2001, he helped make AQAP the one of the most dangerous “subsidiaries” of the group a decade later. It was she, in particular, who planned the attack on the weekly Charlie hebdo in Paris in January 2015.
Brief description
The announcement of the arrest of the Emir in October 2020 however quickly sows doubt. Relegated to paragraph 19 of a twenty-seven-page report, the capture of one of the world’s most wanted jihadist leaders, whose head is priced at $ 5 million ($ 4.1 million euros) by Washington, is mentioned in two sentences: “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula suffered setbacks at the end of 2020. Its leader, Khalid Batarfi, says “Abu Miqdad Al-Kindi” was arrested in October during an operation in Gheïda (Mahra province) ”. A rather summary description when we know that he would have been the first manager of a network franchise captured alive.
“The congressional assault incident is just the tip of the iceberg of what lies ahead [les Américains] God willing, ”Batarfi says in the video.
On Wednesday February 10, Khalid Batarfi resurfaced in a video uploaded by the AQAP propaganda body. Lasting half an hour, the document raises the question of the credibility of this UN information on Yemen. Not so much for what it shows – Al-Qaida has a habit of posting old videos of its leaders – but for what Khalid Batarfi says there.
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