Taliban

[1001]

Taliban leader vows more attacks in Afghanistan

Mon Jan 9, 2006 6:38 AM EST

KABUL (Reuters) - Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar on Monday vowed more attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai suggested he "get in touch" if he wanted peace.

In a message to mark the three-day Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, which starts in Afghanistan on Tuesday, Omar reiterated his call for jihad, or holy war, against the United States.

"The Taliban attacks in Afghanistan will further intensify in this New Year, which will force Americans to leave Afghanistan very soon," he said in a message carried by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news agency.

AIP said the message had been read over the telephone by a Taliban spokesman, Mohammad Hanif.

Omar, whose whereabouts have been unknown since U.S.-led forces toppled his government in late 2001, said jihad was a religious obligation for Muslims as the United States was "the biggest enemy of Islam."

"Muslims should stand prepared for the sacrifice of jihad on the great day of Eid al-Adha because armed jihad is the only way to safeguard the Islamic world."

Omar's Taliban was driven from power after refusing to surrender al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Karzai told the Associated Press news agency on Sunday he was willing to listen to what Omar had to say, but said the Taliban leader would first have to account for his actions.

Omar's message made no mention of Karzai.

But Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, a deputy of Omar and defense minister in the Taliban's deposed regime, rejected the offer, calling Karzai an "American puppet" who should be tried in an Islamic court.

"Hamid Karzai, the American agent, has turned Afghanistan into an American base and has killed thousands of Afghans," he told Reuters by satellite phone from a secret location.

An adviser to Karzai said the government's attitude toward Omar remained uncompromising.

"Our policy regarding talks with Taliban is clear. Omar is a criminal and he should be brought to justice," he told Reuters.

The United States has posted a $10 million reward for the Taliban leader, but Omar also has plenty of enemies among Afghans who fought against and endured five years of harsh Taliban rule.

Despite the presence of almost 30,000 foreign troops, the country remains dogged by violence.

Thousands have been killed since 2001, more than 1,200 last year alone, including hundreds of militants and more than 50 U.S. soldiers.

Akhund said it would be a betrayal of Islam to stop fighting "America and the infidel forces." "Mullah Omar and his Taliban are not ready for this sin," he said, adding that suicide attacks would continue.

Karzai says hundreds of insurgents have already given up and a handful of former Taliban won seats in September elections.

He held out an olive branch to Taliban rank and file two years ago, and the head of a national reconciliation commission said in November talks were needed to end the violence.

Omar and bin Laden are often said to be hiding on the rugged Afghan-Pakistani border, protected by friendly Pashtun tribes.

http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-09T113800Z_01_ARM931081_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-AFGHAN-KARZAI-COL.XML

[1001]

Afghan, al Qaeda militants use sophisticated arms

By Sayed Salahuddin Fri Feb 3, 8:27 AM ET

KABUL (Reuters) - Al Qaeda and Taliban militants are coordinating attacks on Afghan government troops and foreign forces and using increasingly sophisticated, and deadly, weapons, Afghanistan's defense minister said on Friday.

The militants, who have launched a string of attacks, including 14 suicide bombings in recent months, were getting their equipment from abroad but Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak declined to speculate on where it was coming from.


"It is quite obvious that all the infiltrations to Afghanistan and all the equipment, some of it really technically sophisticated equipment, are supplied from outside Afghanistan," Wardak told Reuters in an interview.


The equipment included high explosive used in roadside bombs and remote-control mechanisms to set off blasts, he said.


"We don't have this equipment readily available in Afghanistan," Wardak said.


About 1,500 people, most of them militants but including Afghan forces, aid workers, civilians and nearly 70 foreign troops, have been killed in the insurgency over the past year.


Wardak said he did not know the level of cooperation between al Qaeda and the Taliban, but said Afghan militants were able to help their foreign comrades.


"It is a combination ... al Qaeda by itself will not be able to do much," he said.


"There are Taliban, there are Haqqani's group, there are Gulbuddin's groups and there are other foreign militant organizations," he said.


Jalaluddin Haqqani is a pro-Taliban militant commander whose forces are active in southeastern Afghanistan. Militants loyal to former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are active in the east, near the border with Pakistan.


PAKISTAN TALKS


Wardak said he could not confirm speculation that al Qaeda militants from Iraq might be slipping into Afghanistan from Iran.


The militants had lost the ability to confront Afghan and foreign forces, he said, and had changed their tactics to suicide attacks, virtually unknown in Afghanistan until recently.


While Wardak declined to speculate on where militants were getting their weapons from, President Hamid Karzai said he would raise the violence in talks during an official visit to Pakistan this month.


"Bombs go off ... the children of Afghanistan suffer," Karzai told a news conference.


Afghanistan could not go on making sacrifices, he said.


"This is an issue we will speak about. Both of us should find a solution," said Karzai.


Pakistan, which is battling militants in its border areas, rejects accusations from Afghan and some U.S. officials that militants are getting help on Pakistani territory.

The past year has been the bloodiest since U.S. and Afghan opposition troops overthrew the Taliban in 2001 after they refused to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060203/wl_nm/security_afghan_dc_1

[Casey]

Al Qaeda leaders not in Afghanistan: Abdullah
Published: Monday, 20 February, 2006, 11:32 AM Doha Time

Staff Reporter

Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah was sure yesterday that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taleban leader Mullah Omar were not present in his country.

He admitted that there was a recent increase in Taleban’s operations "was a matter of concern for us".

However, he told reporters that the security situation has improved taking into consideration that 90% of the country was under the control of Taleban and Al-Qaeda."

He said that discussions between President Hamid Karzai and the Pakistani leadership concentrated on ways to stop attacks from Taleban and Al-Qaeda and to put an end to the infiltration on both sides of the border.

Abdullah said that the government’s priority was to form a national army that will be a beginning of a reconciliation.

On the issue of cartoons offending the Prophet Muhammad, Abdullah questioned the logic of destroying infrastructure and property during demonstrations in order to show resentment.

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=73621&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16

[1001]

Qaida threat in Afghan protest

Jalalabad (Afghanistan), Feb. 20 (Reuters):

Hundreds of Afghan students shouted support today for Osama bin Laden and threatened to join al Qaida during a protest against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.


In an attempt to cool the controversy after a weekend of rioting in countries including Nigeria, where 28 people were killed, and Libya, where 11 died, Pope Benedict said the world’s religions and their symbols had to be respected.


Pakistan’s main Islamist alliance vowed to broaden its campaign with more protests targeted at the US and Pakistani Presidents.


Pakistan's main Islamist alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), said today it would broaden its campaign. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, president of the MMA, was held under house arrest in Lahore at the weekend to prevent him leading a rally in Islamabad yesterday.


After his release today, he called publication of the cartoons in European newspapers “part of the clash of civilisations led by (President George W.) Bush”.


“Therefore, our movement is against Bush as well as against Mush,” he said, referring to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.


The protest in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad passed off without violence. Students gathered at the university campus chanted: “Death to Denmark”,“Death to America” and “Death to France”, a witness said.


They also shouted support for al Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri.


Shouting “Death to Karzai”, they demanded President Hamid Karzai close the embassies of Denmark, the US and France and expel their forces from Afghanistan.


“If they abuse the Prophet of Islam again we will all become al Qaida,” the students shouted.


Two weeks ago in Afghanistan, at least 10 people were killed in several days of protests over the cartoons but violent demonstrations there have largely petered out.


The cartoons, first published in a Danish newspaper last year and reprinted in European papers, have sparked worldwide protests by Muslims who believe it is blasphemous to depict the Prophet.


In a speech to the new Moroccan ambassador to the Vatican, the Pope said: “In order to promote peace and understanding between peoples and mankind, it is both vital and urgent that religions and their symbols are respected and that believers are not the object of provocations that wound their religious feelings.”


“However, intolerance and violence can never be justified as a response to any offence, because it is a response that is incompatible with the sacred principles of religion,” he added.


Some 56 people have been killed and at least 280 injured in the protests, half of them in northern Nigeria. In the deadliest protests this weekend, at least 28 people died in riots in two Muslim states in northern Nigeria.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060221/asp/foreign/story_5874743.asp

[rectar]

hmmmm...221 or 222 or 224's lol

[rectar]

hmmmm...221 or 222 or 224's lolhmmm....222....The Golden Dome....Start of WWIII

http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20photo%20negatives/2006%20News%20Photo%20Originals/February/samarrashrine22f6ap.jpgIraqi Civil War Intensifies: 29 Sunni Mosques Attacked, Following Bomb Attack on a Samarra Shi'i Shrine (http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20archives/2006%20News%20Archives/February/22%20n%20b/Iraqi%20Civil%20War%20Intensifies%20%2029%20Sunni% 20Mosques%20Attacked,%20Following%20Bomb%20Attack% 20on%20a%20Samarra%20Shi'i%20Shrine.htm) (AP, 2/22/06).

[Casey]

Al-Qaeda militants seize control of Kabul prison wing
By Marina McIntyre


An Afghan soldier at Pul-e-Charkhi Prison in Kabul today (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

HUNDREDS of rioting prisoners led by al-Qaeda and Taleban militants were locked in a stand-off with security forces last night after seizing control of a wing of Afghanistan’s main high-security prison.
As night fell the prison, on the eastern edge of Kabul, was ringed by soldiers and police, backed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers, to prevent a break-out.

Seven people were killed in the uprising at the Pul-e-Charkhi prison, according to one police officer at the scene. Prison officials said that 30 had been wounded in clashes between inmates and police.



The huge, run-down, Soviet-style prison was built in the 1970s, and thousands of Afghans who opposed communist rule were killed and tortured there in the 1980s. It now holds 2,000 inmates, including about 350 Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Rioting began in the prison’s Block Two on Saturday night. Muhammad Qasim Hashimzai, Afghanistan’s Deputy Justice Minister, said that prisoners led by al-Qaeda and Taleban militants had taken two female guards hostage during a row over a new prison rule forcing inmates to wear blue uniforms.

The uniforms were intended to prevent a repeat of a break-out last month, when seven Taleban suspects escaped by disguising themselves as visitors.

General Mahboub Amiri, head of Kabul’s Rapid Reaction Police Force, said that the violence began when Taleban members tried to escape. Prison officials said that inmates had been seen trying to climb the walls, but that none had escaped. Hundreds of prisoners armed with makeshift weapons then barricaded themselves inside the block. Gunfire rang out during the day. Smoke rose from windows as inmates burned mattresses and bedding.

The block was divided into three sections, with one each for political prisoners, ordinary criminals and women. Mr Hashimzai said that prisoners had broken through the divisions, and that there were fears that some female prisoners could have been raped.

Four prisoners were wounded while trying to escape, but other injured prisoners were still being held by rioters, Mr Hashimzai said. “They have control of the wounded prisoners and they are not giving them to us so that we can treat them. We have doctors and ambulances ready here,” he said.

Timur Shah, a gang leader who helped to kidnap Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni last year, was involved in starting the riot, according to one of the negotiators, Nader Nadeery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Mr Hashimzai said last night that negotiations with the prisoners had foundered. “Unfortunately, the prisoners have no unity and have different demands. There’s no one leader who can talk to us,” he said.

He said that prisoners were chanting: “Death to (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai”, “Death to Bush” and “Death to America”.

A hundred Afghan prisoners currently held at Guantanamo Bay are expected to be moved to the prison this year.In December 2004, four inmates and four prison officers died after an attempted break-out at the jail. A separate block in the prison houses Jack Idema, an American former soldier convicted of torturing Afghan suspects in a private jail in 2004.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2060280,00.html

[Petronas]

Taliban says sending fighters to Iraq
March 5, 2007

A senior Taliban commander said in remarks broadcast on Friday that the Afghan Islamist group was sending fighters to Iraq to support anti-U.S. militants. "Whenever there is a chance the (Afghanistan-based holy fighters) mujahideen travel to Iraq and the opposite is also true," Mullah Dadullah told Al Jazeera television in an interview. "We have very strong relations with the mujahideen in Iraq. The mujahideen stay in Iraq for a month for example then they come here," he added in remarks dubbed in Arabic. "We also share intelligence." "Travel from and to Iraq is at a peak currently ... if any mujahid wants to carry out an operation in Iraq he can travel."

Several Sunni Muslim groups including a wing of al Qaeda, which is allied to the Taliban, have been fighting U.S.-led and Iraqi government forces in Iraq.

The interview appeared to have been recorded before news emerged on Friday that Pakistani security forces had arrested Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the third most senior member of the Taliban's leadership council. Asked if he was aware of the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders including top chief Osama bin Laden, Dadullah said: "I do not know where they are ... (but) Osama bin Laden is alive, praise God, and he sends his orders to the mujahideen and sends us news of victory." The Taliban were toppled in 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition for refusing to hand over leaders of al Qaeda.

Dadullah repeated that the Taliban plans to escalate operations against foreign soldiers in Afghanistan in the spring with at least 6,000 fighters which he said might rise to up to 20,000 once the fighting intensified. Dadullah was speaking to a Jazeera correspondent outdoors interview with heavily armed bodyguards nearby. Dadullah said the Taliban has obtained weapons but did not say from where, adding that the group was making its own weapons when necessary. "The Taliban today is not the same as the Taliban of five years ago," he said. ...

http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=3/5/2007&Cat=2&Num=003

[Vancouver]

Al-Jazeera's recent interview with Dadullah:
http://www.archive.org/download/mulladad/mulla.wmv
The Arabic text running at the bottom contains unrelated AJ headlines.

In the "artist" field of the wmv, we find
Abu Hadhifa al-Maqdisi
أبو حذيفة المقدسي
"al-Maqdisi" means "of Jerusalem". That alias is also used by al-Qaida's #1 cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (who is Jordanian, currently in the slammer, and who has probably never set foot in Jerusalem).

[Vancouver]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269823,00.html
An American military spokesman says they think Abu Laith al-Libi was behind the attack during Cheney's visit, and Dadullah's attribution of that attack to bin Ladin is apt to be a lie to bolster morale about the missing Saudi.

[Casey]

'Taliban leader Mullah Omar is in southern Afghanistan, not Pakistan'
Saturday, May 12, 2007 - 08:35 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Khalida Mazhar 'Pakistan Times' US Bureau Chief

WASHINGTON (US): President General Pervez Musharraf has said that Pakistan is pursuing a correct strategy to fight the menace of terrorism and strongly rejected Afghan president’s allegation that Taliban leader Mullah Omar is hiding in Quetta.

“Even if we are succeeding 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, the direction is correct, end goal is correct, strategy is correct,” he told American CBS news channel, while forcefully defending Pakistan’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Responding to a question he dismissed as “absolute non-sense” Afghan President Karzai’s allegation that Mulla Omar is hiding in Quetta.

President Musharraf said the Taliban leader is somewhere in south of Afghanistan.

President said, “He (Mullah Omar) is in south of Afghanistan somewhere, he is not in Pakistan, although President Karzai and everyone keeps saying he is in Quetta - absolute nonsense, absolute total nonsense—he has never been in Pakistan - they are trying to make a scapegoat of Pakistan and we don’t like that at all.”

He said “Pakistan is being maligned by the West unfairly because of lack of understanding, total lack of understanding of the environment and reality by President Karzai himself.”

Asked if he is angry with the Afghan leader, the President replied :”Yes, indeed, very angry.”

He ruled out the suggestion of a joint operation by American and Pakistani forces against insurgents trying to hide on the Pakistani side.

He rejected, “absolutely and totally,” the prospect of the joint US-Pakistan military operation to pursue retreating insurgents inside Pakistan adding that “the whole population of Pakistan will rise against it.”

In response to a question about al-Qaeda leaders remaining “free to operate” even after six years of counter terrorism efforts by the coalition, the President said “they are in the mountains and there are people who support them and hide them and these mountains are inaccessible - they have been there for centuries - even the British never went in.”

The Pakistani leader brushed aside reports that US Vice President Dick Cheney had visited Islamabad last month to ‘pressure’ the country to do more in the fight against terrorists.

“Is there an alternative,” he posed a question when the interviewer suggested that partial success in the fight against terrorism means partial failure.

When asked as to why US, Pakistan and Afghanistan have not been able to trace terrorists despite sharing intelligence information, he said “We are trying to locate them by all possible means—and we are not being able to - it is as simple as that - they are in the mountains and we do not even know whether they are in Afghanistan or on our side and they keep shifting.”

Responding to a question President Musharraf said he does not feel frustrated that after six years of pursuing terrorists the coalition has not been able to capture or eliminate some of the top terrorists but believed this is a challenge to face for the sake of Pakistan.

The President said, “We have a challenge to face - we have a challenge to face for the sake of Pakistan.”

Answering another question, President Musharraf said it is not the government’s weakness that it has not so far moved against two “madaris” adjacent to Lal Masjid in capital Islamabad.

He said, “Certainly, it is not weakness of the government.”●

http://www.pakistantimes.net/2007/04/15/top5.htm

[Casey]

Taliban chief urges unity against US
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sat, 12 May 2007 22:39:53

Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar has called upon all Muslims to unite against international forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fugitive Omar issued a rare statement Saturday, calling on Afghan and Iraqi insurgents to put aside sectarian disputes.

"While the oppressor Americans are pounding bombs on innocent people... they are meanwhile attempting to separate Muslims through ethnic, religion and tribal (differences)," the statement quoted Omar as saying.

"I call upon all jihadi leaders, national figures and politicians to join hands and free their beloved countries from the hands of infidel Americans," Omar added.

He further called on the same groups to form a 'pure Islamic government' once international troops are ousted.

"This is America's conspiracy to divide Afghans by the name of (ethnic) Tajik and Pashtuns and in Iraq by the name of Sunni and Shiite in a bid to ease the pressure on themselves, but they are failing," the Taliban chief stressed in the statement.

Omar continued "I'm sure the Americans will be defeated both in Afghanistan and Iraq."

The Taliban leader, who has a 10-million-dollar bounty on his head, headed the 1996-2001 Taliban regime which was ousted by the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

MF/KB

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=9617§ionid=3510204

[Casey]

Officials: Taliban's Dadullah killed in Afghan clash


Story Highlights•

NEW: Taliban's top operational commander, Mullah Dadullah, killed in clash
• NEW: Dadullah believed to be behind kidnappings of foreigners and Afghans
• More than 70 militants killed in southern area, Afghan security official says
• Roadside bomb killed at least eight Afghan police outside Kandahar

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) -- The Taliban's top operational commander, Mullah Dadullah, has been killed in a clash in Afghanistan, security officials said on Sunday.

"Mullah Dadullah has been killed and his body is in Kandahar," said Saeed Ansari, spokesman for the intelligence department.

Another government spokesman said the one-legged Dadullah was killed in a clash with Afghan troops in the southern province of Helmand on Friday.

Apart from leading most Taliban attacks in the south, the notorious Dadullah was also believed to be behind a series of kidnappings of foreigners and Afghans.

There have been several reports over recent years that Dadullah had been killed or captured.

His death will be a heavy blow for the Taliban, fighting to expel foreign troops since they were ousted in a U.S.-led offensive after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

He would also be the most important Taliban killed since then.

In December, U.S.-led forces killed another top Taliban official, Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Osmani, in an air attack in the south of the country after a tip-off by Pakistan.

In other developments, Western and Afghan troops have driven the Taliban from a southern area after a week-long battle in which more than 70 militants were killed, an Afghan security official said on Saturday.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan in recent months after the traditional winter lull and an upsurge of fighting last year, the bloodiest since the Taliban's removal in 2001.

Bomb kills eight Afghan police
In the latest incident on Saturday, a roadside bomb killed at least eight Afghan police outside the southern city of Kandahar, provincial police chief, Esmatullah Alizai said.

There were no casualties among Afghan and Western troops in the fighting in Nahri Saraj of neighboring Helmand province, scene of a series of operations by foreign-led forces in recent weeks, the security official said.

Five Taliban commanders were amongst those killed, the official said, adding there were no casualties among civilians.

"We have driven out the Taliban from the district and it is under our control," he said.

Foreign troops led by the U.S. military and NATO as well as the Taliban could not be immediately contacted for comment about the battle.

Nahri Saraj lies 25 km (15 miles) from Sangin district where witnesses said more than 40 civilians were killed last Tuesday in an air strike by U.S.-led coalition troops.

The coalition has confirmed civilian casualties in the battle of Sangin.

Separately, an air attack by Western forces killed at least seven civilians, including women and children, in Marja district of Helmand early on Friday, witnesses said on Saturday.

Seven of the civilians wounded in the attack were brought to a government run hospital in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, they said.

"I know of six or seven deaths in my village," a wounded woman said at the hospital.

Afghan officials say U.S.-led troops have killed scores of civilians in the past two months in Afghanistan.

A U.S. commander apologized last week for the deaths of 19 civilians killed by coalition forces in March.

Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/05/13/afghanistan.violence.reut/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

[pixikill]

yay!!
God is killing allahs minions!!
and God is killing allahs minions in allahs god-forsaken homeland.
nice one, God!

[Vancouver]

"Irhabi 11" at Firdaws confirms that this is Dadullah:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/images/2007/05/20070513065040x-dadollah-203.jpg
BBC photo.

Al-Jazeera just now:

Taliban sources confirmed to Al Jazeera that Dadullah had been killed.

A Taliban spokesman had earlier rejected the government's claim labelling it "propaganda".

[Vancouver]

http://www.aljazeera.net/mritems/images/2007/5/13/1_692180_1_34.jpgal-Jazeera photo

[pixikill]

how gay are those sheets?

[Petronas]

U.S.: NATO has intercepted Iranian arms
Wed Jun 13, 1:06 PM ET

NATO has intercepted Iranian weapons shipments to Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents, providing evidence Iran is violating international law to aid a group it once considered a bitter enemy, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

"There's irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this," Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said on CNN. "It's certainly coming from the government of Iran. It's coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government."

Speaking separately to The Associated Press, Burns said NATO must act to stop the shipments. The Iran-Afghanistan frontier is "a very long border. But the Iranians need to know that we are there and that we're going to oppose this." "It's a very serious question," he said, adding that Iran is in "outright violation" of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The State Department later appeared to step back from Burns' assertion the Iranian government was directly involved in the transfers but stressed Washington has proof that weapons from Iran were being sent to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. "We absolutely are certain that there are Iranian-origin weapons flowing into Afghanistan to the Taliban," spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. "We do not know the extent of any Iranian government involvement at this point, but given the nature of the regime and also some of its past behaviors elsehwhere — whether in the Palestinian areas or in Iraq — it certainly raises very serious questions and we are quite concerned about it," he said.

Tehran, which is also in a dispute with the West over its nuclear program, denies it is aiding the Taliban, calling the accusation part of a broad anti-Iranian campaign. Iran says it makes no sense that a Shiite-led government like itself would help the fundamentalist Sunni movement of the Taliban.

