The State Department on Tuesday declared a former doctor for Osama bin Laden and a factional leader in Pakistan’s now-fractured Taliban as specially designated global terrorists.
Ramzi Mawafi (whose last name is often spelled Mowafi as well) is an Egyptian national who worked as a doctor for al Qaeda leader bin Laden and is known as an explosives expert. Most recently, Mawafi, who escaped from an Egyptian prison amid the chaos of the 2011 revolution, has been coordinating among Islamist militant groups in the Sinai peninsula, as well as helping supply them with money and weapons for terrorist attacks, the State Department said.
Islamist militants in the Sinai have conducted several deadly terrorist attacks and have been fighting a guerrilla war with the Egyptian army that has recently heated up. The designation of Mawafi as a terrorist is likely to please the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with whom the Obama administration has sometimes had a difficult relationship.
Pakistani Khan Said, whose real name is Khalid Mehsud, is leader of a faction of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan centered around the powerful Mehsud clan. Said, also known as “Sajna,” or “close friend,” split his faction out of the main group in May, the State Department said, reportedly because he refused to accept the authority of the group’s new leader, Mullah Fazlullah, the first who was not a member of the Mehsud clan.
Said was “the mastermind behind the 2012 jailbreak in northern Pakistan where the TTP freed 400 inmates, and he was also involved in planning the 2011 attack on a key naval base in Karachi,” according to a profile of him by the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.
