By Libya Herald reporter.
Tunis, 15 November 2016:
Reports that one of the top commanders of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Abdulrahman Talha, was killed in an air raid in the southern Libyan town of Gurdah Al-Shatti yesterday have been denied by a local official.
“He is still alive. He was seen this morning in the town” the official who did not want to be identified told the Libya Herald.
Confirming the air raid, however, he said that seven or eight people had been killed, all of them foreign. They were Tunisians and Mauritanians and had arrived in Gurdah, some 70 kilometres north of Sebha, a few days ago. Six vehicles had come to take the bodies away, he added.
Foreign fighters were coming and going all the time, he explained.
Reports elsewhere say that some 40 other fighters were injured, and that more than one building was hit.
Talha, who has various nicknames such as Talha Abu Ali, Abu Talha Al-Hasnawi, Abu Talha Al-Libi and Abu Talha al-Mauritani, is said to come originally from Mauritania and to have joined AQIM in 2006. According to one report, he was born in Mauritania in the 1980s but his family fled during the 1990-1996 Tuareg rebellion there and settled in Libya.
During the conflict in Mali, in 2012, he was in charge of the Islamic police in Timbuktu. Following the death of AQIM Furghan brigade commander Mohamed Lamin Ould El-Hassan, killed by French special forces in February 2013, Talha was named as its new leader.
Although a member of AQIM, he is said also to have links with the so-called Islamic State. “He is between the two”, the local Shatti official said
“We know all about him and his movements”, he explained. But “no one can do anything about him. He’s very dangerous”. Local people, he added, were afraid of him and his family who also live in Gardah.
However, yesterday’s attack has brought matters to a head, he said. There would be a meeting “to see what can be done about him”.
Locals say that foreign aircraft were responsible, possibly French.
“If he was the target, it is logical that French would be behind this, but there are no French combat drones in the area,” a French military analyst specialising in the region told this newspaper.