Burns acknowledged that it was "curious" that Iran would aid the Taliban. "It's quite surprising," he told CNN. "The Iranians had said that they were the mortal enemies of the Taliban in 2001 and '02."

Burns did not give details on the scope of the alleged Iranian shipments, although he appeared to indicate that they were limited. "I don't think it's made a substantial difference in the greater theater of the war," he said. "It is not going to turn the tide against us, but it is very troublesome, it is illegal under international law ... and the Iranians need to stop it," Burns told the AP.

Burns, who was holding talks in Paris, first accused Iran on Tuesday of transferring weapons to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan — the most direct comments yet on the issue by a ranking American official.

In Afghanistan last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Iranian weapons were falling into the hands of anti-government Taliban fighters, but he stopped short of blaming Tehran.

Iran's possible role in aiding insurgents in Iraq has been hotly debated, and last month some Western and Persian Gulf governments alleged that the Islamic government in Tehran is also secretly bolstering Taliban fighters.

In an AP interview Monday, U.S. Army Gen. Dan McNeill said Taliban fighters are showing signs of better training, using combat techniques comparable to "an advanced Western military" in ambushes of U.S. Special Forces soldiers.

"In Afghanistan it is clear that the Taliban is receiving support, including arms from ... elements of the Iranian regime," British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in the May 31 edition of the Economist. ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070613/ap_on_re_eu/iran_taliban;_ylt=AnkEWt9dE_domyjMlPgKkmgUewgF

[Casey]

Taliban vow to attack Westerners in Kabul

The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
KABUL: A spokesman for the Taliban said Tuesday that its fighters would attack restaurants in the capital that are frequented by Westerners, a day after eight people died in a suicide assault on a luxury hotel here.

Afghan officials said they had arrested four men after the attack Monday on the Serena Hotel, a heavily guarded property frequented by Westerners and other foreigners working in Afghanistan. One of those detained was seized in a police uniform, an official said.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said by telephone: "We will target all these restaurants in Kabul where foreigners are eating. We have jihadists in Kabul right now and soon we will carry out more attacks against military personnel and foreigners."

Taliban spokesmen have boasted before of plans to increase their attacks, threats that often were not realized. In the past two years, however, the militants have turned increasingly to suicide attacks. The attack on the Serena was the first of its kind against a facility frequented by Westerners.

Afghan officials accused a militant connected to an insurgent leader in Pakistan of organizing the attack. An American, a Norwegian reporter and a Filipina hotel worker were among the dead. The police said they found a video made by two of the attackers in a house in Kabul where they arrested two men. A fourth man - believed to have driven the attackers to the hotel - was arrested in eastern Afghanistan while trying to flee to Pakistan, the police said.

The hotel attack indicated that the Taliban could be refining their strategy to undermine the government of President Hamid Karzai and the Western campaign to stabilize Afghanistan.

Amrullah Saleh, head of Afghanistan's intelligence service, said three militants stormed the hotel. A guard shot and killed one at the gate to the hotel's parking lot, which triggered his suicide vest. A second blew himself up near the entrance to the hotel's lobby. The third made it inside the hotel and shot his way through the lobby, Saleh said. The police said the man they suspected of being the third attacker was arrested soon after the assault. He was the one wearing a police uniform.

The militants stormed the hotel just after 6 p.m., hunting down Westerners who hid in a gym. More than 30 U.S. soldiers rushed to the hotel and security personnel from the U.S. Embassy ran to the scene.

Blood covered the lobby floor as gunfire rang out, witnesses said.

Saleh asserted that the attack was organized by Mullah Abdullah, an ally of Siraj Haqqani, a militant who is thought to be based in Miran Shah, the main town in the tribal region of North Waziristan in Pakistan. The U.S. military has offered a $200,000 reward for the capture of Haqqani.

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=9236371

[Casey]

The Media Activities Of The Taliban Islamic Movement - By Al-Somood Magazine.

Published and translated by Al-Somood Magazine

Since its inception as a military jihadi movement, the Taliban Islamic movement has recognized the extraordinary importance of the news media in deciding [the outcome of] conflicts, in particular, ideological conflicts. It is convinced that the media are among the most important elements of psychological warfare - and the war of morale, which is by no means less important than the field war. Accordingly, the movement undertook to begin its media activity, together with its military activity, against the invading crusader forces at the time of the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan. The movement appointed a unit consisting of the journalistic cadres who formerly occupied important media positions within the Government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The [media] unit officially began its journalistic activities on 23/09/2002; the activities consisted of the following:

1. The setting up of an internet website, speaking on behalf of the Islamic Emirate.

2. Issue of the monthly magazine Sirk in the Pashtu and Dari languages.

3. The quarterly magazine Murshal [The Trench], specializing in the publication of military news and reports.

4. Issue of the weekly newspaper ad-Dami^r [The Conscience] in Pashtu and Dari.

5. Publication and distribution of CDs containing jihadi films.

6. Publication and distribution of [audio] tapes of jihadi songs and [news] reports.

7. Contact with both local and world [TV] channels and other news media.

8. The collection and gathering of field news, then the translation thereof into Arabic, English and Urdu.

9. Translation and publication of Islamic books, especially those concerning jihad and resistance [to occupation].

Initially, the media unit was conducting its activities under the supervision of Sa’ada Qudratu’llah Jamal, who held the position Minister of Media and Culture in the period of the Islamic Emirate Government. Then Sheikh Ustaz Muhammad Yasir was appointed official in charge of this unit on 08/05/2004.

Likewise, Brother Mufti Latifu’llah Hakimi was appointed its official spokesperson, in which capacity Brother Hakimi would proclaim the continued pursuit of the jihadi course by the Muslim Afghan people, under the leadership of Commander-of-the-Faithful Mullah Omar (God protect him), against all the occupiers and their minions; and this he would do by contacting the news agencies and TV stations.

This unit led the movement’s journalistic struggle against the crusader occupation, and contributed toward directing the media battle against all the various, rancorous Western media [outlets]; as the world crusader alliance led by America had launched an ideological attack against Afghanistan, besides its military onslaught. And in this attack they spared no effort, but did whatever they could.

In the context of these sorely expended crusader efforts, the Foreign Relations Committee of the American Congress agreed in November 2001 to instigate a media war against the Taliban through the setting-up of a 24-hour “Radio Free Afghanistan”, as well as the creation of radio stations and television channels. The Republican Congressman Ed Royce, who proposed the project, said at the time:

“Directing radio and television programs toward Afghanistan will help us win the media war against the Taliban.”

The Western media set out to distort the public image of the Taliban movement by stirring up a number of issues related to the Afghan question. However, through its active spokespersons, the movement succeeded in repelling these attacks using its own media. Brother Mufti Hakim had played the critically effective role in this serious confrontation, at a time when the efforts of all the enemies were concentrated against the movement.

By the writ of Almighty God, that the enemies were able to capture Sheikh Ustaz Muhammad Yasir. The enemy accounted his capture a painful blow to the movement, but God (Great and Exalted) caused their hopes to be disappointed through his replacement by other active brothers of the media unit, similarly able and qualified in this field.

Only a short space of time elapsed before Brother Latif al-Hakimi was arrested, and the brothers Qari Muhammad Yusuf “Ahmadi” and Dr Muhammad Hanif were appointed the media unit’s official spokespersons for the movement. By the Grace of God, and through His Succour, the movement’s media activities did not come to an end. Indeed, they were in a state of forward progress, and that owing, first, to the Goodness of God, and then to the efforts of the brothers who took upon themselves the task of achieving that progress.

In the year 1427 AH the media centre issued Alsomood [The Resistance] magazine in Arabic, under the supervision of Sa’ada Nusayru’ddin ‘Herawi’ (may God protect him). It is worth mentioning that Sheikh Nusayru’ddin “Herawi” is considered among the most important and pre-eminent personages and jihadi leaders in the movement at present. So too previously, he occupied very high and important positions, and acquired the honour of [being] “Secretary of State” in the Bureau of the Commander-of-the-Faithful at the time of the Islamic Emirate.

Seeing as he enjoys a special status and dignity in his relation to the Commander-of-the-Faithful (may God protect him), and, furthermore, undertakes the accomplishment of important military and administrative activities, he has become famous among the leadership of the Taliban and among the Mujahideen as the “Right Hand” of the Commander-of-the-Faithful (God protect him). Accordingly, he is respected by all.

Security circumstances have necessitated that he use the name “Herawi” instead of his real name; as he works in more than one sphere, his original name appears at the head of the Americans’ list of the main wanted persons belonging to the Taliban. We content ourselves here with revealing this much of his identity and no more, for the sake of his protection; and we implore God (High and Exalted) to help him in his undertakings in noble jihadi causes, and to grant him success, and to protect him through His Generous Protection.

Sheikh Nusayru’ddin “Herawi”, in addition to the founding and publication of Alsomood magazine, has created a sister website at: www.alsomood.r8.org; this he did on 01-02-2007.

Likewise, the magazine office has other media projects, such as the production and issue of jihadi films in Arabic and the local language, and their publication in the Islamic world through websites and Islamic jihadi forums. In this way, Taliban has been able (with God’s Help) to take the battle to the heart of the enemy, achieving this, specifically, by the broadcast, through world and local media outlets, of the pictures of jihadi operations against crusader soldiers.

Taliban continues to conduct significant and notable media activities besides those we have already mentioned, such as the creation of news websites in Pashtu and Arabic, as well as the issue of newspapers and magazines, all of which has given the movement a broad media presence.

We mention here some of these activities, as examples:

1. ‘Azm [Resolution/Purpose] monthly magazine

This magazine was established on 25th May 2002 by brother Nasiruddin al-Nasir. It published articles, reports, and accurate military statistics from behind the frontline in Pashtu and Dari. Its preparations for publication got as far as the eighth issue but it stopped publication after the seizure/capture of its editors on 16th April 2003. ‘Azm magazine is considered one of the most successful of the movement’s publications because it was distinguished in publishing extensive essays specializing in the Afghan situation and carrying out interviews with the leaders in the field and also the detailed reports from the trenches.

Newsweek, the American magazine - after the detention of its founder - wrote a detailed report [Newsweek, Periscope (March 22nd 2004)] about ‘Azm magazine and its important role in the movement’s first media appearance [i.e. it was important in establishing for the Taliban, for the first time, a media presence].

2. Tawakkal [Trust] magazine

This magazine was established by the martyred brother Mullah Mohammad Hussein Mustas’ad (may God (Most-High) have mercy on him) following the capture of the founders of ‘Azm magazine in accordance with the saying of God Most-High [in the Qur’an], “then, when thou has taken a decision, put thy trust in God,” taking it [the saying] as a good omen. The publication of this magazine continues in Pashtu to this day. However, it be delayed from its specified date [of publication] following the martyrdom of its founder brother Mohammad Hussein Mustas’ad (may God have mercy) in a fierce battle face to face with American forces in Zabul province on 22nd July 2007. The martyred brother Mullah Mohammad Hussein Mustas’ad (may God have mercy on him) was considered one of the movement’s preeminent scholarly and journalistic personages of the movement since he left behind a great wealth of his scholarly and cultural writings; and we mention here, in particular, his well know n four-volume work entitled “The Taliban in Afghanistan - from the rightly-guided caliphate to the Islamic Emirate.” This weighty book is a comprehensive encyclopedia of the Afghan Taliban movement since the author (may God have mercy on him) explores all the stages of the growth of the movement and its development. He also discusses the details of the formation of the Islamic Emirate and its administrative, political and military affairs and its relationships with [other] Islamic movements and the countries of the Islamic world and others.

Brother Mustas’id (may God have mercy on him) held important scholarly and administrative positions at the time of the Islamic Emirate government, such as President of the Central Academy in Kabul and Deputy Minister of Finance.

3. Basoun [Revolution] newspaper

This newspaper was established by brother Mullah Hussein Khan in the last days of the month of October in 2002 and was issued on a fortnightly basis in Pashtu and Dari. Its publication continued for a whole year but it stopped on account of security conditions.

4. Tora Bora magazine

This magazine was established by brother Ghazi Ajmal in 2003 and is issued every 3 months in Pashtu and Farsi. Its pages included articles, announcements and military reports. It enjoys great fame among other jihadi publications in Afghanistan.

5. Monthly Istaqamat [Uprightness] magazine

Istaqamat magazine was established on 3rd November 2005 by brother Hamidullah Hamed and this magazine was published in 3 languages: Pashtu, Dari and English. It stopped publication following the third issue on account of straitened security circumstances.

6. I’idaad [Preparation] website in Pashtu on the internet

7. Nafir [Trumpet/Horn] website in Arabic on the internet

They both [also I’idaad website] were closed down and stopped from publishing after 6 months. That happened after their closing on the internet by the enemies.

8. Mujahid Ghag [Voice of the Mujahid] magazine

This magazine was established on 6th August 2004 by brother Suleymankhil. It is published every 2 months in Pashtu.

All the supervisors and those who published and established these media/informational publications are journalists and followers of the Islamic Emirate, even if they prefer to publish these magazines and newspapers not officially as spokespersons for the movement’s media unit.

[Casey]

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A death and an injury an a big number of the collaborating administration members in the attack of Kabul

The chosen sacrifice of Allah ( Mojahed ) - 27 / 4 / 2008



بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم



مصرع وإصابة عدد كبير من أعضاء الإدارة العميلة في هجوم كابل

ذبيح الله (مجاهد) – 27/4/2008

هاجم مجاهدو الإمارة الإسلامية الأبطال التالي أسمائهم: ملا عبد العلي من ننجرهار، ملا حمزه من قندهار، ملا عطا محمد من كابل، ملا محمد عثمان من قندهار، فرهاد من هرات والياس من بكتيا، هجوما مسلحا مفاجئا ضمن عمليات ((العبرة)) صباح اليوم في قلب العاصمة كابل وبالتحديد في استاد " غازي استوديوم " حين كان رئيس الإدارة العميلة كرزاي وأعضاء حكومته وعدد من البرلمانيين يحتفلون يوم الثامن من شهر ثور الموافق لـ 27 أبريل.

حسب التقارير الواصلة، خلال الهجوم الذي استمر لمدة 15 دقيقة، بداية أطلق المجاهدون عددا من الصواريخ على مكان الإحتفال، ثم مباشرة أطلق هؤلاء الأبطال المذكورين أعلاه قذائف آر بي جي ونيران الأسلحة الرشاشة داخل الإستاد على مسئولي الإدارة العميلة، مما أسفر عن مقتل وإصابة عددا من المسؤولين رفيع المستوى، وعددا من أعضاء البرلمان ومجموعة كبيرة من جنود الداخليين.

وبعد عمليات الكماندوز، عاد ثلاثة من المجاهدين المهاجمين إلى مراكزهم بأمن وسلام، وأستشهد الثلاثة الآخرين من قبل العدو.

وبعدها القي القبض على عدد من الأشخاص الأبرياء من قبل العدو من شدة الاضطراب بتهمة الإرتباط بالهجوم.

وجدير بالذكر، بأنه ليست هذه هي المرة الأولى التي يتم فيها عمليات الكماندوز من قبل مجاهدي الإمارة الإسلامية الأبطال على العدو، حيث قبل مدة وجيزة بقرب من قصر الرئاسة الجمهوري في فندق " سرينا " تم هجوم مماثل على العدو.



دستور إمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - المقدمة والعشرة فصول مترجمة للعربية



وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمْ لَا تُفْسِدُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ قَالُوا إِنمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحُونَ (البقرة11)
أَلَا إِنَّهُمْ هُمْ الْمُفْسِدُونَ وَلَكِنْ لَا يَشْعُرُونَ (البقرة12)



معلومات: الناطق الرسمي لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان
قاري محمد يوسف (احمدي)
للمناطق الجنوب الغربية والشمال الغربية في البلاد
هاتف : 008821621346341
خلوي : 0700886853 - 0707163424
ذبيح الله (مجاهد)
للمناطق الجنوب الشرقية والشمال الشرقية في البلاد
هاتف : 008821621360585
خلوي : 0799169794 - 0707010740

والله أكبر والعزة لله ولرسوله وللمؤمنين
اللجنة الإعلامية لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان
------------------------------------------------------
المصدر / صفحة (صوت الجهاد) في 27/4/2008
موقع رسمي لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان


In the Name of Allah, the Benificent, the Merciful



A death and an injury an a big number of the collaborating administration members in the attack of Kabul

The chosen sacrifice of Allah ( Mojahed ) - 27 / 4 / 2008

The militants of the Islamic emirate attacked the heroes the next their names : Abd Al-Ali's mullah from Nangarhar, Hamza's mullah from Kandahar, Ata Mohamed's mullah from Kabul, Mohamed Othman's mullah from Kandahar, Frhad from Hrat and Elias from Paktia, a sudden armed attack within operations ( the lesson ) today in the morning in the heart of the capital Kabul and specifically in a stadium " Ghazi Istoudiom " when it was the president of the collaborating administration Karzai and its government members and a number of parliamentarians celebrate the eighth day from bull month the coinciding to 27 April .

According to the benevolent reports, through the attack that continued for 15 minutes, beginning the militants shot a number of missiles at the celebration place then directly that shot these mentioned heroes its above is the missiles of RBJ and the machineguns fires inside the stadium on the officials of the collaborating administration, which resulted in a killing and an injury a number of officials high-ranking, and a number of parliament members and an a big group of the internal soldiers .

And after Al Kmandoz operations, three of the attacking militants returned to their centers with security and peace, and I am martyred the other three from the enemy .

And after it he carried out the arrest of a number of the free persons from the enemy from the intensity of disorder with the charge of connection with the attack .

And a worth mentioning, that it is not this she is the first time that takes place in it Al Kmandoz operations are from the militants of the Islamic emirate the heroes on the enemy, where before a short period near from the republican presidential palace in a hotel " our secrets " a similar attack on the enemy took place .



A constitution emirate of Islamic Afghanistan - the introduction and the affability are chapters translated into the Arabic



And if for them he says, you do not spoil in the land they said but we are reforming ( the cow is 11 )
So they are the corrupter but they do not feel ( the cow is 12 )



Information : The spokesman of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban
A continental is Mohamed Youssef ( you praise )
To the regions the south western and the north western in the countries
A telephone : 008821621346341
A cellular : 0700886853 -0707163424
The chosen sacrifice of Allah ( Mojahed )
To the regions the south eastern and the north eastern in the countries
A telephone : 008821621360585
A cellular : 0799169794 -0707010740

And Allah is the greatest and the honour to Allah and to its messenger and to the believers
The media committee of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban
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The source / a page ( the jihad sound ) on 27 / 4 / 2008
An official site of the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban

[The 801]

Taliban claim victory from a defeat
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The Taliban have suffered their first major loss in this year's offensive, but they are putting on a brave face, even spinning the setback as a triumph in their broader battle against foreign forces in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, several thousand US Marines captured the town of Garmsir in the southern Afghan province of Helmand in their first large operation since arriving to reinforce North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops last month.

The Taliban-controlled Garmsir had served as a main supply route for their insurgency in the area.

The Taliban, however, claim the loss of one base is not critical, and anyway, for NATO to hold on to its gain it will have to commit thousands of troops to the outpost, which is located in the inhospitable desert, if it is to effectively guard the lawless and porous border through which the Taliban funnel men, arms and supplies.

The Taliban also claim that one of their underlying goals since the US-led invasion in 2001 has been to tie down as many foreign troops as possible, much as the mujahideen wore down Soviet troops in the 1980s. Various Taliban leaders have told the media they will not resist the forces in Garmsir, one of the biggest concentrations since the 2001 assault on the country.

Meanwhile, the Taliban say they will energize their drive to win over the Pashtun tribal districts on both sides of the border and turn them into "Taliban country", a process that is already well underway.

For NATO, the fight against the Taliban has almost gone full circle. From the initial large offensive involving thousands of troops, NATO resorted to limited special operations with heavy reliance on air attacks. This only increased the population's anger against the coalition as many ordinary citizens died in the onslaught from the sky, and the Taliban were able to capitalize on this discontent.

NATO command has now decided to increase its ground presence, even at the risk of greater casualties. As mentioned above, this suits the Taliban and its al-Qaeda-inspired goal of tying up troops.

As NATO consolidates in the Garmsir deserts, the Taliban will be busy in eastern Afghanistan's border provinces, aiming to bring the tribes there under Taliban control.

One of their weapons is fear, as happens in the Pakistani tribal areas, where through targeted killings of high-profile enemies, such as tribal chiefs, clerics and pro-government personalities, they effectively intimidate their rivals.

Now it is happening in Afghanistan, the latest being the suicide attack, carried out by Anwar ul-Haq Mujahid's Tora Bora group, in the Khogiani district of Nangarhar province against the police chief of Khogiani, who had informed US forces in 2001 about the Tora Bora mountains and al-Qaeda's sanctuary there. The police chief survived, but at least 18 other people were killed.

The mastermind of this strategy is Ustad Yasir, a regional commander of the Pakistan and Afghan border regions, though he was recently rooted out from Khyber Agency in Pakistan after the Taliban were betrayed there. (See Taliban bitten by a snake in the grass Asia Times Online, April 26.)

Having "lost" Khyber Agency, where the Taliban had targeted NATO supply lines, they now want to continue this tactic in adjoining Nangarhar province.

The Taliban don't forget - or forgive - though. On Thursday, they launched a suicide attack in Khyber Agency against Haji Namdar, who betrayed them. Only one of the four explosive plates strapped to the bomber exploded, so Namdar managed to escape unhurt, although 30 others were injured.

At the time of the attack, Namdar was appealing to the masses for donations for the Taliban's struggle in Afghanistan. But now he has been exposed as a traitor and in fact not pro-Taliban. This may allow the Taliban to make inroads into his large constituency, which is traditionally suspicious of the Taliban, who still very much want to regain a footing in Khyber Agency.

Taliban sources have also claimed the capture of an important US military camp in Khost province (close to the Pakistan border), but that could not be independently confirmed. The camp is said to have been taken by Jalaluddin Haqqani and handed over to al-Qaeda militants. If this is true, it would be a step in the Taliban's march to wrest control of Afghan tribes.

Meanwhile, the NATO soldiers guarding the Garmsir deserts, one of the world's hottest spots, with temperatures reaching 50-60 Celsius (122-140 F - 801), face a tough time. The area is central to the country's flourishing opium trade.

On the Afghan side of the border, it is run by elements in the Afghan administration and security forces. (See The Taliban's flower power Asia Times Online, February 1, 2007.) Across the border, it is mainly run by Pakistani-Iranian Baloch smugglers.

