April 06, 2008	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 28, 1429

NEW YORK, April 5: Abu Yahya Libbi, a so called obscure preacher who escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan, is being tipped as heir apparent to leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, a leading US publication said on Friday.

“I call him a man for all seasons for A.Q.,” Jarret Brachman, a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency who is now research director of the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point told the New York Times.

“He’s a warrior. He’s a poet. He’s a scholar. He’s a pundit. He’s a military commander. And he’s a very charismatic, young, brash rising star within A.Q., and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist movement.”

Mr Libbi, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, is now considered to be a top strategist for Al Qaeda, as well as one of its most effective promoters of global jihad, appearing in a dozen videos on militant Websites in the past year, counterterrorism officials said. At a time when Al Qaeda seems more inspirational than operational, Mr Libbi stands out as a formidable star whose rise to prominence tracks the group’s growing emphasis on information in its war with the West, the newspaper report said.

The secrecy that envelops Al Qaeda’s leadership structure makes such estimates speculative, other analysts noted. But one Islamist insider said that in addition to youth and charisma, Mr Libbi possessed one skill that Al Qaeda’s leaders had been lacking: religious scholarship.

Perhaps with this in mind, Al Qaeda is featuring Mr Libbi, who spent two years in Africa studying Islam, in as many of the videos as the group’s top leaders, Mr bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. “Bin Laden is an engineer and Zawahri is a medical doctor,” Dr Muhammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who lives in London told the Times. “So it is important that they also present someone who has the role of scholar.”