Yesterday’s newsletter mentioned the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the Osama bin Laden deputy now expected to face capital charges for his role in planning the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The aborted plea deal he made with the U.S. military court system led to the publication of various documents that shed light on his relationship with Qatar, the American ally that funds and houses Hamas and controls Al Jazeera. Yigal Carmon writes:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was actively involved in terrorist activities and planning while residing in Qatar during the mid-1990s. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, he moved to Qatar at the request of a patron in the Qatari government, Abdul Rahman Yasin. In Qatar, KSM worked for the Ministry of Electricity and Water. Despite his government employment, he continued to engage in activities related to terrorist networks, leveraging his position to facilitate his operations.

KSM’s connections in Qatar were crucial for his operational security. These relationships provided him with a degree of protection that made it difficult for U.S. authorities to apprehend him during their investigations into his terrorist activities. His patron in Qatar, whose identity and exact motivations remain a matter of sensitivity, appears to have played a key role in providing KSM the necessary cover to plan and coordinate terrorist activities, including early planning stages of what would become the 9/11 attacks.

When the FBI came to Doha in 1996 to arrest KSM, the only ones reportedly to be informed of this, in confidentiality, were the Qatari emir and the palace. Within hours, KSM had disappeared.

While revisiting al-Qaeda, it’s worth also nothing that Wednesday was the anniversary of the terrorist group’s simultaneous bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1996, which killed 224 people and injured more than 4,000. And as, Matthew Levitt wrote in 2011, there was another country beside Qatar providing support to al-Qaeda, as a U.S. district court concluded:

In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa. The Washington court also found that “the Iranian defendants, through Hizballah, provided explosives training to bin Laden and al-Qaeda and rendered direct assistance to al-Qaeda operatives.” Hizballah is the Lebanese party and militia long allied with Iran.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.