The Taliban only allow the transportation of drugs and related activities for payment, which means the drug cartels will facilitate the insurgency, and make it even hotter for NATO.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JE03Df02.html

[Casey]

Killed a father and Sheikh Suleiman al-Dajani Aba Al-Qahtani in Afghanistan

-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------

Name of God the Merciful

Statement
Al-Qaeda organization in Afghanistan

About the martyrdom of Sheikh Abu Suleiman al-Allah's mercy

Praise be to God, who singled out to stay, and wrote a courtyard created, and generous of them martyrs, they are alive with their Lord.
And prayers and peace upon our Prophet Muhammad Imam Alatkiee, and the machine owners Tahireen Alazkiae.
After:

Our hearts are filled recognition of the king Qadeer, and satisfaction juvenile Galilee God Almighty, to mourn the Islamic nation in general and especially to the mujahideen struggling Sheikh Sulaiman Al-Otaibi father Almighty God's mercy, it was on a date with martyrdom in the land of Afghanistan after the Iraq side of the brothers here, before they Nearly six months after the migration, Jihad and the science and advocacy and advice, both parts of God about us and good for Islam and Muslims.

It was his martyrdom in the state of Paktia in Afghanistan with his companion, Brother Abu Al-Qahtani Dja God's mercy, is the brother Nasser Abu Faraj Al-Qahtani by God, following a clash with the enemies of God and renegade soldiers of the Cross, proved to God and his eyesight and beating an example of heroism and sacrifice and Alastpsahl.

God's mercy and the mercy wide, before the satisfactory, and housing.

We extend our condolences to his family and two sisters all Muslims and mujahideen, but Abe Solomon Brothers of the Mujahidin of Iraq especially in the island for a Arabs.

We ask God to bless the effects of the martyrs, and compensates them better Muslims.
Thank God the Lord of the Worlds.

Do not forget to pray for

Al-Qaeda organization in Afghanistan

Written by Sheikh commander / Mustafa Abu These remarks were made - may God protect him --
First 1429 e-ul


Source: (Center for Media Dawn)




استشهاد أبا سليمان العتيبي والشيخ أبا دجانة القحطاني في أفغانستان

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

بيان
تَنَظيم قَاعِدةّ الجِهَاد فِي أفغَانِستَان



حول استشهاد الشيخ أبي سليمان العتيبي رحمه الله




الحمد لله الذي تفرد بالبقاء ، وكتب على خلقه الفناء ، وكرّم منهم الشهداء ، فهم عند ربهم أحياء .
والصلاة والسلام على نبينا محمدٍ أمام الأتقياء ، وعلى آله وصحابته الطاهرين الأزكياء.
وبعد :

فبقلوبٍ مِلؤها التسليم للملك القدير ، والرضا بقضاء الرب الجليل عز وجل ، ننعى إلى الأمة الإسلامية عامة وإلى المجاهدين خاصة الشيخ المجاهد أبا سليمان العتيبي رحمه الله تعالى ، فقد كان على موعدٍ مع الشهادة في أرض أفغانستان بعد أن انحاز من العراق إلى إخوانه هنا ، قبل ما يقرب من ستةِ أشهر ، بعد هجرةٍ وجهاد وعلمٍ ودعوةٍ ونصحٍ ، جزاه الله عنا وعن الإسلام والمسلمين خيراً.

وكان استشهاده في ولاية بكتيا بأفغانستان مع رفيقه الأخ أبي دجانة القحطاني رحمه الله ، وهو أخو أبي ناصر القحطاني فرج الله عنه، إثر اشتباكٍ مع أعداء الله جنود الصليب والردة ، وثبّتهما الله ونصرهما وضربا مثلا للبطولة والتضحية والاستبسال.

فرحمهما الله رحمة واسعة ، وتقبّلهما في المرضيين ، وأسكنهما عليين .



ونتقدم بالتعزية فيهما لأهلهما وإخوانهما المجاهدين وعموم المسلمين ، ولإخوان أبي سليمان من مجاهدي العراق خاصة وفي جزيرة ا لعرب.

نسأل الله أن يبارك على آثار الشهداء ، وأن يعوّض المسلمين منهم خيرا.
والحمد لله رب العالمين.



لا تنسونا من الدعاء

تَنَظيم قَاعِدةّ الجِهَاد فِي أفغَانِستَان

كتبه الشيخ القائد / مصطفى أبو اليزيد - حفظه الله -
جمادى الأولى 1429هـ


المصدر: (مركز الفجر للإعلام)

[Casey]

Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/ statement over the martyrdom of Sheikh Abu Sulaiman Otaibi

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Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan/ statement over the martyrdom of Sheikh Abu Sulaiman Al Otaibi

In the name of Allah the most gracious the most merciful

Statement
Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan

Over the martyrdom of Sheikh Abu Sulaiman Al Otaibi

Praise is to Allah who is Unique in being Immortal, and wrote for His creation perishing, and honored from them the martyrs, for they are before their Lord Alive
And peace and blessings of Allah on our Prophet Muhammad the Imam of the pious, and on his family and righteous companions

To proceed

With hearts full of surrender to the decree of the All Capable Lord, and with the acceptance of the judgment of Allah the Exalted, the Almighty, we present to the Islamic Ummah in general and to the Mujahideen especially the news of the martyrdom of the Mujahid Sheikh Abu Sulaiman Al Otaibi, May Allah have mercy on him. He was on an appointment with martyrdom in the land of Afghanistan after he came from Iraq and joined his brothers here before 6 months approximately, after migration and jihad and knowledge and Dawah and instruction. May Allah reward him on behalf of the Muslims and Islam with goodness

He was martyred in the Pakitka province in Afghanistan with his companion and brother Abu Dujanah Al Qahtani May Allah have mercy on him, (the brother of Abu Naseer Al Qahtani May Allah hasten his release), as a result of clashes with the enemies of Allah from the crusaders and apostates. Allah granted them steadfastness and victory and they cited an example of championship, sacrifice and heroism

May Allah have vast mercy on them, and accept them amongst the accepted and grant them high station

We give condolence in them to their families and Mujahideen brothers and all brothers in general, and to brothers of Abu Sulaiman in the Iraqi Jihad especially and in the Arabian Peninsula

We ask Allah to bless the imprints of the martyrs and to compensate the Muslims better than them and praise is to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds


And don’t forget us in your righteous prayers
Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan
Written by the Commander Sheikh Mustafa Abu Yazid
Jamadi Al Oola 1429H

Source-AL Fajr media productions


Translated by Umm Saad

[The 801]

Afghanistan: Taliban claim death of 'female US spy'


Karachi, 21 May (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) - Taliban fighters in Afghanistan claim to have killed a woman by slitting her throat after accusing her of spying for US forces in Afghanistan.

They said they killed the alleged female American informer in the Afghan valley of Kunar on Monday.

"Bachagai, 32, was part of an American proxy network in the Sarkano district's village Barogai," a Taliban spokesperson Zubair Mujahid told Adnkronos International (AKI) from the Kunar valley.

"Her information caused a lot of American attacks on the position of the mujahadeen, their killings and arrests," said Mujahid.

"We throughly investigated the matter and confirmed her links with Afghan intelligence and American troops. She also received cash rewards on the information she provided against the Taliban," he said.

Mujahid told AKI that once all the evidence against the alleged spy was gathered, they slit her throat with a knife and killed her.

The Taliban have killed many suspected informers in past especially in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar but killing a woman is a rare occurence among the former ruling student militia.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.2182812534

[Casey]

Officials Downplay News Reports of Taliban Takeover in Southern Afghanistan
By Ayaz Gul
Islamabad
17 June 2008

Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces are discounting media reports that say Taliban militants have seized control of several villages in southern Afghanistan. From neighboring Pakistan, Ayaz Gul reports.

Afghan reinforcements wait at Kabul airport before taking a flight to Arghandab district, Afghanistan, 17 Jun 2008
Reports earlier this week said a force of about 500 Taliban fighters had swept into several towns just north of the Southern city of Kandahar, setting up roadblocks and planting landmines.

Hundreds of local residents are reported to have fled the area (the Arghandab district).

But officials from the U.S. led coalition in Afghanistan say a patrol sent into the area to investigate, found no evidence to support the reports of a Taliban takeover in the villages.

A statement says that coalition forces moved freely and met no resistance.

In Kabul, presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada has also played down the reported Taliban offensive in the Kandahar region.
more (http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-06-17-voa50.cfm)


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Taliban takes control of 18 towns in Kandahar, elder says
By Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa
Published: June 17, 2008

ISLAMABAD: Afghan families continued to flee the district of Argandab in southern Afghanistan as Taliban fighters and NATO and Afghan forces prepared to battle over the strategic region Tuesday.

The Taliban have taken control of 18 villages west of the Argandab River and started digging trenches and mines, a tribal elder from the region said. NATO and Afghan forces moved troops in to the region and dropped leaflets from the air warning civilians to stay inside their homes if fighting erupted in their area.

The sudden flurry of activity from all sides, coming days after some 400 Taliban prisoners escaped Friday during a jailbreak in Kandahar, indicates the seriousness of the threat.
more (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/17/mideast/afghan.4-289286.php)

[Casey]

Local Taliban commander’s house blown up

TANK: Security personnel blew up the house of a local Taliban commander during a pre-dawn raid in the city, said a district police official on Tuesday.

Security personnel carried out the operation at about 4.30am, blowing up the house of local Taliban commander Hayatullah who had allegedly carried out attacks on Manjhi Khel police checkpost on Monday night.

Hayatullah and his brother Faridullah were not in the house at the time of the operation.

Separately, the security forces arrested at least three people during a search operation in the city, police confirmed. The police began a search operation inside Durand gate, which resulted in the arrest of Allah Naaz, Akhtar Naaz and Muhammad Bakhsh. Those arrested have been moved to an undisclosed location for further questioning. app

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C06%5C18%5Cstory_18-6-2008_pg7_24

[Casey]

Taliban destroy bridges, plant mines outside Kandahar in battle preparation

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan, June 17 (AP): Taliban destroyed bridges and planted mines in several villages they control outside southern Afghanistan's largest city in apparent preparation for battle, residents and officials said Tuesday. More than 700 families fled the Arghandab district 15 kilometers northwest of Kandahar city, said Sardar Mohammad, a police officer manning a checkpoint on the east side of the Arghandab River. On the west side of the river, hundreds of Taliban controlled around nine or 10 villages, Mohammad said. “Small bridges inside the villages have been destroyed,” he said. The Afghan army flew four planeloads of soldiers to Kandahar from Kabul Tuesday. A Taliban commander named Mullah Ahmedullah told the Associated Press Tuesday that around 400 Taliban moved into Arghandab from Khakrez, one district to the north. He said some of the militants released in Friday's prison break had joined the assault. “We've occupied most of the area and it's a good place for fighting. Now we are waiting for the NATO and Afghan forces,” Ahmedullah said. (Posted @ 13:20 PST)

http://www.dawn.com/2008/06/17/welcome.htm

[Casey]

Warlord: My encounter with Taliban mastermind

Backed by the CIA, he fought the Soviets then was sidelined. Now he's back, wreaking havoc among British forces.
Raymond Whitaker on meeting Jalaluddin Haqqani

Sunday, 22 June 2008

In a month when Britain has lost nine soldiers in Afghanistan, including the first woman, and hundreds of Taliban fighters were freed by a daring bomb attack on Kandahar's main jail, the British public is only just becoming aware of the malevolent power of Jalaluddin Haqqani.


A man once known only to old Afghan hands is being credited with the resurgence of the Taliban since 2006. He is said to have introduced Iraqi-style suicide bombings to a country where they were unknown and are still considered by many to be un-Islamic. Wily and well connected, he is emerging as the biggest threat to Britain and its Nato allies in Afghanistan, where last month more Western troops were killed than in Iraq for the first time since 2003. He has experienced a comeback as spectacular as that of the movement he is now serving as principal military commander.



When I encountered Haqqani in March 1994, the fortunes of the legendary Afghan warlord were at a low ebb. He was a hero to the CIA and wealthy Arab backers during the fight against the Soviet invaders. As chronicled in the movie Charlie Wilson's War, torrents of money and arms had been channelled through Pakistan's intelligence service to resistance leaders like him. But, after the Russians pulled out in 1989 and the Communist regime collapsed in 1992, Haqqani and his fellow Pashtun chieftains had been outmanoeuvred.


Kabul had been seized by the Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who installed his party leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, as President. Now Haqqani was sitting outside the President's office, waiting for an audience in which he would seek favours, and the photograph I took of him shows all the discomfort of a man who would have preferred to be meeting Rabbani on the battlefield.


Already in his late 40s, the mujahedin commander might have been expected to fade into obscurity, especially when Pakistan despaired of his ilk and decided to foster the Taliban instead. Yet 14 years later, he is regarded as the Taliban's most effective military leader. The former darling of the West's intelligence agencies is now their leading target after Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Taliban figurehead, Mullah Omar.


Haqqani has shown his talent for psychologically significant blows, such as the attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in the heart of Kabul in April, and January's attack on a luxury hotel that killed seven and sent shivers through the expatriate community in the Afghan capital.


This has accompanied the steady stream of suicide bombings that undermine Nato's military superiority and keep the civilian population on edge. On Friday, a suicide bomber on foot attacked a foreign military convoy in Helmand province, killing one Nato soldier and five civilians.


How did a man now in his 60s, who appeared to have been pushed to the margins, return to such a central role? Bin Laden himself, of course, was once seen as an asset by the US, and when the wealthy Saudi decided in the 1980s to take up the Afghan cause, one of the first Afghans he met was Haqqani. From a Pashtun clan with clout both in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal territories, Haqqani was able to provide Bin Laden with territory for his first camps. It was an association that later stood him in good stead.


As one of the few Pashtun commanders able to demonstrate effectiveness in fighting the Communists – he seized Khost, the first town to fall to the mujahedin after the Soviet pullout – the rough-hewn Haqqani was admired by Arabs who dreamed of jihad but lacked the nerve to go to war themselves. He visited the Gulf states frequently, learned Arabic and was always able to raise money in the Middle East after the American tap was turned off, enabling him to maintain large numbers of men under arms.


Even when Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) switched horses and backed the Taliban, he remained on good terms with the agency and was able to make a comfortable retreat to his stronghold, Miram Shah, in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.


Haqqani was the first mujahedin commander to surrender unconditionally to the Taliban, and remained on polite terms with the movement. Although he was never part of the tight inner circle, he took various minor posts during Mullah Omar's five years in power, between 1996 and 2001, eventually becoming interior minister.


He also helped his old associate Bin Laden to set up training camps on his return to Afghanistan. None of this necessarily meant that he was fully committed to the alliance between the Taliban and al-Qa'ida, in the view of his old contacts in the CIA and ISI – but after 9/11 it was time to put that theory to the test.


According to at least one report, Haqqani was summoned to Islamabad and told he could be installed as president of Afghanistan if he formed a breakaway "moderate" faction of the Taliban, excluding Mullah Omar. Presumably, the al-Qa'ida leadership would have been expelled from Afghanistan under the deal. But the warlord declined and returned to his stronghold. According to Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, a history of American involvement in Afghanistan, it was into Haqqani's territory that Bin Laden fled after he managed to elude the Americans in 2001.


Even then, Haqqani did not immediately assume a prominent role in the Taliban, although his forces were always ready to attack the Americans in eastern Afghanistan. It was only after the movement's 2006 spring offensive ran into trouble that he was asked to take command. The subsequent Taliban resurgence took Nato by surprise and spread dissension among its members over tactics and reinforcements.


Nato insists that it cannot be defeated in battle by the Taliban. That is certainly true – large numbers of Taliban militants freed in the attack on Kandahar jail were later killed when they tried to mass together to seize the city – but it is irrelevant. With a judicious mixture of hit-and-run attacks, suicide bombings and occasional "spectaculars", plus the constant vehicle bombings that claimed four British lives last week, Haqqani can destabilise nearly half the country and hold back economic reconstruction.


Recently, he appeared in a DVD to dispel rumours that he was dead, or that he had handed over to his 34-year-old son, Sirajuddin, who has assumed responsibility for military operations. He is a particularly formidable opponent for the West, with his long-standing connections to Pakistani intelligence apparently protecting him from any intervention in Waziristan, while his Middle Eastern links bring him money and recruits.


"This is not a battle of haste; this is a battle of patience," he says in the DVD. He speaks from experience. The commander I saw in the President's waiting-room 14 years ago appeared to be washed up, but he has outlasted his opponents. The Taliban, formed to get rid of old warlords like him, is now grateful for his help.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/warlord-my-encounter-with-taliban-mastermind-851912.html


This article comes from WorldAnalysis.net
http://worldanalysis.net/smee

The URL for this story is:
http://worldanalysis.net/smee/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=78

[Casey]

Pakistan tribe gather dead after Taliban take town
Tue Jun 24, 2008 3:07am EDT
By Alamgir Bitani

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, June 24 (Reuters) - Pakistani Taliban militants told rivals to collect the bodies of their men on Tuesday in a northwestern town the Taliban seized the previous day, a tribal elder said.

Militants loyal to Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud seized the town of Jandola, on the main road into the South Waziristan ethnic Pashtun tribal region on the Afghan border, in fighting on Monday.

The fighting comes as the government tries to end violence by Mehsud through talks despite concerns from the United States, which says negotiations and peace deals give militants a free hand to plot attacks.

At least nine people were killed in the fighting on Monday, most of them members of the pro-government Bitani tribe.

"We've been asked by the Taliban to pick up bodies which are lying there," said tribal elder Haji Alamgir.

Khazan Gul, a member of a so-called peace committee the government had set up, later said nine bodies had been recovered.

Pakistan's semi-autonomous Pashtun lands along the Afghan border have been a refuge for Taliban and al Qaeda militants since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001.

The area where Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding has never come under the full control of any government and the United States says it has become a sanctuary for militants plotting violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan and beyond.

Mehsud, a member of South Waziristan's Mehsud tribe, has emerged as Pakistan's most notorious militant over the past year.

He has been accused of launching a string of suicide attacks across the country including a Dec. 27 gun and bomb attack in which former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed.

KIDNAPPED

The top political official in the Jandola region, Barkat Ullah, said the area was completely under the control of the Taliban and the fighting was over.

Tribal elders were discussing the fate of up to eight members of the pro-government peace committee whom the Taliban had kidnapped, but Ullah declined to say what action the police might take.

A military spokesman referred queries to the Interior Ministry, saying it was responsible for security in the region despite the presence of an army base with about 4,000 men just outside the town.

The government's top Interior Ministry official was not immediately available for comment but a security official said he expected government action to restore control of the town.

"This is basically between the two tribes. This is a Bitani area and the Mehsuds have attacked them because the Bitanis were part of the peace initiative," said the official, who declined to be identified.

"The Mehsuds were in a pretty comfortable position before the army moved into the area so now they want to reassert their control."

Separately, militants attacked a military post in the Swat valley in North West Frontier Province where the militants and provincial government signed a peace pact last month.

A militant was killed and one wounded when troops responded, Colonel Mohammad Nadeem Anwar told reporters. A militant spokesman said two people were killed.

The mountain valley was a tourist destination until last year when militants began attacking police as part of a bid to impose Taliban-style rule. (Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony, Junaid Khan and Robert Birsel; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Ben Tan)

http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSISL129171

[The 801]

Here now is the price that we pay for our government taking their eye off the taliban and going off to fight in Iraq.

The scariest of shit is about to happen folks....

Taliban Imperil Pakistani City, a Major Hub
Akhtar Soomro for The New York Times


PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/28/world/28pakistan02_190.jpg
Taliban militants prepared on Friday to execute two men in Bajur, having accused them of helping the United States to carry out a missile strike. One of the men was decapitated.

The Taliban have established bases around Peshawar.

The militants move unchallenged out of the lawless tribal region, just 10 miles away, in convoys of heavily armed, long haired and bearded men. They have turned up at courthouses in nearby towns, ordering judges to stay away. On Thursday they stormed a women’s voting station on the city outskirts, and they are now regularly kidnapping people from the city’s bazaars and homes. There is a feeling that the city gates could crumble at any moment.

The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.

For the United States, the major supply route for weapons for NATO troops runs from the port of Karachi to the outskirts of Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Maintaining that route would be extremely difficult if the city were significantly infiltrated by the very militants who want to defeat the NATO war effort across the border.

NATO and American commanders have complained for months that the government’s policy of negotiating with the militants has led to more cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by Taliban fighters based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But the brazen campaign of intimidation in Peshawar, just 90 minutes by highway from Islamabad, the capital, shows that the Taliban threat now cuts deeply on both sides of the border, not just with suicide bombings but also with the persistent presence of militants among the population.

In this hard-boiled provincial capital, the linchpin of the North-West Frontier Province, the fear is palpable. Many of the rich have fled their mansions and left for Dubai. Middle-class families are packing for other places in Pakistan, and the poor are vulnerable to the militants’ entreaties.

“If this trend continues, there will be complete peace because the city is under the Taliban, or civil war because of the fighting,” said Samullah Shinwari, 31, the father of four children, who is selling his lucrative shopping mall and two ancestral family homes and moving to Islamabad.

With the militants crowding in, the national government called a special meeting in Islamabad on Wednesday to address the rapidly deteriorating security situation.

The day before, a sympathizer of the Taliban, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, shocked the National Assembly when he said that the entire North-West Frontier Province, including Peshawar, was on the brink of being engulfed by extremism.

The government’s control, he warned, was “almost nonexistent” in the province, an integral part of Pakistan and one of just four in the country. The specter of the fall of Peshawar threatens the fabric of the country.

The government issued a statement after its meeting announcing that it was turning over security of the province directly to the army. In the tribal areas, the police and the paramilitary Frontier Corps would remain the first line of defense, and the policy of peace deals with the militants would continue, the statement said. The military would be a force of last resort.

On Friday extra police officers were patrolling the main roads of Peshawar and its entry points from the tribal region.

There were reports that the Frontier Corps planned an operation in the coming days in the Khyber agency, adjacent to the city, to clean out Islamic militants under the sway of Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver who has grown into one of the most feared extremist leaders, commanding thousands of men.

But whether there was sufficient resolve to push back the startling gains by the militants was a point of debate.

“The government is helpless,” said Arbab Hidayat Ullah, a former senior police officer here. “It has lost its wits. The police have lost so many men at the hands of the Taliban they are scared.” Mr. Ullah said that the police of Peshawar had a considerable budget, but that the money had little impact and that the void allowed the brute force of the Taliban to flourish.

Despite its proximity to the capital, Peshawar has always been a world unto itself, and the province and the tribal areas have been largely forgotten by successive Pakistani governments. They have reaped slim allocations from the federal budget and received minimal governance.

Until now, the people of Peshawar have pretty much liked it that way, providing for themselves or growing rich on the smuggling routes that come with its position as the entrance to the semiautonomous tribal lands. The city has also long been a staging area for intrigue.

In the 1980s, the Americans used the city as rear base for the mujahedeen, the Islamic fighters supplied by Washington to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden came here in 1985 to help in that effort, and almost exactly 20 years ago, in August 1988, Mr. bin Laden held meetings at a house here that gave birth to Al Qaeda, according to a new history, “The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century” by Steve Coll.

