SANAA, Yemen—The killings of US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and another American al-Qaeda propagandist in a US air strike on Friday wiped out the decisive factor that made the terrorist group’s Yemen branch the most dangerous threat to the United States: its reach into the West.

Two US officials, meanwhile, said intelligence indicated that the top al-Qaeda bomb-maker in Yemen also died in the strike. Ibrahim al-Asiri was the bomb-maker linked to the bomb hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity on al-Asiri’s death because it is yet to be officially confirmed.

Issuing English-language sermons on jihad on the Internet from his hideouts in Yemen’s mountains, al-Awlaki drew Muslim recruits like the young Nigerian who tried to bring down a US jet on Christmas and the Pakistani-American behind the botched car bombing in New York City’s Times Square.

Friday’s drone attack was believed to be the first instance in which a US citizen was tracked and killed based on secret intelligence and the president’s say-so. Al-Awlaki was placed on the CIA “kill or capture” list by the Obama administration in April 2010—the first American to be so targeted.

Authorities also believe al-Asiri built the bombs that al-Qaeda slipped into printers and shipped to the US last year in a nearly catastrophic attack.

Christopher Boucek, a scholar who studies Yemen and al-Qaeda, said al-Asiri was so important to the organization that his death would “overshadow” the news of al-Awlaki and the other American killed in the strike, Samir Khan.

Khan published a slick English-language Web magazine, Inspire, that spouted al-Qaeda’s anti-Western ideology and even offered how-to articles on terrorism—including one titled, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

The voices of Khan and al-Awlaki elevated the several hundred al-
Qaeda fighters hiding out in Yemen into a greater threat than similar affiliates of the terror network in North Africa, Somalia or East Asia.

President Barack Obama heralded the strike as a “major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,” saying the 40-year-old al-Awlaki was the group’s “leader of external operations.”

(AP)