The Opportunistic Attack in Benghazi
In addition to the IssaLeaks dump, there were several reports on the Benghazi attack Friday suggesting it was an “opportunistic” attack: not planned in advance, but not an outgrowth of non-existent protests; not planned by al Qaeda, but carried out by those with ties to it.
That assessment corresponds with what my best wildarsed guess about what happened, based on the IssaLeaks documents (perhaps not surprisingly, since those documents presumably come from State’s investigations).
An anonymous official describes the current understanding of the attack this way to Greg Miller.
“There isn’t any intelligence that the attackers pre-planned their assault days or weeks in advance,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “The bulk of available information supports the early assessment that the attackers launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”
[snip]
U.S. officials have backed away from claims that protesters had gathered around the Benghazi mission before it was overrun. Instead, analysts now think that the siege involved militants who “may have aspired to attack the U.S. in Benghazi,” and mobilized after seeing protesters scale the walls of the embassy in Cairo to protest the controversial video.
The violence in Benghazi appears to have involved militants with ties to al-Qaeda in North Africa, but no evidence indicates that it was organized by al-Qaeda, or timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said.
The LAT includes similar quotes–as well as eyewitness accounts describing the attackers to be a mix of experienced fighters and apparent civilians.
Libyan guards who served as the security force at the U.S. compound said the mob was made up of disparate types, some who appeared to be experienced fighters and others who were not. There were long-bearded men whose faces were obscured by scarves in the style of practiced militants and called each other “sheik.” But there also were younger men, some who looked like teenagers with wispy beards on their uncovered faces.
“There were civilians there, and many were carrying weapons,” said Sheik Mohamed Oraibi, a hard-line Islamic preacher who arrived soon after the attack began. He said the attackers arrived in about 20 pickup trucks, many of which had machine guns mounted on them in the style favored by rebels during the Libyan revolution last year.
These details, along with the materials in the IssaLeaks, appear to support an early report from CNN, stating that the suspected culprit was the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.
A pro-al Qaeda group responsible for a previous armed assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is the chief suspect in Tuesday’s attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, sources tracking militant Islamist groups in eastern Libya say.
They also note that the attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior Libyan member of the terror group.
The group suspected to be behind the assault — the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades — first surfaced in May when it claimed responsibility for an attack on the International Red Cross office in Benghazi. The following month the group claimed responsibility for detonating an explosive device outside the U.S. Consulate and later released a video of that attack.
A June 25 cable from the IssaLeaks dump–labeled routine–noted the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade (ISOARB) had taken credit for three attacks against western targets: two attacks on the ICRC (which it accused of proselytizing Christianity) and the June 6 attack on the US mission in Benghazi (see PDF 45). Read more →