Today the Taliban, sometimes working with Al Qaeda, have almost total control over the tribal agencies, and their influence has steadily bled into Pakistan proper, as they “Talibanize” and challenge nearby areas.

The Taliban militants are a fractious mélange of various groups, law enforcement and local officials say. A survey of the towns close to Peshawar reveals the mixture.

To the south in Darra Adam Khel, forces of the Tehrik-e-Taliban of Pakistan, an umbrella group of Taliban, took virtual control of the city some time ago. The group is led by Baitullah Mehsud, who is accused by the Pakistani government of masterminding the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December and running scores of suicide bombers on both sides of the border.

To the east, a militant named Mangal Bagh leads a group called Lashkar-i-Islam. He holds sway in the Khyber agency and is so flush with men and money that he is fighting another Islamic group in the Tirah valley, law enforcement officials said.

To the north, the forces of Tehrik-e-Taliban established a prison in the town of Michini several months ago. And in the town of Warsak, the Taliban have constructed a training camp, the officials said.

In Shabqadar, a few miles away, the Taliban turned up in the central square and posted a notice urging people to contact them rather than the courts to settle their disputes, said Ahsanuddin Khan, the deputy superintendent of police.

On Thursday, in Tangi, near Charsadda, four pickup trucks of armed men with beards, long hair and scarves wrapped around their faces pulled into a school where polling places for women were set up for a special election for the provincial assembly. The militants ordered men present in the grounds of the school to leave.

“There were too many Taliban,” said Laila Gul, a worker for the Pakistan Peoples Party. “They fired into the air. One of them said he would explode the grenade on his belt.” In response, two battered trucks of the North-West Frontier police turned up, with a few elderly officers, but the intruders were allowed to get away.

In Charsadda, just 20 minutes from Peshawar, menacing convoys of Taliban men have showed up in recent weeks, their presence unchallenged, and almost accepted, said Munir Orekzei, a tribal leader and a member of the National Assembly.

On Friday, Waliur Rehman, a local Taliban commander, oversaw the execution of two men before thousands of people in Bajur, accusing them of helping the United States carry out a missile strike in Damadola that killed 14 people last month.

Gunmen with daggers pounced on one of the men, decapitating him and waving his severed head at the cheering crowd, according to The Associated Press.

In all of these places, the militants use a mixture of fear and social co-option, techniques similar to those used by their kin in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban emerged after the retreat of the Soviets and the end of the American financing for their mujahedeen proxies.

One of the first targets of the Taliban are usually criminals with whom they often fashion a symbiotic relationship, officials here said. Often the Taliban attack criminals and in that way increase their social standing with local people.

And then to win favor with the Taliban, the criminals grow their hair and their beards, and join forces with the militants, they said. In this way, the criminals get protection from the militants for the money they give to the Taliban from their extortion rackets.

Last weekend 16 Christians were abducted from a house in an upscale section of Peshawar. They were released after negotiations with the police, but the landlord, a Muslim, was held longer and released only on the stipulation that he attend Islamic revival meetings for the next three months.

Unnerving for reasonably tolerant Peshawar was the recent kidnapping of four prostitutes from a house in Hayatabad, the most expensive area of the city, adjacent to the Khyber agency.

Abduction of young boys has also become common in Hayatabad: in the last few weeks a dozen boys have been snatched by militants demanding that they become jihadists rather than sit idly at home, said Masood Afridi, a doctor who lives there.

Nobody knows exactly when the Taliban will actually try to take on Peshawar.

Few people expect a direct assault but rather a mounting campaign of intimidation and fear, and the posting of heavily armed men at carefully chosen strategic points. Some people believe that once the summer fighting in Afghanistan is over and more Pakistani Taliban return home, they will turn their sights on Peshawar.

Not knowing the militants strategy was one thing, but the government’s strategy was nonexistent, complained Waris Khan Afridi, a tribal leader from the Khyber agency and a former member of the National Assembly.

“There is no strategy to counter them,” he said. “Very soon, the Taliban will go to Peshawar and say: ‘Hands up.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/world/asia/28pstan.html?ei=5087&em=&en=848ef5383b36b99f&ex=1214798400&pagewanted=all

[Casey]

Pakistan: Baitullah warns of attacks in Sindh, Punjab

By Alamgir Bhittani


TANK, June 28: Pakistani Taliban on Saturday suspended peace talks and accused the government of going back on its word and continuing crackdown against militants.

Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud told Dawn: The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is suspending peace talks with the government. This will apply not just to South Waziristan but all areas, including Swat.

He, however, did not go as far as announcing resumption of hostilities. If the (security forces) operations continue people will see Sindh and Punjab turn into furnace.

He said the people had voted the ANP and PPP into power on the premise that they would bring peace. But now, they are talking about use of force and are launching operations against our people in Tank, Jandola and Darra Adamkhel.

Let the people ask their government why it has gone back on its word, he said. It will be unfortunate if violence engulfs the whole region again.

The government was holding talks with Baitullah Mehsud and militant groups in Bajaur, Mohmand tribal region and the semi-autonomous arms manufacturing town of Darra Adamkhel through tribal interlocutors.

Muslim Khan, the spokesman for the militant group in Swat, told Dawn: We have not yet received any instruction from the Taliban leadership.

Baitullah Mehsud tried to justify the killing of members of the peace committee in Jandola and said he had repeatedly asked military authorities to curb their criminal activities.

They were criminals and we had no other option but to go after them.

Baitullah Mehsud reiterated that regardless of the situation in tribal areas, the holy war against Americans in Afghanistan would continue.

He warned that the militants would wage a jihad against Pakistan Army if it helped the Americans launch attacks inside tribal areas.

http://www.dawn.com/2008/06/29/top2.htm

[The 801]

Plot to divide the Taliban foiled
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Along with the Taliban's ongoing progress in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has strengthened its position in Pakistan's tribal areas, reinforced by a steady stream of new recruits from other countries and an expansion of its networks among local tribes.

The situation reached a point where the Pakistani security agencies, in connivance with the Saudi establishment, felt they had to act. They hatched a plot to establish a proxy network in a newly formed Taliban group that rivals the anti-state al-Qaeda franchise of Baitullah Mehsud's Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban.

Al-Qaeda was wise to the ploy, though, and the proxies were last
Friday wiped out before they could even gain a toehold.

A senior Pakistani militant affiliated with al-Qaeda's setup told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, "Pakistan and the Saudi establishment tried to create a conspiracy, taking advantage of some tribal feuds between Taliban commanders coming from [tribal] Wazir and Mehsud backgrounds, and planted their proxy network to hijack the whole Taliban movement.

"But on Friday there was a clash in Mohmand Agency in which Taliban commanders close to Baitullah Mehsud terminated the leadership [of the proxies], including Shah Khalid, the local leader of the pro-government Taliban. The move to hijack the Taliban movement vanished into smoke," the militant said.

At least 15 people, including Khalid, the chief of a militant outfit known as the "Shah group", and his deputy, Qari Abdullah, were killed in the fighting. (State-run PTV, however, reported that Khalid had been killed after surrendering to militants loyal to Mehsud.)

Khalid's group had previously been involved only in fighting United States-led forces in Afghanistan and was not interested in local Pakistani affairs. But it recently became a part of a newly formed group headed by North Waziristan's Wazir tribal commander, Gul Bahadur, to rival al-Qaeda's franchise - Mehsud's network.

The roots of the group's formation were originally the result of ethnic differences between the Wazir tribe and the Mehsud tribe, but Pakistani security agencies took full advantage of the situation and encouraged known Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) contacts in the Taliban, such as Haji Nazir from South Waziristan and Haji Namdar from the Khyber Agency, beside Khalid from Mohmand Agency, to be a part of this new Shah group.

Mehsud is now on the offensive, all too aware of the establishment's schemes to undermine him and al-Qaeda.

Since the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistan has tried to drive al-Qaeda from the seat of the ideological throne of the Afghan resistance against Western armies by encouraging local Afghan commanders to structure the resistance on tribal lines.

In the broader picture, Pakistan envisaged this would improve the chances of reconciliation between the tribal movement and the Western armies, and the tribals would eventually be tolerated as the rulers of Afghanistan. Pakistan's connections would in the process remain intact in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda would be alienated.

Tribal tribulations
The story of the current infighting in the Taliban starts in the labyrinth of the regional war theater with the emergence of one Aminullah Peshawari, a well-respected Salafi academic whose influence spread from the Pakistani city of Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the tribal areas of Mohmand and Bajaur to the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nooristan.

Aminullah was a known anti-establishment figure and used to meet Osama bin Laden, but he was neither a militant nor operated any militant group. He was a credible anti-American voice in the region.

After the US invasion of Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation started operations in Pakistan against al-Qaeda's sympathizers. The Pakistani security apparatus was aware that it had to play its cards very cleverly in its newfound role as a partner in the "war on terror". Pakistani officials thus approached Aminullah and warned him of possible arrest and of being sent to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The noose was tightened so much that the respected Salafi academic was left with no choice but to blindly follow the footsteps of the Pakistani security agencies, which were desperate that he announce his support for the Laskhar-i-Taiba's commander in Mohmand Agency, Shah Khalid.

Previously, Khalid's group had been banned from operating inside Afghanistan because of his closeness with the Pakistani security agencies. Aminullah's support allowed Khalid to operate in the region freely. Both Aminullah and Khalid were now on the payroll of the ISI and Saudi intelligence.

Aminullah moved around with armed guards and a string of four-wheel drive vehicles in the city of Peshawar. The same protocol was given to Khalid. These sort of allowances and the money helped their networks thrive and they boasted of several successful operations in Afghanistan.

This month, North Waziristan's Gul Bahadur made public his differences with Baitullah Mehsud and summoned a meeting at which he (Gul) was appointed as the chief of Pakistani Taliban. Khalid emerged as one of Gul's main followers.

Other local Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders, however, suspected that Khalid had links to the state apparatus. A respected Taliban deputy commander in Nooristan province in Afghanistan and Kunar province's Mufti Yousuf advised Khalid to submit to the local discipline of the Taliban instead of operating a separate jihadi network. The advice went unheeded. As a result, tension mounted between Khalid and Omar Khalid, alias Abdul Wali, the regional commander installed by the Taliban.

As for Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan, Baitullah Mehsud, the al-Qaeda franchise, did not want to challenge him as he is a grandson of the legendary anti-British resistance fighter, Faqir of Ipi, and they were not sure he was an ISI proxy.

However, Baitullah Mehsud suspected a few ISI-backed Taliban commanders in the Pakistani tribal areas would aim to take advantage of his and Gul Bahadur's differences, and Shah Khalid was one of them, in addition to Haji Nazeer of South Waziristan and Haji Namdar of Khyber Agency.

So the decision was taken to confront the pure proxies of the ISI, Khalid being the first. He was advised by Omar Khalid to leave the area at once. Khalid agreed, and one of his comrades, Haji Namdar from Khyber Agency, provided him with a base in the agency. But last Tuesday, one of Khalid's men killed a deputy of Omar Khalid's group.

This situation in the most important strategic backyard of the Taliban, which guarantees them access to Nooristan and Kunar provinces across the border, was of major concern to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who also wanted to clarify just who the ISI's contacts were.

Mullah Omar assigned two of the Taliban's most respected regional commanders to intervene. They were Ustad Yasir of the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar and Pakistan's Khyber Agency, and Qari Ziaur Rahman of the Afghan provinces of Nooristan and Kunar and the Pakistani agencies of Mohmand and Bajaur.

These commanders arrived in Mohmand Agency on Friday, but on that day the Taliban's local commander had already begun fighting Khalid, conclusively beating him and capturing his network's arsenal and assets.

As a follow up, Mullah Omar's delegates, including Ustad Yasir and Qari Ziaur Rahman, issued a strict warning that such intra-Taliban bloodletting was not acceptable and that in the future all fighters would work under one umbrella with no stand-alone activities tolerated. This is a clear message to the rivals of Baitullah.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has tried to play the killing of Khalid and his fellow jihadis to its advantage. The bodies were taken to Peshawar in a procession arranged by various Salafi organizations. The highest political figure of a Salafi political party to have received direct patronage from Riyadh, Allama Sajid Mir, attended prayers in Peshawar and held a press conference in which he maintained that the majority of the Taliban were deviants, terminology generally used by the Saudi religious apparatus against al-Qaeda.

The Pakistani national press played up the incident under banner headlines of discord among the supporters of the Afghan battle against coalition forces.

Baitullah Mehsud hit back by announcing a deadline for NWFP's secular and liberal government, which signed a peace deal with the Taliban, to resign within five days or face the consequences. But at the same time the Taliban resumed operations in NWFP - a clear aggressive gesture against the state's writ.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda have come out of this sideshow in the tribal areas as strong as ever, and more recruits keep pouring in.

The Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan is viewed by global militants as a part of the promised battles of Khurasan (ancient Khurasan comprising mostly Afghanistan, the Pakistani tribal areas and parts of Iran), hinted at in the Prophet Mohammad's sayings concerning the End of Time battles.

It is believed the militants of Khurasan will eventually win this battle and then go to the Middle East (the Land of Two Rivers is said to be Iraq and Syria) to support the armies of the promised Mehdi to fight against the anti-Christ in Palestine. Based on this theory, jihadi websites are calling on Muslims to support the Afghan jihad instead of going to Iraq.

But the revival of al-Qaeda in the Pakistan region will provide a new lifeline for the Iraqi resistance as newly trained fighters from Afghanistan can go to Iraq when fighting slows in the winter months in Afghanistan.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JG23Df01.html

[Casey]

I am seeing a rumor that the mujahideen are moving in on Kabul.
Of course they are asking for it to be substantiated, thus far it has not been.

Anyone else have anything on this??

[Chuckles]

I am seeing a rumor that the mujahideen are moving in on Kabul.

Anyone else have anything on this??

Maybe a related hint from al-Reuters.

Taliban orders mobile shutdown in Afghan province (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081021/tc_nm/us_afghan_mobiles)


Oct 21, 2008

GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents said Tuesday they had told mobile phone operators to shut down their networks during the day in the Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, saying signals help track insurgent fighters.

[Chuckles]

I am seeing a rumor that the mujahideen are moving in on Kabul.

Anyone else have anything on this??

I see Inshallahshaheed posted the Globe & Mail (http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081014.afghan-kabul131/BNStory/Afghanistan/home&usg=AFQjCNGUAekHkN2M-FXcpqb5xTpfDf_Kxg)article with the title...


Kabul Is Now Surrounded By The Taliban! (http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=10&q=http://revolution.muslimpad.com/2008/10/16/kabul-is-now-surrounded-by-the-taliban/&usg=AFQjCNEOydrXIk_hIq0VYf1g9yrAJ4lwjQ)

[Casey]

Statement regarding mobile phone usage restrictions 21/10/08

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------







Statement regarding mobile phone usage restrictions

The Mujahid nation of Afghanistan is faced with a stubborn and rebellious enemy that has no commitment to any national or international standards. Given this information, The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is compelled to adopt measures that force decisions on some complicated and challenging issues.

The occupying invader forces use telephone communications for espionage and investigation purposes in order to suppress Afghans. This is against all international standards.

Therefore, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has decided to ban the use of mobile phone services at night in order to protect the Afghan people and the Mujahideen, who are constantly fighting against the enemy of Islam.

Additionally, our fellow Afghans and Mujahideen have noticed that the trial implementation of the decision in some parts of the country has already yielded positive results.

The invader enemies use their equipment to spy on telephones mainly from sunset to sunrise. Because nights have grown longer and days are shorter now, the Islamic Emirate has also shortened the standard usage time of mobile phone services. Cellular communication companies will be permitted to provide communication services from 6:30 am in the morning to 5:00 pm in the afternoon in the cities and rural areas. We reiterate that the companies should halt their operations at night time.

The Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are and will remain committed to implementing the decision. Mobile companies will be held responsible if they do not put the decision into practice. Mobile companies will also face strict consequences for non-compliance

Official website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban).

[The 801]

US division doesn't add up
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - General David Petraeus, who took over last Friday as the new head of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) with overall responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has arrived in Pakistan with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher to push his plans in the South Asian theater of the "war on terror".

This involves the dual task of government-led reconciliation with Taliban insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with the countries influential in the war.

Petraeus' arrival on Sunday coincided with two events. One was a US Predator drone strike which killed 25 people, including possibly an Arab commander, Abu Akash, in the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan. At the same time, militants and Pakistan, on Islamabad's initiative, agreed on a peace formula under which Pakistan has stopped military operations in the tribal areas and the militants have assured they will not unleash a "winter offensive" in Pakistan. (See A long, hot winter for Pakistan Asia Times Online, October 11, 2008.)

Pakistan has already slowed operations in Bajaur Agency and shelved plans for operations in North Waziristan. All the same, the militants welcomed the month of November with unprecedented attacks, which, according to the militants, are a part of a carrot-and-stick game.

On Friday, a suicide attack on a police office in Mardan, North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), killed four policemen. These were followed by three more suicide attacks at different locations and a rocket attack at Peshawar airport in NWFP that killed several security personnel.

Tackling al-Qaeda
Petraeus is credited with saving the United States from defeat in Iraq through his initiative to engage the indigenous tribal resistance especially the Sunnis, and getting them to turn against foreigners, that is al-Qaeda.

If the same is planned for South Asia, it is sure to fail as al-Qaeda's traditions in the region are different from those in Iraq: al-Qaeda was a new phenomenon in Iraq, while it has been in South Asia for several decades.

After September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Afghanistan that year, al-Qaeda became even closer to the local tribes who became a part of the Afghan resistance.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a large number of al-Qaeda and Arab groups (not all Arab groups were al-Qaeda) based in Afghanistan went to Iraq, leaving behind a small group of Arabs.

Most of them were trainers, like Iraqi Abu Akash, or ideologues like Abu Waleed Ansari, a Jordanian-Palestinian. Neither Ansari nor Abu Akash was directly linked with the hardcore of al-Qaeda. Ansari was more of cleric than a commander and he gave sermons to youths in North Waziristan to fight against foreign forces in Afghanistan. On the other hand, Abu Akash established a maaskar (training center) in North Waziristan at which he prepared youths for guerrilla battle.

Through this process, a new Arabic-speaking tribal Pashtun generation was raised. Now, at a time when numerically al-Qaeda and Arab warriors in South Asia are insignificant, this breed of tribal Pashtuns has become the vanguard of al-Qaeda's cause.

One could call them the neo-Taliban, and in most instances they have taken over the leadership of the Taliban. Veteran mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani was once close to the Pakistani establishment and he had a pure tribal mindset. But his sons Sirajuddin and Nasiruddin, who speak Arabic, lean towards Arabs and their cause.

Qari Ziaur Rahman is another case in point in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Arabic-speaking commander of Pashtun ethnicity is closer to Arabs and there is no chance of him siding with the establishment in either country.

There is no official word on whether Abu Akash has been killed, but even if he is dead he will have left a strong legacy.

Abu Akash (or Abu Akasha as his comrades call him) is not a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s as he is in his mid-30s. He is an expert in explosives and guns and after arriving in North Waziristan he tapped Uzbeks and Tajiks of Central Asian origin to act as trainers.

He also used his young trainees to control traffic in North Waziristan. This was a simple drill but some local tribes did not like it and in 2007 he was expelled to the Shawal region that spans the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But he returned within a few months and blended even further into tribal society, so much so that he could speak the local dialects of Urdu and Pashtun and at one point Pakistani intelligence reported that they suspected Abu Akash was Punjabi, not Arab.

Abu Akash and his likes will make it very difficult for Petraeus to divide and defeat the resistance, as in Iraq.

Syed Saleem Shahzad

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JK04Df01.html

[The 801]

Army Social Scientist Set Afire in Afghanistan
By Noah Shachtman EmailNovember 06, 2008 | 1:24:51 PMCategories: Agony of A-Stan, Human Terrain

A social scientist in the Army's controversial Human Terrain program was en route to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas after being set on fire in and apparent Taliban attack in Afghanistan. It's the third time in five months that a Human Terrain Team member has been killed or seriously wounded.

Paula Lloyd was interviewing locals in the southern village of Maywand on Tuesday as part of her duties in a Human Terrain Team, which embeds civilian cultural experts into U.S. combat units. She approached a man carrying a fuel jug and they began talking about the price of gas. Suddenly, the man doused Lloyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire. She suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of her body, a Human Terrain source told Danger Room.

The injuries could have been worse. Lloyd's teammate immediately threw her into a nearby water source to douse the flames, then Lloyd was sped to a nearby medical facility. Fortunately, the first doctor to treat her was a U.S. Army burn specialist. After being stabilized, Lloyd was evacuated to the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and is now en route to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Lloyd is in "stable, but guarded condition," the source said.

The Taliban took credit for the attack on their website. The Taliban has a long history of setting women on fire as a way of punishing them for perceived immodesty.

This is the latest in a series of attacks on Human Terrain personnel. In May, Michael Bhatia, an Oxford-trained political scientist working in eastern Afghanistan, was killed, along with two soldiers, by a roadside explosive. Less than two months later, a bomb detonated inside the Sadr City District Council building in Iraq. Social scientist Nicole Suveges was inside. She and 11 others died instantly. Each incident has been scarring for the few hundred people in the tightly knit program. But the casualties are almost certain to continue. "I mean, it's a war. That's what we're involved in," a Human Terrain source says.

The Human Terrain program has come under criticism from within the military for its sloppy hiring practices and uneven battlefield training. Academic social scientists, meanwhile, have accused the program on being unethical, for blurring the line between civilian researcher and armed combatant. Over the last year-and-a-half in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the program's social scientists have dressed in uniforms that make them virtually indistinguishable from ordinary soldiers; others have not. Some have carried weapons; others move around unarmed.

Lloyd knew Afghanistan well, having worked there previously for the State Department. She visited Maywand several times and was "very popular there. She was accepted very positively throughout the village," one program official says. The man who attacked her was "from all appearances a non-belligerent." Until he struck.

The attacker was shot dead, and the Army is investigating the incident, according to John Stanton, an independent journalist.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/army-social-sci.html

[The 801]

37 Civilian killed in US Missile strike

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban fighters held a wedding party captive and fired on U.S. forces in an attack designed to draw U.S. airstrikes on civilians and stoke anti-American sentiment, a U.S. official said Friday citing "firsthand" reports.

The official declined to give further details of the reported events leading to the U.S. bombing Monday in the southern Afghan village Wech Baghtu, where dozens of civilians and insurgents were killed.

But such a tactic by the Taliban could mean significant complications for U.S. forces and allies _ forcing them to break off attacks and pursuit of extremists in populated areas for fear that the Taliban would try to maximum civilian casualties.

Civilian deaths in Afghanistan have become an increasing point of tension between Washington and President Hamid Karzai and could be one of the first major challenges for President-elect Barack Obama.

