What We Know About the Next American-Born Militant the US Wants to Kill

Who is the man they call Abdullah al-Shami?

He restsat the core of a debate across the US goverment as to whether President Obama "should once again take the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of an American overseas," as The New York Times reports. It's the first time since September 2011, when a CIA drone killed US-born Anwar al-Awlaki (and just days later, Awlaki's teenaged son) in Yemen, that the Obama administration has grappled over using the weaponized technology to kill a natural-born citizen abroad.

And while officials familiar with the deliberations are still not saying much of anything relating either to who this man really is or what the legal rationale behind his would-be killing might look like, a fuller portrait of al-Shami—an assumed Arabic name—is slowly coming into focus.

He moved to the Middle East as a boy, possibly from Texas, and is now hiding out somewhere in remote northwest Pakistan, according to the Times. For an al-Qaeda affiliated militant of high ranking, al-Shami maintains a decidedly low profile—no firey YouTube clericism here, no flaunting of the terrorist attacks certain former and current US officials believe he actively plots.

He's quiet—so quiet, in fact, that the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant groups' online communications and video propaganda, told the Times that it has no records of Shami’s name having ever popped up in known terrorist chat rooms and forums.

But his demure online profile doesn't belie the fact that the US, particularly the CIA, might want him out of the picture. As a senior administration official told the Times, “We have clear and convincing evidence that he’s involved in the production and distribution of I.E.D.’s,” or improvised explosive devices, which have long been blamed for maiming and killing troops in Afghanistan and the surrounding region. Mr. Shami's is the first case, then, to test a new set of guidelines laid out by Obama in a May 2013 speech that firmed up the rules governing lethal drone strikes.

If you missed it, a White House policy note at the time explained that, “The Department of Justice will conduct an additional legal analysis to ensure that such action may be conducted against the individual consistent with the constitution and laws of the United States.” This check apparently adds a layer of rigor missing from the legal justification that authorized the killing of al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born cleric taken out (along with three others, who the US maintains weren't America citizens) in 2011.

Obama's own stance on targeting Shami is murky at best. A key part of what the president put forth last May is that any hit on an American abroad should be handled by the Pentagon, not the CIA—which thanks to drones has come to operate as much as a paramilitary unit as an intelligence agency. It's a provision meant to open up government officials to talking openly about these sorts of operations after they've happened. The rub is that the CIA currently enjoys free reign with its covert drone operations in Pakistan.

Then again, it's said the classified policy allows for "exceptions if necessary". But no matter if an exception is granted to take out Shami, there are still parallels between his and al-Awlaki's cases. The Department of Justice has once again been tapped to gauge whether a deadly strike on Shami would be legally justified, just like it was, we're told, when al-Awlaki's fate hung in the balance. And though it does seem that the issue continues to divide the administration, a number of US officials have said that the CIA has backed killing Shami from the get go and that despite the Pentagon still feeling somewhat hesitant to carrying out such a plan, the "public" prong of the US's shadow war is perhaps closer to seeing eye-to-eye with the CIA than ever before.

Now in its fifth year, Obama's drone war has killed over 2,400 people. Whether or not Abdullah al-Shami is added to that tally is a matter of who's who.