JAMAL AL-BADAWI, wanted by the United States for his suspected role in the attack on the USS Cole 18 years ago, was killed in a precision strike in Yemen on Jan. 1, U.S. Central Command said Sunday.

Badawi was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2003 over his role in the October 2000 deadly bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy guided-missile destroyer. He escaped from prison in Yemen twice, once in 2003 and again in 2006.

“U.S. forces confirmed the results of the strike following a deliberate assessment process,” said Central Command spokesman Captain Bill Urban, two days after the Defense Department said U.S. forces had targeted Badawi in the strike.

It is the latest blow to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has lost key leaders in U.S strikes in recent years. In 2018, U.S. officials said they believed that Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, once one of the world’s most feared bombmakers, had been killed.

Still, Katherine Zimmerman at the American Enterprise Institute conservative thinktank cautioned that AQAP had proven it will remain a threat. The group has benefited from the chaos of Yemen’s civil war, although it has lost major strongholds, including the port city of Mukallah.

“There is certainly a degradation of the leadership,” Zimmerman said.

“The big concern is that al-Qaida has always proven that its bench is much deeper and there is no clear strategy for stabilizing Yemen and setting the conditions where we don’t have a new generation of militants coming forward.”

The death of Badawi removes perhaps the last major figure in the USS Cole attack from the battlefield. (SD-Agencies)