Afghan officials said Friday a joint investigation found that 37 civilians and 26 insurgents were killed in Wech Baghtu, a village in Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold. The U.S. official said the inquiry found that 20 civilians died. It wasn't clear why the two sides offered differing numbers.

It is not the deadliest reported civilian death toll from a U.S. attack in Afghanistan in the last three months: An Afghan commission found that an August operation by U.S. forces killed 90 civilians in the village of Azizabad. A U.S. investigation concluded 33 civilians died.

Insurgents have always used populated areas for cover in conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the U.S. claim Friday represents the first detailed intelligence on an apparent Taliban strategy to bring innocent lives into the crossfire, the official told The Associated Press.

"We have firsthand knowledge that we know this was a deliberate act on the part of the Taliban to draw our forces into a fight and to cause civilian casualties, knowing that a wedding party was going on," the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the U.S. findings.

The official, however, did not offer additional evidence _ leaving the United States open to accusations that it was trying shift blame for civilian deaths onto Taliban tactics and away from possible American battlefield mistakes.

A U.S. official last year told The Associated Press that the military believed it was possible the Taliban was deliberately trying to get U.S. forces to kill civilians, but it had no direct evidence. In past cases of civilian deaths, the U.S. has said that militants fired on its forces first from civilian areas, but no official has ever claimed the militants hoped that civilians died when the Americans returned fire.

Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Washington-based Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, said research by her group suggests Taliban fighters often flee after firing on U.S. forces and that retaliatory bombs hit civilians.

But she said Afghan and foreign forces cannot simply ban attacks on villages, which would turn them into Taliban safe havens.

"Does this mean waiting until the Taliban flees the scene and then doing surveillance to find them, instead of bombing the village? Maybe. Bottom line is they have to figure this out. It's the new frontier of warfare and it's not going to end anytime soon," Holewinski said.

The account by the U.S. official _ possibly based on intercepted phone and radio communication between Taliban commanders and fighters, or on intelligence provided by a villager _ suggests a Taliban attempt to keep civilians from fleeing the village.

First, women and children at a wedding party _ which are segregated by gender in Afghanistan _ were told they could not leave the area, the official said. Then Taliban gunners opened fire on a nearby U.S. convoy.

The Afghan government report also accused the Taliban of seeking shelter near the wedding party. The report said 27 civilians were wounded. It said the government paid $2,000 to families of each victim and $100 to the wounded, a standard practice. The majority of those killed were women and children.

American forces dropped eight bombs, the U.S. official said. At least one landed on the wedding party.

In a second civilian death case this week, coalition airstrikes killed seven civilians Thursday in the northwest province of Badghis. One bomb hit the house of provincial council member Mohammad Tawakil Khan. Two of his sons and one grandson died, he said.

"The Americans are hitting civilian houses all the time. They don't care, they just say it was a mistake," Khan said. "Afghan officials are only offering their condolences. After some 100 times that they have killed civilians, we have to take revenge and afterward say our condolences to them.

"For their 100 times, we should do something against them once, and after that they will understand how painful it is," Khan said.

Following Monday's battle in Wech Baghtu, President Hamid Karzai urged President-elect Barack Obama to help stop the killings of civilians, actions that undermine popular support for the Afghan government, the U.S. and NATO.

Khan said Afghan officials meet with coalition authorities and warn them to not use airstrikes because of the damage civilian deaths cause.

"They agree with our advice, but after that whenever they are in a gun battle they use airstrikes," he said.

The researcher Holewinski urged Obama to create a high-level Pentagon position dedicated to civilian casualties.

"Obviously the status quo cannot stand. Civilians are angry, President Karzai is angry, and the U.S. knows it can't afford either," she said.

___

Associated Press reporters Noor Khan in Kandahar and Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/07/afghanistan-us-missile-st_n_142087.html

[The 801]

Afghanistan: American journalist kidnapped by Taliban


Kabul, 11 Nov. (AKI) - By Syed Saleem Shahzad - An American journalist was kidnapped by Taliban militants in the Afghan province of Logar, located 60 kilometres south of the capital Kabul. David Rohde, a journalist working for the US daily The New York Times, was abducted along with his driver and interpreter by a Taliban group known as Siraj Haqqani and has been taken to eastern Afghanistan, sources told Adnkronos International (AKI).

War-torn Afghanistan has seen a surge in kidnappings of foreigners by Taliban militants recently. On Monday, Canadian journalist Mellissa Fung was freed in Kabul after being held in captivity for four weeks by militants.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=3.0.2698112746

Ugg, this ain't gonna turn out good.

[NYer]

I like Ace's story better:

Terrorist Kidnappers In Afghanistan Killed By Altitude Sickness And Exquisitely Aimed Rounds Fired By Navy SEALs But Mostly By Exquisitely Aimed Rounds Fired By Navy SEALs
—DrewM.

Kidnapping an American engineer working in Afghanistan probably seemed like a good idea at the time to a bunch of terrorists. Then the SEALs showed up to get him back.

“He had captors who thought we wouldn’t be able to deal with that terrain,” the special operations officer said.

That, the officer added, was a mistake. Seven years of experience in Afghanistan have enabled U.S. special operators to adapt to the unforgiving landscape.

“The terrain is really not a challenge any more,” he said. “It slows you down, but it slows them down, too.”

Nevertheless, the kidnappers apparently felt secure enough in their mountain lair to stay put for an extended period, rather than move their captive every day or two.

...“I don’t know what I said in English, but whatever I said I said it rather loudly evidently, because they said ‘Quiet!’ ”

The hostage’s aim was to quickly let the operators know who he was, but he understood their unease at the level of volume. “Sound carries so far, and they’d worked so hard to come down quietly across the mountain, and here I am shouting,” he said.

Nevertheless, “They knew who was who,” the engineer said. the SEALs quickly demonstrated that, aiming their silencer-equipped weapons to shoot and kill the kidnapper in the room before he could fire a round. The engineer said he heard the sounds of the operators shooting and killing a guard posted outside.

The SEALs turned to the now former hostage and told him they were there to take him back.

“I was in favor of that, 100 percent,” he said. “I was very surprised, very amazed and very happy.”

Cost of training a team of SEALs: Millions of dollars

Ammunition for their weapons: Thousands of dollars

Saving an American citizen and killing the bad guys? Priceless

H/T: OP For
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/277796.php

And thank you Veterans for all you did for us and ours.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. - G Orwell

[The 801]

I cannot find any colaborating information on the kidnapping of David Rohde.
It was reported by the usually reliable Syed Saleem Shahzad.

I will email him to determine validity.
801

[The 801]

Got an email back....

Dear (801),

It was a first hand reporting as I was informed by the militants about the kidnapping. however, I sent the story few hours later only because I was away from my computer but still think that it was the first story on the world wide web.
Any way since the NY times has requested to all media organizations not to publish any thing on that matter, I have not followed the matter.
.............

Cheers

Saleem

[The 801]

U.S. missiles hit Pakistani Taliban, 12 dead
Fri Nov 14, 2008 5:55am EST


By Haji Mujtaba

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (Reuters) - Suspected U.S. drones fired missiles into a Pakistani tribal region on Friday, killing 12 people, including five foreigners, in an area known as a stronghold of Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud.

Pakistani officials said the attack targeted a house in a remote village on the border between North and South Waziristan, where Mehsud, an al Qaeda ally, has been bottled up by Pakistani forces since early this year.

Frustrated by fighters from Pakistan fuelling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and fearful of al Qaeda regrouping, U.S. forces have intensified missile attacks by pilotless drones since early September, security sources say.

"We have reports that 12 people were killed, including five foreigners," a paramilitary official told Reuters by telephone from the area.

It was unclear if the dead foreigners included Arabs, who usually signify an al Qaeda presence.

A relative and aides to Mehsud, and Pakistani government and paramilitary officials said the attack happened at around 1:45 a.m. (2045 GMT), and up to four missiles were fired.

"There were two drones flying in our area and they fired four missiles," a paramilitary official in the area said. "They were American."

Missile-armed drones are primarily used by U.S. forces in the region, though the United States seldom confirms drone attacks. Pakistan does not have any.

Mehsud, who was accused of being behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last December, married a second wife in a ceremony held earlier this week in the Makeen area of South Waziristan.

"Around 50 guests attended the marriage. They were all his close friends. It was a simple ceremony," close aide Mufti Wali-ur-Rehman told Reuters.

His new wife is a madrasa-schooled daughter of a cleric from his own Mehsud tribe. Mehsud has no children by his first wife. Under Islamic custom a man can take up to four wives. (This is old information at this time - 801)

"CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER"

CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Washington think tank on Thursday that U.S. pressure in Pakistan's borderlands aimed to put al Qaeda "off balance," and said the region represented the greatest terrorism threat to the United States.

Hayden said several al Qaeda veterans had been eliminated "by violence or natural causes" in the past year and the hunt for Osama bin Laden was "at the top of CIA's priority list."

The spy chief did not refer openly to the missile strikes or a U.S. commando raid in South Waziristan on September 3, which marked the first time the lid has been raised on the use of ground forces on Pakistan soil.

Pakistan has condemned the violations of its territory. Islamabad argues the attacks fuel anger toward the United States and undermine the government's own efforts to garner people's support for the campaign against militancy.

There are hopes in Pakistan the incoming administration of Barack Obama will be less aggressive than the outgoing George W. Bush administration in its approach to counter-terrorism operations inside Pakistan.

"It's undermining my sovereignty and it's not helping win the ... hearts and minds of people," President Asif Ali Zardari told CBS News in an interview aired overnight.

Zardari, whose 8-month-old civilian government is desperate for financial support to avert an economic meltdown, denied media speculation Pakistan had silently agreed a deal with the United States to allow missile strikes, and said more cooperation was needed.

Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is visiting Brussels next week where he will raise the issue of the strikes and their repercussions during talks with NATO officials, according to Pakistani military sources.

The latest attack coincided with a visit by the commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan to Islamabad.

General David McKiernan met with Pakistani parliamentarians at the U.S. embassy on Thursday to brief them on the security situation and efforts to combat the militancy threat, according to a lawmaker in attendance, who asked not to be named.

(Additional reporting by Alamgir Bitani and Hafiz Wazir; Writing by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Jerry Norton)

http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed2/idUSTRE4AD14320081114?sp=true

Haji Mujtaba is Mr. Missile strike. Go google him and see what he reports, and from what side. He is wired into the Taliban.

[NYer]

Any way since the NY times has requested to all media organizations not to publish any thing on that matter, I have not followed the matter.


When the US Govt asks the NY Times not to publish sensitive info, it's leaked as Front Page News. But if the NY Times requests media silence ... Hmmmmm.

[Casey]

Saudi Arabia offers asylum to Omar-German weekly

Sat Nov 22, 2008 9:28pm IST

BERLIN (Reuters) - King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has offered political asylum to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, German weekly Der Spiegel reported on Saturday.

The offer had been pushed by U.S. President George W. Bush and Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, the magazine said in an advance report from its Monday edition, quoting government sources in Kabul. It did not give further details.

A Saudi foreign ministry official was not available for comment.

Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting between pro-government Afghan officials and former Taliban officials in September for discussions on how to end the worsening conflict in Afghanistan.

An Afghan government official said on Wednesday Afghan government representatives and former members of the Taliban were expected to meet in Saudi Arabia soon for a second round of talks.

The official said Karzai, King Abdullah and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had discussed the initiative on the sidelines of a U.N. conference in New York this month.

Omar is suspected to be hiding in the mountainous areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Karzai has said he will guarantee the safety of Omar if he wants to talk peace to end the hardline Islamist group's insurgency.

Saudi Arabia has a history of providing sanctuary for exiled and controversial politicians, including Uganda's Idi Amin, who died in exile there in 2003.

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the main supporters of the Taliban when they ruled from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban were overthrown by U.S.-led troops in 2001, weeks after the Sept 11. attack on the United States.

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-36643220081122

[Casey]

I knew this was coming....


Saudi denies offering asylum to Taliban leader
38 minutes ago

RIYADH (AFP) — The Saudi government on Saturday denied reports that it has offered political asylum to Afghanistan's fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

A foreign ministry spokesman "denies totally the report ... according to which Saudi Arabia has offered political asylum to the Taliban leader," the state news agency SPA reported.

The German news magazine Der Spiegel, in its edition due to appear on Monday, said Saudi King Abdullah had offered asylum to Mullah Omar, quoting sources close to the Kabul government.

The sources said the offer was the result of mediation and pressure from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US President George W. Bush as part of efforts to seal a reconciliation.

Karzai said earlier this month that he would go to "any length" to protect Mullah Omar if the Taliban leader agreed to peace talks.

The Afghan president has for years pushed for peace talks with the Taliban which ruled the country before a 2001 US-led invasion, as a way out of a deadly insurgency involving foreign militants, including Al-Qaeda.

The Taliban, driven from government for sheltering Al-Qaeda after the September 2001 terror attacks, have said they would only agree to negotiations if international troops leave Afghanistan.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j5KBC_I_tQO9HmsUVfA7pxIFG5hw

[The 801]

US Strikes Unite Pakistan Militants

By Aamir Latif, IOL Correspondent

WANA, South Waziristan — Incessant US drone attacks on the northern tribal belt have persuaded splinter militant groups to burry their hatches, and are providing them with a new recruiting tool.

"We have received credible reports that the three top rival pro-Taliban commanders operating in different regions of the tribal belt have recently contacted each other and agreed to chalk out a combined strategy vis-a-vis their activities in the region," a senior intelligence official told IslamOnline.net.

He said the groups are the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) of Baitullah Mehsud, the largest militant group in the 700-kilometer belt, Mullah Mohammad Nazir, a pro-government Taliban commander based in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a powerful commander of North Waziristan.

Bahadur had parted his ways with Mehsud a few months back over differences over using suicide bombings against Pakistani security forces.

The decision to reunite was taken at a recent meeting chaired by Bahadur in Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan.

"The meeting was attended by the representatives of Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Nazir," said the official.

The US has stepped up its campaign against alleged militants in the restive tribal area with a series of missile strikes from predator drones.

It has conducted more than 40 drone attacks inside Pakistan during the past ten months killing hundreds of tribesmen, including children and women.

Commander Bahadur has ordered his fighters to get ready to avenge the blood of "innocent martyrs" and threatened to strike inside Pakistan amid reports that the drone attacks are being conducted with the consent of Islamabad.

Well-placed sources earlier told IOL that Pakistan and the US have a secret deal under which US drones continue to strike inside the tribal belt and Islamabad continues to publically complain about them.

The TTP reportedly groups between 8,000 to 25,000 well armed, highly-trained fighters of the Mehsud tribe, the largest tribe in the border region.

Mullah Nazir commands a militia of some 600 fighters of the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe, which has had old rivalries with the Mehsud tribe.

This group, known as Punjabi Taliban, is believed to have been formed by the army copying the US strategy of countering Al-Qaeda through local Iraqi Sunni tribes.

Bahadur snatched the control of a large number of militants based in North Waziristan after he developed differences with his Baitullah Mehsud.

Recruiting Plus

The Pakistani intelligence official believes the US drone attacks and the deaths of many civilians, including women and children, have rejuvenated the dwindling support for the militant groups in the tribal region.

"The pro-government Taliban and tribal Maliks (lords) are going weak with every passing day due to the killing of civilians," he said.

"The hardline Taliban groups are getting stronger with the induction of a large number of area youths within their ranks, compelling the moderate Taliban to either stop supporting the government forces or rejoining them (hardline militants)."

The official thinks that the drone attacks and the useless, weak response of the government have left moderate Taliban and tribal lords with limited options.

"Various tribal lords have openly refused to stand alongside us because the killing of hundreds of tribesmen have forced them to back those who are fighting against US forces," he said.

"And naturally, they are Taliban."

According to well-placed sources, army chief General Ashfaq Perwaiz Kyani told Premier Yousaf Raza Gilani during a briefing meeting on Thursday, November 21, that the drone attacks are discouraging those who have been supporting his troops in the tribal areas.

Security analysts also believe that the drone attacks are helping Al-Qaeda and Taliban.

"These attacks are simply helping Al-Qaeda and Taliban to regroup because every drone attack gives them new blood in the form of area youths who hand themselves over to militant groups as would-be suicide bombers," Hamid Mir, an Islamabad-based security analyst, told IOL.

"Every attack is increasing support for Taliban in the tribal areas and the rest of the country. Even people who are against Taliban oppose US attacks inside Pakistan," he maintains.

The expert noted that parliament recently passed a unanimous resolution against foreign attacks on Pakistani areas and lawmakers are asking the government to either fire back at attackers or complain to the UN.

"The US war on terror has lost whatever support it had among the people of Pakistan because of these drone attacks."


http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1227019206860&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout

[Casey]

Fearing Taliban, Pakistan Cops resign

SWAT: Ismaeel Khan is one of hundreds of cops in the restive valley of Swat who have recently resigned after being threatened by Taliban militants to either quit or face "dire consequences."

"Around 400 cops, including myself, have resigned from our posts as we all still want to live," Khan, 42, a head constable in Swat police, told IslamOnline.net.

Mujahideen of the pro-Taliban Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TSNM) of Maulvi Fazlullah issued a warning to local policemen last month to resign from their posts.

"We don't want to fight you (local policemen) as you are our own people," read one of several pamphlets circulated by TSNM militants.

"Therefore, it is in your better interest to either leave your jobs or get ready for dire consequences."

The pamphlets advised local policemen to advertise their names in local newspapers if they quit their jobs.

Khan, like many colleagues, was initially defiant to cow to the threats but continuing ambushes targeting military and police convoys changed his mind.

"I consulted with my other friends, who all were of the same opinion that we should quit our jobs to save our lives."

They published a joint advertisement in a local newspaper informing the Taliban militants that they have quit the police force.

"It was a hard decision to take as I left my 16-year long service," said a visibly moved Khan.

A senior police officer of the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders Afghanistan, confirmed the resignation of around 350 local policemen.

"Yes, ads regarding their resignations from the police force are being published in local newspapers in order to save themselves and their families from Taliban," he told IOL requesting anonymity.

"We cannot stop them. We are fully aware of their position. They are locals and they have to live there."

Hijacked Dream

Khan, the head constable in Swat police, believed he had no other option but comply to the militants' demand.

"It was my job. I had been earning livelihood for my family, but I realized that there was no other option left for me because of the complete insecurity," he told IOL.

"Even army troops who live in heavily cordoned off places are not safe, let alone us (policemen) who are locals and an easy target."

Some 102 policemen have been killed in the past 10 months in militant attacks in Swat and neighboring areas.

Many of them were first kidnapped and later slaughtered by suspected Taliban militants, while some of them reportedly committed suicide.

"It was a hard decision to take as I left my 16-year long service," said a visibly moved Khan.

He was about to be promoted to the rank of assistant sub-inspector before his resignation.

"I had been waiting for this moment for last many years. In police departments, promotion for rankers (those who joint the police department as constable and do not appear in particular examinations) is always a dream.

"In fact, I had started receiving advance greetings, but my dream was hijacked by insecurity and uncertainty," he lamented.

The senior NWFP police officer said they have recommended to the federal and the provincial governments announcing some incentives for the Swat police in order to boost up their morale.

"However, I doubt that it will yield any positive results because life is more precious than any incentives."
Source: IslamOnline

[The 801]

Taliban not talking peace
Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

Amid continuing reports of a renewed initiative to hold peace talks with the Taliban over Afghanistan, and confusion over the Taliban's position, the Taliban leadership decided to outline its stance, and chose Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani to speak with Asia Times Online.

Rahmani, about 50, is a member of the Taliban's shura (council) and a close adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, with whom he is in daily contact; so much so that in Taliban circles he is considered Mullah Omar's shadow. During Taliban rule (1996-2001), Rahmani was governor of Kandahar province, the Taliban's spiritual heartland.

The interview took place at a location at which both North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Pakistan security troops operate in their hunt for the Taliban.

Asia Times Online: Please introduce yourself. How were you introduced to the Taliban movement? How did you became governor of Kandahar province? What is your relation with the Taliban movement at present?

Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani: My name is Hasan Rahmani. I am a former governor of Kandahar province. I was involved with the Taliban movement from its beginning. It was an Islamic movement, and I had been involved in jihad, so I joined it. Later, when some areas were conquered by the Taliban, I was appointed as governor of Kandahar, and till the last I remained in this position.

ATol: Where did you get your education?

HR: At different places and in different madrassas [seminaries] in Afghanistan, Peshawar, Quetta etc.

ATol: Since you are still very close to Mullah Omar, and you are part of his shura , please explain why the Western media are boosting peace talks with the Taliban and saying that Saudi Arabia has played a major role. One report even says Saudi Arabia has offered Mullah Omar asylum.

HR: Today the Taliban are successful and the Americans and the NATO forces are in a state of defeat. The enemy wants to engage the Taliban and deviate their minds. Sometimes they offer talks, sometimes they offer other fake issues. The Taliban never ever tried for such talks, neither do we want these talks to be held. Neither the Saudi Arabian initiative [talks held recently in Mecca] nor the Saudi Arabian proposal [over Mullah Omar] is acceptable.

ATol: Al-Sharaq al-Awsat is a very credible [London-based] journal which mentioned two names [among others] which, according to my knowledge, are a part of the Taliban. One is Moulvi Abdul Kabeer, who was governor of Nangarhar province during Taliban rule, the other was Syed Tayyab Agha, who was Mullah Omar's secretary. These people went to Saudi Arabia and dined with King Abdullah. Is this news correct? Were they really there, and if so, in what capacity?

HR: This is absolutely wrong. Neither Moulvi Abdul Kabeer nor Tayyab Agha went to Saudi Arabia. In the last days of Ramadan [end of October] the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, was invited for dinner, but later the media projected that talks had begun with the Taliban under Saudi mediation. That was to weaken the Taliban and their jihad. The fact is that the Taliban were not part of such talks, nor are they ready to be so.

ATol: You have always been one of Mullah Omar’s close lieutenants, part of his shura. Is he still commanding the Taliban from Afghanistan?

HR: Mullah Mohammad Omar Mujahid is still the commander of the faithful. He is the sole leader of the Taliban and solely in charge of their affairs.

ATol: Every year there is talk of Kandahar falling to the Taliban, but they have not succeeded in occupying it, or even putting any serious pressure on it. Except for engineering a mass jail break this year, they could not undertake any significant action. Why?

HR: This is a battlefield arrangement. Sometimes the Taliban capture several areas and reach near Kandahar, and believe they are in a position to seize it, so they talk about occupying it. But the fact is the Taliban could not occupy Kandahar.

ATol: The Taliban are blamed for attacking unveiled women with acid in Kandahar. What is the reality?

HR: This is propaganda aimed at defaming the Taliban. Nobody knows who threw the acid. Throwing acid on any human being, whether a man or a woman, has never been the Taliban’s policy and the Taliban deny their involvement in such acts.

