The US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three staff members at the US consulate in Benghazi were deliberately murdered Tuesday night Sept 11. debkafile’s counter-terror sources report exclusively that far from being a spontaneous raid by angry Islamists, it was a professionally executed terrorist operation by a professional Al Qaeda team, whose 20 members acted under the orders of their leader Ayman al Zawahri in revenge for the liquidation of top al Qaeda operative Abu Yahya al-Libi last June.

Turkey is finally getting its safe haven plan off the ground by bringing two Syrian rebel brigades under Turkish command for capturing large segments of northern Syria. The Free Syrian has meanwhile begun liquidating foreign Islamists including al Qaeda who have streamed into Syria to fight Assad.

Al Qaeda missiles struck Kibbutz Kholit opposite the Egyptian-Gazan-Israeli border junction and an IDF post in the Kissufim district Monday, Aug. 28, debkafile reveals, in line with the terrorists' tactic of holding Israel hostage as a lever for bending Cairo to their will.  The IDF communiqué omitted to mention those attacks - only the Qassam rocket targeting Sderot that morning.  Al Qaeda’s affiliates timed their strikes for derailing talks the Egyptian defense minister and army chief held Monday with Sinai Bedouin chiefs.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has set up house in Sinai and Gaza, dedicating itself to attacks on Israel. The Egyptian army’s big counter-terror offensive shows no signs of taking off, although its M-60 tanks looking like having come to stay on the Israeli border.

Bands of young Sinai Bedouin have turned their backs on tribal affiliations in and formed lawless bands of jihadis which are highly vulnerably to Iranian and radical Palestinian penetration. Those bands carried out the twin attack on Egyptian and Israel military targets last Sunday.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, in conjunction with military chief Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, fired a row of top military, intelligence and police officials Wednesday, Aug. 8, after more armed Islamist attacks on Egyptian troops. Morsi replaced Intelligence chief Gen. Mourad Mowafi with Maj. Gen. Mohamed Shehata, and fired the governor of North Sinai, Abdel Wahab Mabrouk, as well as other officials.  The president acted expeditiously to quell street protest over declining Sinai security but is not yet grappling with its root cause, Islamist terror.

The initial Egyptian and Israeli accounts of the attacks in which 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed and the Israeli border crashed Sunday night, Aug. 5, don’t match up:  Egypt points the finger at the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip; Israel at Sinai salafists. debkafile postulates a third option: Tehran may have harnessed its Gaza Strip proxies and a Sinai al Qaeda cell for coordinated attacks on Egyptian and Israeli military targets to avenge Al Qaeda’s enlistment to the Western-Arab-backed revolt against Bashar Assad.

Al Qaeda infiltrators from Libya are spearheading much of this month’s anti-Israel violence from Sinai and the Gaza Strip - a dangerous development Israel, Hamas, Egypt and the US prefer to conceal. It appears to tie in with the arrival of al Qaeda’s ex-Iraq fighters in Syria as part of its leader's master plan. Deeply concerned to check the spillover from Libya into Egypt, Cairo has posted its elite counter-terrorist “999 unit” in El Arish, on Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip and along the northern sector of its frontier with Israel.

The combination of lawless Sinai under the control of Bedouin bands, al Qaeda and Salafist militias and Cairo ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood is the recipe for strife between Israel and Egypt.

At a particularly sensitive moment in Israeli-Egyptian relations, Israel’s military leaders were caught napping by the June 18 terrorist attack from Sinai on the southern Route 10, in which an Israeli fence team worker was killed. Because they were too slow to catch on to the identity of the perpetrators (al Qaeda), those military chiefs aimed their reprisals at the wrong quarters (Hamas and Jihad Islami) and so set off a three-day, still ongoing missile-for-air strike cycle in Gaza.
Egyptian liaison officers meanwhile refuse to meet Israeli commanders.

John Brennan held high-powered talks in Sanaa the day before Al Qaeda’s massive attack killed 100 Yemeni soldiers. It was carried out by a dozen AQAP recruits from Yemen’s Central Security Force working as undercover jihadists.

Barack Obama is winning his Herculean battle to stave off a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites until he is safely reelected in November. His policy of “non-solutions for unseen problems” is working just fine: Iran keeps up its nuclear bomb momentum, and al Qaeda expands its foothold in Egypt, Syria and Yemen. Israel and its military option are shoved out of sight.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly in its latest issue out last Friday analyses Obama’s chances of maintaining this posture for seven months.  To subscribe to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, click here.

Word of upgraded underwear bombing devices and double agents should never have been released because without inside intelligence, the key PETN explosive is undetectable by airport security scanners. Running double agents inside terrorist cells is the most tricky and hazardous of undercover operations because no one ever has the whole picture. Compromising the penetration of al Qaeda’s Yemen cell has therefore caused inestimable damage to the counter-terror efforts against al Qaeda. Hence the dismay in US intelligence agencies on both these counts.

Ayman al-Zawahiri is challenged by the Syrian jihadist ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri, who preaches the "multi-pede" concept which would end centralized control of the al Qaeda terrorism organiztion and distribute authority for independent decision-making among its franchises. Zawahiri is fighting back.

Egyptian Sinai is being turned into a lawless wasteland and jihadi recruiting center by the influx of al Qaeda fighters from across the Muslim world. Al Qaeda in Sinai is preparing to open a new front for terror in the western Middle East.

A year after the death of its iconic leader Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special forces, Al Qaeda is making an operational comeback, notably in North Africa and Syria. The suicide bombings hitting Damascus and Idlib in the last 24 hours were the work of Al Qaeda in Iraq – AQI, whose operatives have been pouring into Syria in the last two weeks, debkafile reports. Without US intervention, al Qaeda will be able to use Syria for attacking its neighbors too, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.

The 23rd Arab summit, the first to be held in Baghdad in more than two decades, opens Tuesday March 27 after Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki bowed to Saudi and Gulf Emirates’ demand not to invite Iran and receive only a low-ranking Syrian official.  Although the city is in lockdown, Western security sources doubt it is 100 percent safe from terrorists, whether al Qaeda or Bashar Assad’s henchmen in revenge for  the arms and aid certain Arab rulers tender Syrian rebels.

The French-born al Qaeda killer, Mohammed Merah - who shocked the world by murdering three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher in Toulouse by shots to the head, after killing three French paratroopers - was found dead after jumping out of a window still shooting Thursday, March 22. First, he injured three police officers searching his apartment, bursting out of the bathroom firing madly. To capture him alive, French police and security forces conducted the longest siege in their history against a lone terrorist.

Israel and Britain are not on the same page, but both are smearing Iran for their own reasons: Netanyahu is concerned that sanctions against Iran will boost its urge to attack Israeli targets abroad, while the British fear the London Olympics of July 2012 will be targeted for joint ...

Saudi rulers, to save the Syrian opposition from defeat at Bashar Assad’s hands, are reported by debkafile’s intelligence sources as taking a hand in turning al Qaeda Iraqi cells loose against him. Saudi agents used their pull with Iraqi Sunnis to persuade al Qaeda leaders that Assad and his Alawite regime were their most dangerous foe and their overthrow the first Sunni priority. Al Qaeda’s Pakistan headquarters broadcast the same call-up. Up 1,000 al Qaeda jihadis reported now in Syria.