Other Al-Qaeda leaders and fighters have escaped through Iran following the war in Afghanistan.
He was reportedly smuggled to Iran with two other senior al-Qaeda leaders in 2002.
Mr Abu Ghaith's trial will mark one of the first prosecutions of senior al-Qaeda leaders on US soil.
The US has used remotely controlled aircraft known as drones to target many al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Almost certainly, he also knows the whereabouts of a number of al-Qaeda leaders on the FBI's "most wanted" list.
In any event, the timing and publicity of the killing of the al-Qaeda leaders were especially agreeable to Mr Maliki.
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He was reportedly smuggled into Iran with two other senior al-Qaeda leaders.
Analysts had long suspected Pakistan's Bajaur tribal region to be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other top al-Qaeda leaders.
Modern data-mining techniques allow computers to spot patterns that might previously have passed unnoticed such as large volumes of texts or e-mails to and from areas where al-Qaeda leaders are thought to be hiding.
While no-one - common citizen or militant - disputes the fact that al-Qaeda leaders have been killed in the strikes, they also point to the massive "collateral damage" incurred, and the many innocent lives that have been lost.
He has beautifully engaged his readers to the anarchic situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as he refers to the successive presidents and Al-Qaeda leaders to make his storey central to the current global unrest in the mountains of Central Asia.
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The US could pull out of Iraq tomorrow, he says, and the suicide bombers would continue to strike targets from Baghdad to London and beyond, motivated by a broad sense of humiliation of the Muslim world, he says, something senior al-Qaeda leaders like Ayman Al-Zawahiri often rail against.
Now, again, you have a problem here that I mean, if American intelligence in Afghanistan finds out that Taliban leaders and the Al-Qaeda leaders are gathering somewhere, there will be enormous pressure from the U.S. military to attack whereas in Washington, at least the White House's State Department, I think wants to give this new government a chance and wants to give this government a breathing space.
Success will require a dual strategy of systematically destroying and weakening enemy capabilities -- continuing to kill and capture al Qaeda leaders -- along with breaking the cycle of terrorist recruitment among radicalized bunches of guys.
America already claims to have captured two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leaders, so this could cripple the group.
Both countries are vitally dependent on the assistance of Pakistan, in whose lawless tribal belt al-Qaeda's leaders are thought to have found sanctuary.
Pakistan is of increasing interest to al-Qaeda's leaders at a time when they must be disappointed that militant Islam has played almost no part in north African uprisings.
In Afghanistan he was largely right to push Tommy Franks to make bolder use of air power and special forces (though more ground troops might have made it easier to capture al-Qaeda's leaders).
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For some months now, al-Qaeda's leaders including its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, have been calling on their followers to attack oil installations, saying that the revenues from Muslim oil go to the enemies of Islam.
Senior U.S. officials said al Qaeda operations chief, Saif al-Adel, is one of several al Qaeda leaders believed to be in Iran.
Al-Qaeda's senior leaders are sheltering in Pakistan, yet this ranks as only the 33rd- weakest state on the Brookings index.
High-ranking al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed, and we've stepped up the pressure on al Qaeda worldwide.
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He claimed that after the killing of Bin Laden and other major leaders al-Qaeda was "degraded" and by implication close to collapse.
Between July 2008 and this month, U.S. drones have killed dozens of lower-ranking militants and at least 10 mid- and upper-level leaders within al Qaeda or the Taliban.
The two self-proclaimed leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were released from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007 and sent to Saudi Arabia, according to a Department of Defense report on former detainees at Guantanamo who have returned to terrorism activities.
The Pentagon asserts al-Marri had trained at a terror camp in Afghanistan, met al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and "volunteered for a martyr mission, " according to a government filing with the Supreme Court.
Seventy-five percent of known al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice.
The government could point to a campaign that killed five self-proclaimed leaders of Saudi al Qaeda in the past two years, as well as the capture of many more.
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