ATol:Western media project that the Taliban have imposed Islamic laws, even though they don’t have a government in Afghanistan. They force people to practice Islam, stop the masses from listening to music and insist that men grow long beards and wear turbans. Is there any substance in this?

HR: The reality is that this is the time of resistance and jihad and the entire focus is on resistance. But at the same time, we place emphasis on the implementation of Islamic laws. This is the duty of all Muslims, to practice Islam and motivate others.

ATol: The Taliban have made special arrangements to disrupt NATO's supply lines. In Khyber Agency and in the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar and Wardak, the Taliban have carried out many attacks. Recently, similar attacks were witnessed in Kandahar. Are there plans to permanently disrupt NATO's supply lines in Spin Boldak [in Kandahar province] and in Kandahar?

RH: The Taliban have occupied all major routes in Afghanistan and have been choking the arteries of supplies for NATO convoys. They are strongly prepared between Wardak and Kandahar to cut off NATO supplies, but all over Afghanistan they are better prepared to do so.

ATol: Kandahar is the most important province of Afghanistan. Historically, the ruling elite belonged to this province. All prominent warlords and warriors came from Kandahar. How many Kandahari tribes are with you? I heard that President Hamid Karzai's own tribesmen [Popalzai] supported the Taliban.

RH: This is a fact, that Kandahari tribes are with the Taliban, even Hamid Karzai’s tribesmen, and even the elders of his tribes are with the Taliban and all the tribes.

ATol: Could you please name them, I mean the tribes who collectively decided to side with the Taliban?

RH: The Achakzai, Noorzai, Hajizai, Wazir and the tribes stretching up to Kunar and Khost are all with the Taliban ... and the Barakzai tribe.

ATol: The Popalzai ... ?

RH: Yes, the Popalzai, the Ishaqzai ... those opposed to the Taliban are now embarrassed and are contacting the Taliban, saying that Hamid Karzai deceived them.

ATol:Next year, presidential elections are scheduled in Afghanistan. Kandahar is the home of Karzai. When he contested the elections last time, he was supported by some former Taliban, including Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketti. Will it be possible for Karzai to roam freely in Kandahar to solicit votes?

RH: The entire world knows that he does not have a base or support. He is a weak person. Nobody believes Karzai is able to be supportive or useful to them. He has even lost the support of NATO and the Americans, therefore it is unlikely he will get the same attention from the people as he got during the last presidential elections.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JK25Df02.html

[The 801]

Here's an experiment:
If you failed to hear Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on Fresh Air this week, here is the link. Amazing, firsthand, and absolutely up to date. And Terry Gross steers the conversation. Take the 40 minutes to listen to it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97444808

[The 801]

Pakistan's intelligence chief heads for India

The head of Pakistan's intelligence services will travel to India to share anti-terrorist information in a bid to ease to diplomatic tension between the neighbouring countries.

The high-level agreement, a significant political gesture at a time of escalating political suspicions, came amid a barrage of accusations and denials.

As further evidence emerged suggesting the terrorist onslaught in Mumbai originated in Karachi, Pakistan confirmed it would cooperate with Indian requests for Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, the chief of its controversial Inter-Services Intelligence, to fly to New Delhi.

India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, today declared: "Preliminary evidence indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved." He urged Pakistan to dismantle the infrastructure that supports militants.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, in India on a scheduled visit, retorted: "Whoever has done this is neither your friend nor our friend. We are not responsible for this, nor is it in our interest to get involved in something like this." He called on India not to play politics. "We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands to defeat the enemy."

In the past the ISI has been accused of supporting Islamist militants in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The election earlier this year of president Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto, began a thaw in embittered relations between the rival nuclear powers.

Pakistan's government has been quick to respond to the Mumbai atrocities as it scrambles to avoid a crisis developing with its neighbour. Anything linking Pakistan to the attacks would chill relations and could wreck US hopes of persuading Islamabad to focus on battling the Taliban and al-Qaida.

An Indian state minister has confirmed that one of the arrested gunmen is a Pakistani national. India's prime minister Manmohan Singh is believed to have told his Pakistani counterpart that "preliminary reports" on the attacks "point to Karachi".

Karachi is Pakistan's main port and financial hub, where a host of Islamic militant groups have a presence.

Pakistan's premier Yousuf Raza Gilani, swiftly agreed to Singh's request for the head of ISI to travel to India to share information.

Earlier Qureshi warned India against a kneejerk reaction to the attacks. He said India and Pakistan should cooperate to defeat a common enemy.

There were signs of renewed tension between the two countries today after Pakistani troops opened fire on Indian positions along the line of control in Kashmir. It was the second ceasefire violation in less than 24 hours, a senior army officer said today.

India and Pakistan have been to war three times since the partition of India in 1947, and the threat of further military conflict is ever present especially over the disputed region of Kashmir.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/india-pakistan

My Dumb Ass Opinion:
The only group that had anything to gain from this event was the Taliban.
- The heat is on against the Frontier Agency's.
- If Pakistan got involved against India, that would take the pressure off against that area.
- They have the organizational ability, and know army of suicide soldiers.
- The ISI would have traditionally been the group trying to destabilize the India Pakistani axis. There is plenty of ISI guys that have be disenfranchised since the new president came in.
- The lack of identity of the attackers, and who they are, is of no political value, unless you want to sow confusion.
- AQ needed a big visual operation, they have been becoming less relevant to their own followers, who have been losing faith. AQ / Taliban nexus is pretty well established, duh.
- Both of these organizations have a strong track record for tearing down, and not gaining there aims though positive social action.

[Vancouver]

Mohammad Hanif, a gross liar and sometime hireling of the Taliban, has been killed by one side or the other in Afghanistan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7755106.stm

[NYer]

Cross-dressing Taliban commander killed by US forces. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,459025,00.html)

http://www.jihadwatch.org/burqa.jpg
Photo from Jihad Watch

Queer Eye for the Taliban Guy

[The 801]

The Taliban are experiencing, what we call in the US during these economic times, a "streamlining of management".

[Casey]

Principality Taliban / martyrdom of Dr. spokesman Mohammad Hanif, former Principality 29/11/2008

-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------

The name of God the Merciful

Death of Dr. Mohammad Hanif said the former official of the Principality

Zabihullah (Mujahid) - 29/11/2008

He died on Friday, former spokesman for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Abdul Haq get and also known as Dr. Mohammad Hanif::: acceptable to God:::

In 2007, members of the Intelligence Department of the client, Dr. Hanif, arrested in the department of state Rodat Nangarhar He was released after serving 20 months in captivity.

He cited last night::: acceptable to God::: with three of his relatives in the village of Alma, about 10 kilometers from the epicenter of the eastern state of Ningerhard.

The 20 soldiers stormed the administration's client Brother house last night for the third brother, Dr. Hanif who was present there ostensibly to search the house and arrested with three of his relatives and the soldiers documenting their customers from behind them and opened fire Kalashnikovs and shot them dead on the spot::: acceptance of God: ::

A few days ago reported in the media that Dr Hanif had begun work in the religious programs of the television, but Ningerhard::: acceptable to God::: denied those reports.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan expresses its profound grief by this incident and strongly condemns this cowardly act of terror carried out by the client management and false promises to provide security for the people of this work will not pass without a response from us.

Dr. Hanif::: acceptable to God::: studied law and graduated from the University of Ningerhard worked spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan for more than three years.

We call upon God Almighty to accept our brother is spent with him and receive high level and the ranking of friends and martyrs.

I am God and to Him we return

If they were told not spoil the land they are but Msalehon (The Cow 11)
They are not corruptors, but do not feel (The Cow 12)

Information: spokesman of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban
Qari Mohammad Yousuf (Ahmadinejad)
Of the South, West and North West of the country
Tel: 008821621346341
Mobile: 0700886853 - 0707163424
Zabihullah (Mujahid)
Of the South, East and the North East of the country
Tel: 008821621360585
Mobile: 0799169794 - 0707010740

God is great pride and God, His Prophet and the believers
Information Committee of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban
-------------------------------------------------- ----
Source / page (Voice of Jihad) in 29/11/2008
Official site of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - Taliban


http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y20/caseybritton/cked/tal.jpg


الإمارة طالبان / استشهاد الدكتور محمد حنيف الناطق الرسمي السابق للإمارة 29/11/2008

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

استشهاد الدكتور محمد حنيف الناطق الرسمي السابق للإمارة

ذبيح الله (مجاهد) – 29/11/2008

استشهد يوم أمس الجمعة الناطق الرسمي السابق لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية عبد الحق حقيق والمعروف أيضا باسم الدكتور محمد حنيف :::تقبله الله:::

في عام 2007، ألقت عناصر الاستخبارات التابعة للإدارة العميلة القبض على الدكتور حنيف في مديرية رودات بولاية ننجرهار وقد أطلق سراحه بعد أن قضى في الأسر 20 شهرا.

وقد استشهد ليلة أمس :::تقبله الله::: مع ثلاثة من أقاربه في قرية لالما على بعد 10 كم من مركز المنطقة الشرقية بولاية ننجرهارد.

لقد اقتحم 20 من جنود الإدارة العميلة ليلة أمس منزل الأخ الغير شقيق للدكتور حنيف الذي كان متواجدا هناك بزعم تفتيش المنزل والقوا القبض عليه مع ثلاثة من أقاربه وقام الجنود العملاء بتوثيق أيديهم من الخلف وفتحوا عليهم نيران الكلاشنكوف وأردوهم قتلى على الفور :::تقبلهم الله:::

وقبل أيام قليلة تناقلت وسائل الإعلام أن الدكتور حنيف قد بدأ العمل في البرامج الدينية التابعة لتلفزيون ننجرهارد ولكن :::تقبله الله::: قد نفى تلك التقارير.

إن إمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية تعبر عن حزنها العميق جراء هذه الحادثة وتدين بشدة هذا العمل الإرهابي الجبان الذي قامت به الإدارة العميلة ووعودها الكاذبة بتوفير الأمن للناس ولن يمر هذا العمل دون رد منا.

الدكتور حنيف :::تقبله الله::: درس القانون وتخرج في جامعة ننجرهارد وعمل ناطقا رسميا لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية لمدة تزيد عن ثلاثة سنوات.

ندعو الله سبحانه وتعالى أن يتقبل أخانا ومن قضوا معه وأن ينال الدرجة العالية والمنزلة الرفيعة للصديقين والشهداء.

انا لله وانا إليه راجعون

وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمْ لَا تُفْسِدُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ قَالُوا إِنمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحُونَ (البقرة11)
أَلَا إِنَّهُمْ هُمْ الْمُفْسِدُونَ وَلَكِنْ لَا يَشْعُرُونَ (البقرة12)

معلومات: الناطق الرسمي لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان
قاري محمد يوسف (احمدي)
للمناطق الجنوب الغربية والشمال الغربية في البلاد
هاتف : 008821621346341
خلوي : 0700886853 - 0707163424
ذبيح الله (مجاهد)
للمناطق الجنوب الشرقية والشمال الشرقية في البلاد
هاتف : 008821621360585
خلوي : 0799169794 - 0707010740

والله أكبر والعزة لله ولرسوله وللمؤمنين
اللجنة الإعلامية لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان
------------------------------------------------------
المصدر / صفحة (صوت الجهاد) في 29/11/2008
موقع رسمي لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية - طالبان

[NYer]

http://humanflowerproject.com/images/uploads/munchkins-and-dorothy.jpg

As Coroner , I thoroughly examined him
And he's not only merely dead
he's really most sincerely dead.

Apologies to Warner Bros. (http://thewizardofoz.warnerbros.com/movie/cmp/r-lyrics.html)

[FC-UK]

Taliban leader vows more -AFGHAN-KARZAI-COL.XML (http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-09T113800Z_01_ARM931081_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-AFGHAN-KARZAI-COL.XML)


You have not got a clue have you?
You will LOSe in Afghanstan, you know why? because you are NOT the GOOD GUYS, you are EVIL personified, prancing around like good guys, murdering torturing, raping men women and children

[The 801]

Pakistan capitulates to the taliban. Now starts the downward spiral. At least we will know where Bin Laden will be.

Pakistan: Sharia law endorsed in deal with tribal leaders



Karachi, 16 Feb. (AKI) - By Syed Saleem Shahzad - Sharia law will be enforced in the northwestern Swat valley under an historic agreement endorsed by the Pakistani government and Islamic leaders on Monday. Announcement of the peace deal came after talks between the government of North West Frontier Province and a local leader, Sufi Mohammad.

All un-Islamic laws in the Malakand division of Swat, which is geographically one third of the whole province, have been abolished.

The Islamic judicial system will be enforced by Islamic judges (or qazi), the chief minister of the North West Frontier Province Amir Haider Khan Hoti told media on Monday after reaching agreement with Mohammad's group, the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi.

The Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi signed the historic agreement after a tribal meeting or grand jirga which marked the victory of the Taliban and peace in the Swat valley after two years.

The government of North West Frontier Province had been holding talks with Mohammad on amendments to the enforcement of Sharia in Swat.

The peace agreement will also be complemented by a compensation package for those who were killed and injured in military operations in Swat.

"Those who were killed shall get Rs 300,000 (3,760 dollars) and those who were wounded shall be get Rs 100,000 (1,254 dollars)," Amir Haider Khan Hoti told journalists.

"The entire deal, Islamic laws and other packages related to the deal were completely approved by the president of Pakistan (Asif Ali Zardari) ,” he said.

Mohammad, considered the key Islamic leader in Swat, will now go to the region with a 42-member delegation and ask the Taliban led by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah to lay down its weapons. The Taliban has been fighting for the strict enforcement of Sharia in the region.

"We have established a task force which will monitor the implementation of Islamic law, but enforcement shall be bound by peace and the writ of the state," said Amir Haider Khan Hoti.

"The security forces now (after the signature on agreement) shall be in reactive rather than proactive mode. They shall only retaliate if somebody tries to challenge the writ of the state," he said.

The uprising in the scenic Swat valley, which began after the August 2007 siege at Islamabad's Red Mosque in which over 150 people died, is expected to end after the militants accepted key demands.

The Pakistani military has in recent months been battling fighters loyal to Fazlullah in an intense military offensive.

More than 20,000 people across the Swat valley are believed to have fled their homes to escape the fighting and hundreds of girls' schools have been destroyed since the Taliban insurgency began in 2007.

The grand jirga brought together political parties, elected representatives from the Malakand region and the TNSM leadership. All agreed to the militants' demands regarding Sharia law which resulted in the announcement of the Nizam-i-Adal regulation 2009 (or justice regulation 2009).

“We realised that there was a vacuum in the Swat valley. People faced hardships concerning swift justice," he said.

When Swat merged with the state of Pakistan and its Islamic courts were abolished in 1969, the area came under Pakistan's secular legal system.

"People were getting delayed justice. In 1994 regulalations were introduced, in 1999 regulations were introduced but those were not implemented. People felt deceived.

"This coalition government and the provincial government after prolonged consultation with all the political leaders and the president’s approval amended 1999 regulations," he said.

"I appeal to the people who adopted the path of violence to play their role for the restoration of peace," he said.

The deal drew a mixed response from Pakistan's political leaders.

“I am appalled by this development," pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League senator Marvi Memon told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"Yesterday, President Zardari said in a statement that the Taliban wanted to take over the entire state and today he approved an agreement which legitimises its position.

"The Taliban does not want Islamic laws in Malakand division only but the enforcement of their brand of Islam (elsewhere) in the country and in the whole world. I wonder what this government has done," he said.

But Maulana Sami ul-Haq, leader of his own faction of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam religious party, and popularly known as the father of Taliban, told AKI he welcomed the move.

“This is a major step that's been coming for a long time, and will ensure peace in the North West Frontier Province," he told AKI.

"Hundreds of people were killed during the military operation and over 600,000 were displaced. Now we hope that everything shall be normalised.”

Sami ul-Haq played a pivotal role in the agreement between the TNSM and the government.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=3.0.3020547082

[NYer]

Perv was playing a Double Game. (http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/196405.php)

http://www.rantburg.com/images/surprise.jpg

In not much of a shocker... more of a confirmation. We were being had.

[The 801]

Very cool stuff.....

The Taliban get their first wish
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Many Muslims believe that ancient Khorasan - which covers parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - is the promised land from where they will secure the first victory in the end-of-time battle in which the final round, according to their beliefs, will be fought in Bilad-i-Sham (Palestine-Lebanon-Syria).

The geographical borders of Bilad-i-Sham-Khorasan extend from Samarkand in Uzbekistan to the small Malakand division in the northern fringe of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) that includes the militant-dominated Swat Valley.

On Monday, at a time when United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus was trying to set up a supply route for troops in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan, in this extreme corner of the promised land of Khorasan - Malakand division - militants had every reason to celebrate.

Asif Ali Zardari, the strongly American-backed Pakistani president, and the provincial government of NWFP gave in to the demands of militants and announced a ceasefire, lifted a two-year-old curfew and announced the implementation of Islamic sharia law.

"All un-Islamic laws in the Malakand division of Swat, which is geographically one third of the whole [NWFP] province, have been abolished," the chief minister of NWFP, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, told the media after reaching an agreement with the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi, which is headed by Sufi Mohammad, the symbol of the sharia movement in Malakand division. The Islamic judicial system will be enforced by Islamic judges - qazi.

The accord is a significant victory for the Pakistan Taliban and could end two years of strife in the region which has seen militants pitted against Pakistani security forces.

The peace agreement will be complemented by a compensation package for the families of those killed and injured in the military operations. "[Families] of those who were killed will get 300,000 rupees [US$3,760] and those who were wounded will get 100,000 rupees," Hoti said. "The entire deal, Islamic laws and other packages related to the deal were completely approved by the president of Pakistan," he said.

"We have established a task force which will monitor the implementation of Islamic law, but enforcement will be bound by peace and the writ of the state," said Hoti. "The security forces now [after the signing of the agreement] will be in reactive rather than proactive mode. They will only retaliate if somebody tries to challenge the writ of the state," Hoti said.

The army's Inter-Services Public Relations confirmed that the curfew has been lifted, after two years, in Swat Valley. Militants have also announced a ceasefire for 10 days which is likely to extend for an indefinite period.

The developments in Malakand division coincide with the arrival in Afghanistan of close to 3,000 American soldiers as part of an extra 30,000 to boost the already 30,000 US troops in the country. The new contingent will be deployed in Logar province to secure violent provinces near the capital Kabul. Petraeus must now be thinking of how many more troops he will need to confront the additional Taliban fighters that will come from Malakand.

Taliban's victory: A curtain raiser to the spring battle
A key factor in the Taliban's revival after being driven from power by US-led forces in 2001 was that from 2004 they established a strong network in Pakistan that was coordinated by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

A focal point of this was the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, which was stormed in July 2007 by Pakistani security forces to clear it of militants. The network extended into the Swat Valley, streamed into Bajaur Agency and Mohmand Agency from where militants fed the Afghan insurgency in Kunar and Nooristan provinces.

Other flows of militants into South Waziristan and North Waziristan, Kurram Agency and Khyber Agency respectively fed the Afghan insurgency in the provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Khost and Nangarhar provinces.

By this time, Western intelligence had realized that these developments in Pakistan were a major factor behind the "fireworks" in Afghanistan, and Islamabad was told as much. The Pakistanis were also warned that the militants could also launch a revolution in Pakistan. This was a major turning point in the "war on terror" in the South Asian theater.

For the first time, Islamabad felt a chill up its spine and viewed the situation from a different perspective - not as an American war in which its participation was drawn out of compulsion, but as a war necessary to maintain the status quo of its own system. This system was a blend of the country's deep relationship with the US and the perpetuation of the military oligarchy, combined with a particular brand of Islam that could co-exist with this setup.

The attack on the Lal Masjid was the first shot fired in this battle, and its reverberations soon spread to the Swat Valley, South Waziristan and then Bajaur Agency, in effect turning the whole of NWFP into a war theater. A series of military operations in the tribal areas drove the militants from stand-alone sanctuaries into population centers.

In Malakand, which includes the Swat area, the militants are a part of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban and the vanguard of the Taliban's cause in the region against Western occupation forces in Afghanistan and their ally - Pakistan. They have established their own writ with a parallel system that includes courts, police and even a electric power-distribution network and road construction, and all this is now official in the eyes of Islamabad.

All intelligence indicated that further concentration on military operations in Swat could lead to an expansion of the war theater into Pakistan's non-Pashtun cities, such as Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The security forces were already stretched and even faced rebellions.

These combined factors culminated in Monday's peace agreement, which is a major defeat for Washington
as well as Pakistan, and it could also lead to a major setback for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Afghanistan come spring when hordes of better-trained fighters from Swat pour into Afghanistan.

The Taliban defeat American interests
To tame the militancy, Washington and London devised a plan in 2007, one aspect of which was for the military to take on the militants. At the same time, Pakistan was to move from a military dictatorship under president general Pervez Musharraf to a political government.

This happened in the beginning of last year with the formation of a democratically elected coalition government of secular and liberal parties involving among others the Pakistan People's Party, the Muttehida Quami Movement, the Pashtun sub-nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam and the Pakistan Muslim League-Qaid-i-Azam. It was envisaged that these parties would fully back the US's "war on terror".

Earlier, Washington had brokered a deal between former premier Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf, who was also chief of army staff, under which a National Reconciliation Ordinance was enacted to have all corruption cases against Bhutto and her spouse Asif Ali Zardari dropped. Under this arrangement, later, NWFP was handed over to the ANP, recognized as the most genuine secular political party.

The militants were onto the game. The first shot was the assassination of Bhutto by al-Qaeda in December 2007, which practically turned the whole American plan on its head and created a situation in which Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, an anti-Musharraf party, secured an unprecedented number of seats in parliament, leaving no option but for Musharraf, the most important American ally, to resign. But in time, the secular and liberal political parties in the capital became hostage to the militants.

Another setback for the pro-American forces was the brazen militant attack late last year on Asfandyar Wali, the leader of the ANP, at his home about 20 kilometers from the NWFP capital, Peshawar. He then fled first to Islamabad and later to Europe. Asfandyar had been groomed by the US through many visits to the US.

Asfandyar's departure resulted in half the leadership of the ANP, including the head of their foreign relations committee, Dr Himayun Khan, resigning. Their departure was hastened by dire threats from the Taliban. It was only a matter of time before the ANP's influence in NWFP was severely eroded.

Ironically, the ANP, which sided with the Soviets against the Islamic Afghan resistance in the 1980s and put up fierce resistance to the enactment of Islamic laws in the country, has now become the main engine for the enforcement of sharia in NWFP where it technically rules.

On Tuesday, while Asfandyar has chosen to remain silent, his nephew and the chief minister of the province, Hoti, warned the federal government that any obstruction of the deal with the militants would be unacceptable.

