Ahmed Abdi Godane -- the leader of al Shabab, the Islamic militant organization behind the siege on a mall in Kenya last year -- was killed in a U.S. military strike earlier this week, an al Shabab source told NBC News on Friday. The Pentagon confirmed the death later in the day. "Removing Godane from the battlefield is a major symbolic and operational loss to al Shabab," said Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. "The United States works in coordination with its friends, allies and partners to counter the regional and global threats posed by violent extremist organizations."
[T]hose who argue that Obama is AWOL from the fight against terrorism, or who think it was disastrous that he admitted last week that he does not yet have a strategy to counter Islamic State, are missing (perhaps on purpose) a couple of very obvious points. The first point concerns the actual war on terror that the administration has been waging. It is important to remember that Obama is perhaps the greatest killer of terrorists in American history.... Obama has launched strikes against Islamist terror targets in several countries. He has devastated the leadership of core al Qaeda, and just this week -- as Washington opinion-makers collectively decided that he was hopelessly weak on terror -- the president launched a (quite possibly successful) strike in Somalia against the leader of al-Shabaab, a terror group nearly as bloodthirsty as Islamic State. And here's the important bit -- at the same time the White House is the target of relentless complaints that it has not done enough to combat Islamic State, Obama is actually combating Islamic State, launching what appear to be, at this early stage, fairly effective strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq.