A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan kills terrorist leader Qari Yasin.

A successful U.S. drone attack has killed a senior al-Qaeda official with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis having issued a statement claiming: “The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice.”

Fox News reports:

The Long War Journal reports that Mohammad Khurasani, the Pakistani Taliban spokesman, describes Yasin as “as one of the greatest trainers of explosives and electronics in the fields of jihad.” Yasin’s “students” are “still…performing their duties in the field of jihad relating to such sectors of jihad,” meaning they are manufacturing bombs, according to the Long War Journal. Yasin has decades of experience with jihadist factions operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to The Nation, he had worked for Amjad Farooqi, the Pakistani terrorist who engineered two assassination attempts against Musharraf in Dec. 2003 at the behest of al Qaeda leader Abu Faraj al Libi. The Long War Journal reports that Farooqi is suspected of involvement in other terror attacks as well. Farooqi was a member of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the Harkat-ul-Ansar and its successor – the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen – as well as Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

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Yasin is most infamous for the plot behind the September 20th, 2008 bombing of an Islamabad Marriott Hotel, which took the lives of two U.S. servicemembers, among dozens more.

The Pentagon reported that Yasin was killed during an airstrike in Pakistan in the Paktika Province. They also stated that they would be deploying some 300 Marines in the Spring of 2017 to one of the deadliest provinces for U.S. troops, Helmand, an area that we pulled out of back in 2014 under the Obama Administration.

The fight will still, unfortunately, continue in the region but the Pakistani people can at least take solace for now in the fact that major Islamic terrorist Qari Yasin has been killed.