Meanwhile, all schools in Swat, including girls' schools, were opened on Tuesday and thousands of people flocked to a cricket stadium to greet Sufi Mohammad, who will soon travel to Matta, a sub-district of Swat, to visit his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah to try to persuade him to end the insurgency. For the first time in many months, all members of the provincial and federal parliament will visit the Swat Valley.

Pakistan's failure: How it tackled the militancy
During Musharraf's eight years in power, Pakistan was on board with both the US and Saudi Arabia over the "war on terror". This ensured that Pakistan received a steady supply of all sorts of resources, including deferment on oil payments from Saudi Arabia and special aid packages when Pakistan was badly hit by an earthquake in 2005. Washington mostly looked after Pakistan’s military aid packages and reimbursement of expenses incurred in the "war on terror".

A few steps taken by Zardari, however, crumbled the setup like a house of cards. Immediately after taking over as president last September, in a very high-handed manner, Pakistan withdrew the hunting privileges of two Saudi princes located in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan in southern Punjab. To add salt to the wound, the facility was given to a rival sheikh from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The action was taken at a time when Pakistan badly needed Saudi oil on deferred terms due to soaring prices, and the UAE was in no position to fill the gap. Islamabad now enjoys very good relations with the UAE - which is unable to help Pakistan - due to the family friendship between the Bhutto family and the UAE's rulers. But Pakistan's relations with Saudi Arabia and its two major allies - Qatar and Bahrain - are at an all-time low because of the insult to the Saudi royal family. (The issue of Zardari's Shi'ite background is a secondary factor.)

Asia Times Online has learned that the newly installed US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, was impressed in recent talks with the government to learn that chief of army staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani works fully in coordination with the political government and does not intervene in its affairs. The Swat operation is an example: the military immediately stopped action when the government announced the peace deal with the militants. All the same, the Pentagon will be waiting to receive Kiani in Washington soon to discuss why the Pakistan army failed in Swat.

However, Holbrooke was apparently concerned when he interacted with Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani and members of the cabinet. Gillani expressed his fears that the poor economic situation in Pakistan could hamper its efforts in the "war on terror".

Holbrooke is said to have asked the premier how much money he would need to revive the economy. "As much as we can get," the premier replied, without giving specifics.

The dynamics of the region have changed once again. Nizam-i-Adal Regulation 2009, which proclaims the enforcement of sharia law in Malakand division, is indeed a written document of Pakistan's defeat in the American-inspired war in NWFP.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KB19Df01.html

[The 801]

Pakistan: Taliban wants amnesty for militants in exchange for peace


Karachi, 20 Feb. (AKI) - By Syed Saleem Shahzad - The Pakistani Taliban is demanding an amnesty for jailed militants and the withdrawal of the armed forces from the Swat Valley in the country's north-west before it endorses a peace agreement in the region. Taliban sources told Adnkronos International (AKI) that the Taliban's shura, or tribal council, was expected to finalise its position late Friday and announce its response at the weekend.

Sources said that the leader of Sufi Mohammad, the leader of Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi, discussed details of the government's proposal to Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah, demanding that the Taliban lay down its arms.

But the Taliban expressed its concerns and demanded guarantees regarding the withdrawal of around 10,000 Pakistani army soldiers deployed in the Swat Valley.

The Taliban is also demanding the release of all prisoners including Maulana Abdul Aziz, a radical cleric linked to the Red Mosque seige that resulted in the deaths of more than 170 people in July 2007, as well as unconditional amnesty so that the Taliban can operate from its headquarters in Imam Dheri in Swat.

Leaders also want financial compensation for the families of members who were killed and for property damage caused by the Pakistani army.

After presenting the Taliban's views, Fazlullah entrusted Mohamamad to negotiate with the government on the Taliban's behalf.

Sources said that the Taliban and Mohammad had completed the third phase of their talks.

Fazlullah, the leader of the Taliban in Swat, is also said to be in contact with colleagues in North and South Waziristan and also consulted the head of the Tekrik-i-Taliban in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud.

Meanwhile, a curfew was imposed and troops were deployed after a suicide attack in Dera Ismail Khan in North West Frontier Province killed at least 27 people and wounded more than 50 others on Friday.

Security forces have confirmed that the cities of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore were also on high alert in case the Swat peace negotiations failed, as a Taliban backlash is expected in the bigger cities of the country.

The Pakistani government has dismissed growing criticism of a peace accord it endorsed with Mohammad's Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat Muhammadi for the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the Swat Valley.

The peace deal announced on Monday allows for the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in the former tourist region and surrounding districts, in exchange for an end to the Taliban insurgency which has killed hundreds and forced hundreds of thousands to flee.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=3.0.3041149670

Have you guys figured out our friend Syed yet? Yea, he's wired and he knows what we all want to know. - 801

[Casey]

Top militant commanders resolve rift
Posted by Admin on 2009/2/20 21:30:12 (10 reads) News by the same author

Saturday, February 21, 2009

By Mushtaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR: In a dramatic development, three prominent Pakistani militant commanders — Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazeer ñ on Friday set aside their differences and promised to jointly fight their enemy in future.

A senior militant commander of Maulvi Nazeer group told this correspondent on condition of anonymity that all the three militant commanders, in a meeting held somewhere in the South Waziristan Agency, resolved all their differences and promised to live peacefully with each other in future.

“I am extremely excited today. It’s an Eid for us. I even danced and fired shots in the air as we succeeded in removing misunderstandings created by the Pakistan government,” remarked the Taliban commander while talking to The News from Wana by telephone.

He said senior Pakistani and Afghan Taliban commanders had played a role in resolving differences among the three militant commanders. He said a 14-member Shura was formed after their final meeting that would comprise banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, Taliban commander in North Waziristan and Maulvi Nazeer, militant commander in South Waziristan. Ten other people had been drawn from Baitullah Mehsud’s tribe, Gul Bahadur’s Utmanzai Wazir tribe and Maulvi Nazeer’s Ahmadzai Wazir tribe. The Taliban commander said in an earlier meeting it was suggested to nominate Maulvi Nazeer as the new head of the organisation. However, Maulvi Nazeer expressed his unwillingness to head the organisation and left the matter to the next meeting of the Shura.

The commander said all the three militant groups pardoned each other for the previous killings of their people and material losses.

When asked whether Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazeer would become a part of the TTP, the commander said it would be decided in the next meeting.

Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who is the Taliban chief in North Waziristan, had signed a peace accord with the government on Feb 17, 2008 and was considered a pro-government militant commander as he ceased attacks on security forces and government installations. However, the frequent drone attacks by the US forces in his tribal region have annoyed him.

On one occasion, when Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP became a serious threat to the government, the government tried to unite other militant groups against Baitullah Mehsud, thus, bringing together Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazeer.

Maulvi Nazeer, who is the chief of Ahmadzai Wazir Taliban militants in South Waziristan, was until now considered a pro-government militant commander as he had led an armed campaign against the Uzbek nationals, evicting them from his soil after bloody clashes.

He later lost some of his senior commanders in attacks by unknown people, but he blamed his rival Uzbeks for it.

Nazeer also accused Baitullah Mehsud and his men of sheltering the Uzbeks on their soil but Baitullah always denied the charges.

If the three men, who now rule South and North Waziristan tribal region in true sense, got united, they could give a tough time to the government in future.

The militants from Wana said now they had understood Pakistan’s divide and rule policy, and decided to get united and fight together against it in future. “Pakistan caused more losses to the Mujahideen than the US. It handed over 700 Arab Mujahideen to the US and jailed our people,” the commander alleged.

Responding to a question, he said the issue of Uzbeks had been resolved but didn’t mention whether the Ahmadzai Wazirs would like to welcome them back to Wana and Azam Warsak. He, however, added: “We respect the Mujahideen.”

[Casey]

Taliban rename their group
By Haji Mujtaba Khan

NORTH WAZIRISTAN - Bringing an end to their internal rifts, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leaders have renamed their group as Shura Ittehadul Mujahideen with the purpose of striving for the supremacy of Islam and crushing infidels.

The three leading militant groups calling themselves as Taliban have circulated a single-page Urdu pamphlet in different parts of Waziristan, which confirmed that they had got united according to the wishes of Mujahideen leaders like Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden.

The three leaders Hafiz Gul Bahadar, Baitullah Mehsud and Maulvi Nazir have confirmed the establishment of Shura Ittehadul Mujahideen with certain objectives. The pamphlet said the target of the Shura Ittehadul Mujahideen was to get Mujahideen united at a single platform for Jihad and stop those who were violating and crossing the limits. It said that TTP had decided to shun differences and join hands with one another. It added the TTP supported Mullah Muhammad Omar and Osama bin Laden’s struggle against Obama, Zardari and Karzai administrations.

A number of Quranic verses have been referred in the pamphlet, stressing upon Muslims to get united and join hands against non-believers.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/23-Feb-2009/Taliban-rename-their-group

[The 801]

Officials: Afghanistan Taliban leader was at Gitmo

By PAMELA HESS – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Taliban's new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan had been a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the latest example of a freed detainee who took a militant leadership role and a potential complication for the Obama administration's efforts to close the prison. U.S. authorities handed over the detainee to the Afghan government, which in turn released him, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.

Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, formerly Guantanamo prisoner No. 008, was among 13 Afghan prisoners released to the Afghan government in December 2007. Rasoul is now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a nom de guerre that Pentagon and intelligence officials say is used by a Taliban leader who is in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.

The officials, who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to release the information, said Rasoul has joined a growing faction of former Guantanamo prisoners who have rejoined militant groups and taken action against U.S. interests. Pentagon officials have said that as many as 60 former detainees have resurfaced on foreign battlefields.

Pentagon and intelligence officials said Rasoul has emerged as a key militant figure in southern Afghanistan, where violence has been spiking in the last year. Thousands of U.S. troops are preparing to deploy there to fight resurgent Taliban forces.

One intelligence official told the Associated Press that Rasoul's stated mission is to counter the U.S. troop surge.

Although the militant detainees who have resurfaced were released under the Bush administration, the revelation underscores the Obama administration's dilemma in moving to close the detention camp at Guantanamo and figuring out what to do with the nearly 250 prisoners who remain there.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the jail next year. The order also convened a task force that will determine how to handle remaining detainees, who could be transferred to other U.S. detention facilities for trial, transferred to foreign nations for legal proceedings or freed.

More than 800 prisoners have been imprisoned at Guantanamo; only a handful have been charged. About 520 Guantanamo detainees have been released from custody or transferred to prisons elsewhere in the world.

A Pentagon tally of the detainees released show that 122 were transferred from Guantanamo in 2007, more than any other year.

The Pentagon's preferred option is to hand them over to their home governments for imprisonment. But the Defense Intelligence Agency's growing list of former prisoners that have rejoined the fight shows that, in some cases, that system does not work.

According to the Pentagon, at least 18 former Guantanamo detainees have "returned to the fight" and 43 others are suspected of resuming terrorist activities. The Pentagon has declined to provide a complete list of the former prisoners they suspect are now on the battlefield.

According to case documents assembled by the U.S. military for a 2005 review of Rasoul's combatant status at Guantanamo, the Afghan was captured in 2001 in Konduz.

Armed with a gun and sitting in the car of an alleged Taliban leader, Rasoul insisted to American authorities he was forced to carry the gun by the Taliban. Rasoul told the tribunal in 2005 that in fact he had surrendered with other Taliban members to the Northern Alliance in Konduz on Dec. 12, 2001.

The Northern Alliance was involved in a protracted civil war with the Taliban, and was allied with U.S. forces in the October 2001 invasion.

Rasoul told the tribunal that he and others were then handed over to the Americans for bounties.

According to the U.S. documents, Rasoul was conscripted into the Taliban in 1995, and was seriously wounded in a bombing in 1997. He returned to the Taliban in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 1999.

Rasoul, who hailed from Helmand province in southern Afghanistan_ a Taliban stronghold_ never attended a Taliban or al-Qaida training camp. A key piece of evidence against him was that he was captured with two Casio watches similar to those used in al-Qaida bombings. He said he was holding the watches for a Taliban member who lacked pockets.

He told the tribunal that he intended to return to a peaceful life in Afghanistan.

"I want to go back home and join my family and work in my land and help my family," he said, according to a U.S. military transcript of the hearing.

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said Tuesday that at least two Saudi detainees also turned up recently as members of al-Qaida in Yemen after they were released from Guantanamo. The Saudis had been handed over by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, where they were supposedly rehabilitated as part of a Saudi program to reform extremists.

The Bush administration's decision to transfer militants to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation "doesn't inspire confidence," Blair said.

But he told the House Intelligence Committee last month that the prison must be closed because of the damage it has done to America's reputation. It is too powerful a negative symbol to remain open, he said.

The jail at the U.S. base in Cuba, created by the Bush administration in 2002, has been criticized worldwide for allegations of abuse of prisoners and their legal status.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gepueqQ9a2V5zxXES7DoGnVhSFHwD96REJ1G0

[Hound]

:mad_08:

[American_Jihad]

How to Surge the Taliban
3/12/09

Kandahar, Afghanistan

These were the parting words to us from Brig. Gen. Sher Muhammad Zazai, commander of the 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army in Kandahar. He was echoing the sentiments of a group of village elders we had met days before in Khost Province, who assured us that they would never allow the Taliban to come back.

It is odd that the Afghans felt it necessary to reassure American visitors that all was far from lost. It reflected the fact that even in a country where electricity and running water are scarce, word of the defeatist hysteria now gripping some in the American political elite has spread.

No one in Afghanistan — from the American commander, Gen. David McKiernan, to those village elders — underestimates the difficulties that lie ahead. But no one we spoke to on an eight-day journey (arranged for us by Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the military’s Central Command) that took us from Kunar Province on the Pakistan border to Farah Province near the Iranian frontier doubted that we can succeed, or that we must do so.

The main challenge is to overcome years of chronic neglect in terms of economic development, government services and above all security, which has allowed the insurgency free access to large swaths of the country. The good news is that the Taliban holds little appeal for most Afghans — a BBC-ABC News poll last month showed only 4 percent desired Taliban rule. The Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq, by contrast, maintained much greater support in their respective communities until they were defeated.

Even without much popular backing, Afghan insurgents are staging an increasing number of attacks, but major cities like Kabul and Jalalabad, which we visited, are relatively safe and flourishing. The civilian death toll in Afghanistan last year was 16 times lower than that in Iraq in the pre-surge year of 2006, even though Afghanistan is more populous.

There is no question that we can succeed against these much weaker foes, notwithstanding the support they receive from Pakistan and to a lesser extent Iran. President Obama’s recent decision to send 17,000 additional troops is a good start. While increased security operations will result in a temporary increase in casualties, that spike should be followed by broad reductions in violence, just as with the Iraq surge.

Efforts to develop a countrywide strategy will no doubt be hampered by the confused and often counterproductive NATO command structure. A big part of the problem is that, unlike American headquarters staff members who train together for a year before deploying into a combat zone, NATO staff members from many nations come together for the first time just a few weeks before heading out to Afghanistan. And most of them rotate out after six months; a lack of continuity means a lack of cohesion. A NATO officer even admitted to us that his headquarters is “partially dysfunctional.”

To see the impact of the splintered command structure, look at the drug interdiction. NATO’s forces can’t do antidrug missions, but they can provide assistance like air support and medevac units to American military advisers embedded with Afghan Army units involved with poppy eradication. Thus NATO plays a key role in individual antidrug operations, but there is no way to integrate its forces into broader counternarcotics efforts.

American and allied officers are trying to work around such obstacles, and should be aided by the recent creation of a United States Forces-Afghanistan headquarters in Kabul to coordinate with NATO. Still, more needs to be done to develop a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan, even if that risks alienating some of the 41 coalition countries.

Such a plan will probably require American forces beyond those already on their way, but the overall requirement will remain well below that of Iraq. Seven American ground brigades are likely to be in Afghanistan by the end of the year — two of them focused on training and the rest on combat. Two or three more might be needed next year to provide security in western Afghanistan, which has almost no United States forces. That would result in 45,000 to 55,000 ground troops, plus support units, as compared to more than 160,000 (22 brigades) in Iraq at the height of the surge.

In addition to sending more soldiers, we must also increase our efforts to expand the Afghan security forces. It may be impossible to speed up the pace of building the Afghan National Army, but the current proposed end-strength of 134,000 troops is far too low. We should immediately commit to a goal of 250,000 troops for the army, and a substantial increase in the national police as well. Afghan troops also need lots of better equipment — everything from armored vehicles to night-vision goggles.


One glaring lacuna in the international effort is the lack of focus on developing a justice system. NATO forces are not authorized to detain enemy combatants for more than 96 hours, after which they must be turned over to Afghan authorities. Some American forces have more latitude, but they are holding only 621 detainees, compared to the 24,000 detained in Iraq at the height of the surge. Insurgents taken prisoner by Afghan forces are generally released by the ineffective judicial system.

The lack of a functioning legal system not only makes it harder to quell the violence but provides an opening to insurgents who run their own Shariah courts. So, while the long-term solution is to help Afghanistan build a court system (something that isn’t getting the attention it deserves), the American military should also expand its detention facilities and press for expanded detention authority.

There are many who claim that a large-scale commitment isn’t necessary. Some say we have no interest in making Afghanistan a functioning state — all that matters is preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens, and we can do that by killing terrorist leaders with precision air strikes or covert raids.

The key question for those who advocate pulling back is this: Where will we get the intelligence to direct the raids? If we have few troops on the ground, we will have to rely on intercepted communications. But seven years into the fight, the terrorists have learned a thing or two about keeping their communications secret. The only way to get the intelligence we need is from the residents, and they won’t provide it unless our troops stay in their villages to provide protection from Taliban retribution.

This struggle is not just about Afghanistan. It is also about tracking and effecting what is going on in Pakistan’s tribal areas. That is where the global Qaeda leadership is. It is the nexus of terrorist groups including the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is implicated in the Mumbai, India, attacks last November; the Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi, which now has control of the Swat region in Pakistan; and Baitullah Mehsud’s Pakistani Taliban, which are said to have plotted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister.

From their positions across the border in Afghanistan, American forces can literally see these areas. They can also gather invaluable intelligence from, and spread our influence to, the tribes that straddle the frontier. But we get that vantage point only as long as we have something to offer the Afghans — security, improved quality of life, hope for a better government. If we abandon them, we will become blind to one of the most dangerous threats to our security, and also hand our most determined enemies an enormous propaganda victory — their biggest since 9/11.

Make no mistake: there is hard, costly fighting ahead in Afghanistan. But the fight is worth pursuing, and the odds of success are much better than they were in Iraq when we launched the forlorn hope known as the surge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/opinion/13boot.html?_r=1

[Atlas]

U.S. Drones Obliterate 24 Taliban Terrorists


Friday, March 13, 2009 8:22 AM

[/URL]
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Taliban militants recovered 24 bodies and were searching for more on Friday, hours after suspected U.S. drones destroyed a camp in Pakistan's northwestern region, militants and officials said.


Four missiles believed to have been fired by at least two pilotless U.S. drone aircraft on Thursday evening hit a militant hideout and training camp in the Kurram tribal region on the Afghan border.


Soon after the attack a villager in the Barjo area said 14 people had been killed but an intelligence official and a Taliban official said on Friday the toll had gone up as militants sifted through the rubble of the seven-room training compound.


"We've so far found 24 bodies in the debris and we're still looking," a Taliban official in the ethnic Pashtun region said by telephone. He declined to be identified.


Pakistani security agents and the militant official said there were no senior militants, or "high value targets" among the dead. The Taliban official said those killed were Pakistani and Afghan.


U.S. drones have carried out more than 30 drone strikes since early 2008 when the United States, frustrated by an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan getting support from the Pakistani side of the border, began attacking with greater frequency.


Eliminating militant support from the lawless northwestern Pakistani enclaves is seen as essential for winning the war in Afghanistan.


There has been no let-up in the strikes since the administration led by President Barack Obama took over in January, with six strikes since then, despite complaints from the Pakistani government.


Pakistan's civilian government, elected a year ago, and the army have complained that the U.S. missile strikes are counterproductive and the civilian casualties they often inflict have fueled support for the militants.


The drones, which have mostly struck in the North and South Waziristan regions, to the south of Kurram, have killed several mid-level al Qaeda members.


Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, unable to persuade the United States to stop the strikes, said last month he had asked the U.S. to transfer the unmanned aircraft to Pakistan.


Qureshi was in Washington to take part in the Obama administration's review of policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan.


The administration aims to have the main outlines of the strategy drawn up before a March 31 international conference on Afghanistan and a NATO summit in early April.

[URL]http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/drones_bomb_taliban/2009/03/13/191559.html (javascript:setActiveStyleSheet('largeFont');)

[American_Jihad]

Envoy laments weak US knowledge about Taliban
By ROBERT BURNS – 45 minutes ago

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — U.S. intelligence about the makeup and recruiting power of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan is so shallow that it impedes the U.S. war effort, President Barack Obama's special envoy to the region said Tuesday.

"I am deeply, deeply dissatisfied with the degree of knowledge that the United States government and our friend and allies have on this subject," veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke told reporters during a break in daylong talks with Pakistan government officials and private citizens.

Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen were in the Pakistani capital on the second leg of a three-nation trip to south Asia. The emissaries were conducting the first face-to-face consultations in the region since Obama publicly outlined his strategy for turning around the stalled war effort in Afghanistan and defeating al-Qaida in Pakistan.

Holbrooke blamed the shortcoming partly on the intense U.S. intelligence focus on Iraq over the past six years. Another factor, he said, was the high priority placed on gathering intelligence about al-Qaida in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He did not mention another contributing factor: the smaller U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, relative to Iraq, which makes it more difficult to gather detailed and current information about a shadowy adversary adept at hiding and adapting.

The lack of depth in U.S. understanding of the Taliban, which has mounted attacks both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, has weakened efforts to counter the propaganda they use to recruit new fighters and to discredit the U.S., Holbrooke added.

"We need to make sure we know what the appeal of the Taliban is," Holbrooke said.

Holbrooke said that would be critical in enabling the U.S. and its allies to split the hard-core Taliban leaders, who must be dealt with militarily, from less ideologically driven fighters who might be co-opted.

Holbrooke said there are indications that "well over half" of the Taliban are not committed to the radical Islamic ideology.

Reconciling moderate Taliban elements with the Afghan government and isolating the hard-liners is a key element in the new U.S. approach to Afghanistan. Another is improving the U.S. counter-propaganda operation in Afghanistan, which Holbrooke said would be "one of the most important things we do" in the months ahead.

The information deficit in Afghanistan has been recognized by some U.S. intelligence managers.

"We know a heck of a lot more about Iraq on a very granular basis than we do about Afghanistan," the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, said March 26. "We need to ramp up a level of intelligence support in Afghanistan, and that will be a lot more than just making sure the villages are on the maps."

A CIA spokesman declined to comment Tuesday on Holbrooke's remarks.

Holbrooke said the U.S. would "concentrate on that issue, partly through the intelligence structure" and partly through private aid groups that provide humanitarian and other services in Afghanistan. He estimated that 90 percent of U.S. knowledge about Afghanistan lies with aid groups.

Frequently, in meetings with Afghans as well as Pakistanis, Holbrooke posed simple questions: Who are the Taliban? Why do people join them?

He seemed less than satisfied with the answers he got.

At a meeting Monday in Kabul with senior Afghan religious authorities, one mullah told Holbrooke and Mullen that he had once been a Taliban member. After the session, Holbrooke buttonholed the man and asked if he would explain what caused him to break with the radicals. The mullah demurred, saying it was a long story.

The Taliban movement took control of Afghanistan in 1996 and ruled with harsh enforcement of Islamic fundamentalist law. It also provided haven for Osama bin Laden, who ran training camps for al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan until U.S. forces invaded following the 9/11 attacks.

Bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders moved into the mountainous reaches of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier and, for a period, the Taliban receded.

But over the past three years a resurgent Taliban has taken control of small portions of the country and adapted new means of attacking both Afghan security forces and civilian targets, especially in the south.

Mullen and Holbrooke on Tuesday addressed two other intelligence-related priorities. They aim to encourage the intelligence services of Afghanistan and Pakistan to work together. And they want to press the Pakistani government to sever the support that its intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has provided over the years to the Taliban.

Mullen conceded both issues will take a long time to resolve.

Holbrooke and Mullen spent Sunday and Monday in Afghanistan. After their Islamabad talks Tuesday, they flew to New Delhi for further meetings Wednesday.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWxiu65iLP4CvDJ7BEsBOx-u_vdwD97DQAP00

[The 801]

Taliban on the run in Swat
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Following a barrage of American pressure, Pakistan
abruptly abandoned all its existing plans to thwart insurgents and, in a televised speech by Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, promptly declared all-out was against the Pakistani Taliban.

Within hours, Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Ashfaq Kiani, launched an aggressive military operation - supported by gunship helicopters, heavy artillery and fighters jets - into northern North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), ransacking Taliban sanctuaries in Swat and other areas. Interior Minister Rehman Malik told the BBC that an estimated 200 militants were killed over the weekend, bringing the total killed in fighting in the region to 700.

Water, electricity and lines of communications were completely cut; the Taliban had no option but to flee. An exodus of the local population also began, with hundreds of thousands of residents leaving their homes. In the most affected districts of Swat, Buner and Shangla, some 70% of the population has fled for their lives. The number may soar to 1.5 million in the weeks ahead.

Elsewhere, the government sponsored anti-Taliban conferences across the country in which Shi'ite and Sufi clerics declared the Taliban rebels heretics and called for their destruction. All four of Pakistan's major political parties - including the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party and the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz - released statements in support of the military strike.

This was how the situation unfolded over the past week in Pakistan - a situation envisioned by the administration of former United States president George W Bush more than two years ago. The events are a culmination of years of political deals cut with Islamabad to form a consensus government and provide popular support for Washington's "global war on terror".

But the essential question remains: will Pakistan win this American war against the Taliban? Neither Islamabad nor Washington has the answer, but both realize this will be a very long war. Even if the Taliban can be routed, the force and scope of the operation will undoubtedly pit different segments of society against each other.

This is the exact situation that al-Qaeda has been waiting for.

On the ground
Seven years of war in Afghanistan have shown that no matter how much bad press the Taliban receives, they are still the representatives of Pashtun tribal culture and nothing is going to change this.

Even as the new drama was unfolding in Islamabad, the Taliban issued warnings to all doctors in the NWFP that if they didn't abandon Western pants and shirts and begin wearing Pakistani shalwar kameez, or "proper clothing", they would be attacked by the Taliban.

The NWFP department of health responded by asking doctors to comply and don the Taliban's preferred attire. Despite the powerful military push, many officials still do not have the heart to resist the Taliban.

The military campaign is not universally popular in Islamabad, either. At a dinner held on Sunday at the elite Islamabad Club, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former chief of the fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami, lambasted Pakistan's Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Babar Awan over the operation, claiming that it looked like a war against the people of Swat, not against the militants. Qazi Hussain Ahmed demanded to know why the plan was not approved by the parliament and the cabinet.

The federal minister initially avoided the answer and said that he respects Qazi Hussain Ahmed as a very senior politician. But when Qazi Hussain Ahmed continued his arguments, his patience ran out.

As witnessed by Asia Times Online, Dr Babar Awan said: "Sir, have you seen the footages shown by some international TV channels about how a senior official of the administration was informing the Taliban to leave the places as the security forces are set to enter in Buner? Sir, we did discuss the issues in the closed-door sessions of parliament, but what can we do when our parliamentarians leak the information to the militants? Even a minister leaked very crucial information to the militants. Now, tell me what [other] option [was there] except unleashing the military operation secretly?"

Qazi Hussain Ahmed countered by saying the regional curfew should be relaxed so ordinary civilians could leave instead of being bombed or starved. Some believe that should the humanitarian crises worsen, it would justify direct American interventions deep inside Pakistan.

Influential US military minds, such as retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, have been highlighting this possibility. Macgregor believes that the US should make Pakistan its focus rather than Afghanistan. But in Pakistan nobody is ready to accept this scenario. In fact, no Pakistani decision-maker could have foreseen that one day the entire world would consider the whole area of Afghanistan and Pakistan as the same conflict zone. ( Idiots - 801)

From the eyes of al-Qaeda
The militants did not anticipate such a quick operation in the area and were caught completely unprepared. The numbers of casualties for the security forces are minimal. In most areas, either the militants are on the run or under siege by the security forces. In some cases, they are using the civilian population as human shields.

According to the local people, transporters have raised the bus fares for a single seat from 700 rupees (US$8.70) to 7,000 rupees. People have left their belongings and homes abandoned as they fled to other cities for shelter. Such a mass exodus has not been seen in the region since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in late 1970s.

Now, for financially battered Pakistan, the biggest challenge is the management of the refugees. So far, no political party has been seen in the affected areas. The only NGO, which is active for the relief operation is Al-Khidmat, a wing of the Islamic party, the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. The number of displaced people is likely to grow to as many as 1.5 million in coming days. The total funds the government has allocated so far is 200 million rupees (out of total 1 billion rupees announced by the prime minister). This means roughly 133 rupees for each person, hardly enough for one day's food.

The complaints have already started, and in the weeks ahead the situation is likely to get worse. As in the past, people may blame the government for the situation, not the Taliban.

Taliban may simply flee from Swat, as they did in late 2007, and regroup in different places to exploit the chaotic situation. Gaining several thousands of new recruits should not be a problem, especially when they are lured by monthly stipends and other benefits. The Taliban can easily generate resources from robberies and ransoms. Within a few months, the Taliban will be able to raise new brigades of guerrillas.

With large numbers of people travelling to destinations like Islamabad and Lahore, ethnic tensions will flare up as people in Punjab are already wary of the Taliban and have started treating all Pashtuns with suspicion.

Amid the military strikes, an anti-Taliban religious segment is amplifying its grudge against the militants. When the Taliban regroup they are likely to strike back, killing their opponents as they have done in the past. If that happens, neither the Sufis nor Shi'ites will have much support - neither from their frightened constituencies nor from the military establishment.

This is the situation al-Qaeda has desired for a very long time. Al-Qaeda carried out sectarian attacks on Shi'ite mosques, allegedly assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and bombed bombed public places. But they failed to rupture the national fibre of the country or create enough chaos in Pakistan to draw security forces to multiple fronts.

Now the government has done this for them. Islamabad has sponsored a military campaign that will push an isolated situation to the other parts of the country. The previous fear of the "Talibanization" of Pakistan could possibly become reality.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KE12Ak02.html

Damned if we do, and Damned if we don't.
We are damned.

[The 801]

Taliban storm strategic Afghan city

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Taliban militants attacked a municipal building in the city of Khost in eastern Afghanistan Tuesday, fighting pitched battles with U.S. forces and taking hostages, U.S. and local officials said.
A U.S. soldier on patrol in Khost province in February 2009.

A U.S. military spokesman said the city -- a hotbed of Taliban activity near the Pakistan border -- is not considered secure as reports of running battles, kidnappings and fatalities surface.

The fighting began when U.S. forces initially responded to a suicide bomber at a government compound in the city and came under heavy attack, the U.S. military spokesman said.

Officials in Khost told CNN that insurgents attacked the municipal building, and the police chief there said attackers killed two police officers, two security guards and two civilians.

A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan told CNN 30 Taliban fighters were involved in the attack, and said they were suicide bombers wearing explosive vests. Eight Taliban fighters died in the fighting.

The U.S. military spokesman said U.S. troops killed several militants but had to fall back.

He said a U.S. quick reaction force, backed by helicopters, from a nearby base was called to join ground troops entering the city.

The spokesman said additional suicide bombers then entered government buildings, killing an unknown number of additional Afghans.
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Said Mohammad, chief of staff of the Khost police Security Commander told CNN that armed Taliban are in the basement of the Khost municipality building.

"I don't know about the exact number of the Taliban involved in this attack, but I think there are six to seven Taliban who are still alive and show resistance." These Taliban have taken some students and municipality staff as hostages

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/12/afghanistan.fighting/

[The 801]

Research by the BBC Urdu's service into the growing strength of Taleban militants in north western Pakistan shows that only 38% of the area remains under full government control.

This map of the area is a snapshot of the current situation. However, with ongoing fighting between the Pakistan armed forces and the Taleban the situation on the ground could change in the future.

http://http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/09/pakistan_map/img/pak_taleb_all_466map.gif

BAJAUR (Taleban controlled)

Bajaur is one of those tribal areas where the Taleban established themselves early on.

Analysts have long suspected the region to be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other top al-Qaeda leaders. It is an area where suspected US drones launched their earliest missile strikes.

Maulvi Faqir Mohammad is the chief commander of the Taleban in Bajaur and is said to lead a force of nearly 10,000 armed militants. A year-long military operation ended in Bajaur early this year but a peace agreement has broken down and the Taleban are back in control in most areas outside the regional capital, Khar.

Maulvi Omar, spokesman for the militant alliance Tehrik Taleban Pakistan (TTP), comes from Bajaur. Taleban camps are reported at various places in Bajaur, such as Salarzai and Dasht.

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BANNU (Taleban presence)

Bannu is a so-called "settled" (rather than "tribal") area in North West Frontier Province, which borders troubled Waziristan. The district has witnessed a number of attacks on security forces. Civilians have also been killed.

But locals do not have strong tribal affiliations with the Taleban, and the local Taleban have not been successful in building support for their activies in Bannu.

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BUNER (Taleban controlled)

Buner is only 100km (65 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. The military launched an operation against the militants in April after the so-called Swat Taleban seized control of Buner.

The district is popular with Pashtuns visiting the tomb of a Sufi saint, but traditional religious freedoms have been eroded. Militants from Swat tried to enter Buner in 2008 but were thwarted by locals. An armed clash between the two sides at Shilabandi left six Taleban dead, and the Taleban retreated to their bases in Swat. Local resistance did not go unpunished, however, as nearly 50 people were later killed by the militants.

After Sharia law was introduced in Swat, the Taleban again decided to target Buner as part of efforts to expand their area of influence. After negotiations with locals, the Taleban were permitted to operate in the district. Since then all barber shops and music stores have closed down.

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D.I. KHAN (Taleban presence)

Traditionally famous for its flowers and sweets, Dera Ismail Khan (or D.I. Khan) has not escaped the increase in Taleban activity seen elsewhere in North West Frontier Province.

Two groups of militants are active in D.I. Khan, one of them involved in sectarian attacks, the other in attacks on security forces. Taleban active in neighbouring Waziristan have claimed responsibility for almost all the attacks on security personnel.

After troops stepped up an anti-Taleban drive in Waziristan in 2008, large numbers of tribal families settled in D.I. Khan. Some government officials fear that militants might also have left Waziristan and settled in D.I. Khan.

Local police say 84 people, many of them security personnel, were killed and more than 100 injured in various violent incidents during 2008.

Most analysts agree there will be no end to violence in D.I. Khan until peace is restored in neighbouring tribal areas and concerted action is taken to stop the sectarian attacks.

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HANGU (Taleban presence)

Hangu, neighbouring Orakzai, is believed to be under the control of Hakimullah Mehsud, the right-hand man of Pakistan Taleban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Those parts of Hangu that border Orakzai are dominated by the Taleban.

The district also shares borders with two other Taleban strongholds, Kurram and Waziristan. Most analysts argue that if government fails to take steps to check the increasing influence of the Taleban in Hangu, the radical elements now confined to its border areas could soon expand their activities to other areas of district.

Sectarian tension between Shias and Sunnis is yet another fault line, which deepened after a 2006 suicide attack on a Shia procession in Hangu.

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KHYBER (Taleban presence)

Of the tribal areas of the North West Frontier, Khyber agency is the only one where different religious organisations operate. There are three known religious groups - Lashkar-i-Islam (Army of Islam) headed by Mangal Bagh, Ansar-i-Islam (Companions of Islam) headed by Qazi Mehboobul Haq and Amar Bil Maroof (Organisation for Virtues) headed by Niaz Gul.

The Taleban presence in Khyber is fairly recent and most analysts link it to Nato's use of the main road through the Khyber pass to Afghanistan. The Taleban are believed to have moved into the area to attack convoys carrying supplies for Nato forces in Afghanistan. There has been a spate of such attacks. The Taleban are now in almost total control of two of the three sub-divisions of Khyber agency, including Jamrod and Bara.

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KOHAT (Taleban presence)

Kohat is only a stone's throw from the semi tribal district of Adamkhel.

The Taleban claim to have carried out attacks targeting security forces in the district. In a recent operation security forces say 35 militants were killed. As in Mardan and other districts in North West Frontier Province, the Taleban in Kohat have mostly confined their activities to opposing music and barber shops.

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KURRAM (Taleban presence)

Kurram agency, like neighbouring North Waziristan, is also divided into three administrative areas or sub-divisions - Upper, Central and Lower Kurram.

The Taleban (who are Sunni Muslims) do not have a significant presence in Upper Kurram as the local population are Shias. Shias are also found in one town in Lower Kurram, Alizai. Otherwise, the Taleban are present almost everywhere else in Kurram where the Sunni population dominates.

Foreign Taleban fighters are believed to have moved into Kurram and adjoining Orakzai agencies since 2008 when missile attacks by suspected US military drones became more frequent in north-west Pakistan.

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LAKKI MARWAT (Taleban presence)

Lakki Marwat is a district near North Waziristan where local tribes are very strong. There have been a number of clashes between militants and security forces in the area.

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LOWER DIR (Taleban controlled)

There have been reports since late 2007 that the Taleban have found many hideouts in Lower Dir. This was confirmed in April when the army acknowledged that the Taleban had dug themselves in on the mountain tops. The area known as Maidan, which is also the home town of radical cleric Sufi Mohammad who brokered the now-defunct Swat "peace deal", has become a Taleban hotspot in the district.

The army has twice claimed to have pushed the Taleban out of Lower Dir and taken control. But many people fear the militants may use Lower Dir to expand into nearby Upper Dir.

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MALAKAND (Taleban presence)

Malakand is essentially a mountain pass between Mardan and Swat. Historically the district is known for a number of battles between local tribes and British soldiers in the last years of the 19th Century.

Before extremism began surfacing in Swat, the local administration had been facing law and order problems in Malakand. At the time it mostly concerned criminal activities including kidnap for ransom. In January 2009 members of an international charity were taken hostage. But the biggest Taleban attack in Malakand was carried out apparently to avenge a US missile strike at Damadola. Forty paramilitary recruits were killed in the attack on a training centre at Dargai.

Despite the fact that the Taleban have not maintained a dominant presence in Malakand, the district seems susceptible to their influence and analysts argue that if they so choose the Taleban could move into thearea in a big way.

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MARDAN (Taleban presence)

Mardan, about 60km (37 miles) north-east of Peshawar, is one of the most densely populated districts of North West Frontier Province and a thriving centre for trade.

In the past year the Taleban have boosted their presence in Mardan and reports of skirmishes with paramilitary security forces have become more frequent. Although there are not many of them in Mardan, the Taleban have proved able to disrupt the day-to-day administration of the district.

Early signs of extremism in Mardan can be traced back to attacks on music shops, and more recently, shops providing cable services for different TV channels have been targeted. In another incident an NGO office was also attacked. Responsibility for most of these attacks was reportedly accepted by a militant who claimed to be the local head of the Tehrik Taleban Pakistan alliance.

Mardan also made headlines in the international media when Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a high profile al-Qaeda suspect was arrested there in 2005.

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MOHMAND (Taleban presence)

The Taleban are widely reported to be present in all three sub-divisions of Mohmand agency. The militants here are under the command of Omar Khalid who belongs to the Safi tribe of Pashtuns. He and about 5,000 militants have been resisting attempts by the security forces to clear them from the southern and south-eastern parts of Mohmand in order to reduce pressure on Peshawar and elsewhere.

Taleban fighters of Arab and Uzbek origin are also reported to be present in Mohmand.

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ORAKZAI (Taleban controlled)

Orakzai agency is divided into two administrative districts.

The Taleban do not have a significant presence in Lower Orakzai as most locals belong to an anti-Taleban Shia sect. But, mountainous Upper Orakzai is dominated by Sunnis and has many Taleban and sympathisers.

Most Taleban in Orakzai belong to the Mamuzai, Alikhel, Akhel and Ferozkhel tribes. The local population seems supportive of the Taleban more for sectarian reasons than because of the militants' activities.

The Taleban appointed Hakimullah Mehsud as commander for Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber agencies. He is a cousin of Qari Hussain, the mastermind behind the training of the suicide bombers used by the Taleban.

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PESHAWAR (Taleban presence)

The capital of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Peshawar has become the front line city in the so-called "war on terror" in Pakistan. Bombings and suicide attacks coupled with kidnap for ransom have become commonplace. The city is surrounded by militants on three sides. Mardan and Charsadda to the north, Mohmand and Khyber agencies to the west and Darra Adamkhel to the south have all become battle grounds.

Disrupting Nato plans in Afghanistan has been the key Taleban target in Peshawar - at least 400 vehicles carrying supplies for Nato forces have been destroyed. The Taleban say they will keep on attacking trucks destined for Nato forces until US stops drone attacks in the region.

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NORTH WAZIRISTAN (Taleban controlled)

North Waziristan, home to the Wazir and Dawar tribes, is administratively divided into three sub-divisions called Miranshah, Mir Ali and Razmak. The Wazirs make up 75% of the local population, while the remainder belong to the Dawar tribe.

The Taleban are in control of all three sub-divisions of North Waziristan. They mount regular daily patrols of town centres and hold informal summary courts, adjudicate in disputes and deliver verdicts from offices established in almost every part of the agency.

North Waziristan is controlled by Taleban commander Gul Bahadur, but Baitullah Mehsud is also reported to be in command of at least three Taleban camps. Two of these are located in Miranshah while the third is in Razmak. As in South Waziristan, there is a considerable proportion of Taleban in North Waziristan who are referred to as "Punjabi Taleban".

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ORAKZAI (Taleban controlled)

Orakzai agency is divided into two administrative districts.

The Taleban do not have a significant presence in Lower Orakzai as most locals belong to an anti-Taleban Shia sect. But, mountainous Upper Orakzai is dominated by Sunnis and has many Taleban and sympathisers.

Most Taleban in Orakzai belong to the Mamuzai, Alikhel, Akhel and Ferozkhel tribes. The local population seems supportive of the Taleban more for sectarian reasons than because of the militants' activities.

The Taleban appointed Hakimullah Mehsud as commander for Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber agencies. He is a cousin of Qari Hussain, the mastermind behind the training of the suicide bombers used by the Taleban.

Click to return

PESHAWAR (Taleban presence)

The capital of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Peshawar has become the front line city in the so-called "war on terror" in Pakistan. Bombings and suicide attacks coupled with kidnap for ransom have become commonplace. The city is surrounded by militants on three sides. Mardan and Charsadda to the north, Mohmand and Khyber agencies to the west and Darra Adamkhel to the south have all become battle grounds.

Disrupting Nato plans in Afghanistan has been the key Taleban target in Peshawar - at least 400 vehicles carrying supplies for Nato forces have been destroyed. The Taleban say they will keep on attacking trucks destined for Nato forces until US stops drone attacks in the region.

Click to return

SHANGLA (Taleban controlled)

Shangla is said to be under the partial control of the Taleban. Recent reports speak of militants taking control of emerald mines here and it is rumoured that an army operation will soon be launched.

The Taleban captured Shangla Top, a strategic point, about 18 months ago and since then have taken control of police stations in the district. Policemen had no option but to run for their lives. Other government buildings in Shangla have since been in and out of Taleban control - and some analysts believe the militants could retake them if they want.

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SOUTH WAZIRISTAN (Taleban controlled)

South Waziristan is the largest tribal district or agency - two big Pashtun tribes, the Mehsud and the Wazir, dominate. The Wazirs are historically settled on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, while the Mehsuds are confined to South Waziristan.

It is widely believed the Pakistani government has lost control of almost all of South Waziristan - for some time the army has been restricted to Zerinoor camp in the agency's main town, Wana.

The army had to evacuate the Mehsud-dominated area of South Waziristan in 2008 when around 300 troops were taken hostage. The army is understood to lack a secure supply line that could guarantee a smoother flow of men and ammunition into this area.

Parts of South Waziristan under the direct influence of top Pakistan Taleban militant leader Baitullah Mehsud are reported to contain as many as seven camps where suicide bombers are trained. These camps or training centres are believed to have been established at Makeen, Shaktoi, Kanigaram, Dela, Kot Kai, Shawwal and Badar.

In addition, another Taleban leader Mullah Nazir is also believed to be running two separate training centres in South Waziristan at Shikai and Baghar. Some of his followers are also known to be based in Balochistan province, which almost borders Wana.

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SWABI (Taleban presence)

Swabi is considered to be the heartland of the secular Pashtun political party, the Awami National Party (ANP). Mainly for this reason, people in Swabi have not welcomed the Taleban. But there have been recent incidents of graffiti in Swabi boasting local support for the Taleban's drive for their version of Sharia law and Islamic "virtues".

Swabi was in the news in the early 1990s when an operative of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency emerged as a key link between the army and the Taleban.

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SWAT (Taleban controlled)

Known as the Switzerland of Pakistan, the former princely state of Swat had been popular with tourists for decades. It is now under almost total Taleban control.

The militants have targeted the security forces, the police, secular politicians and government-run schools.

By early April 2009, Sharia law had been imposed as part of a deal between the authorities and the local Taleban. However, the militants failed to disarm completely in line with the accord and their fighters spread to neighbouring districts, prompting international concern. An army offensive was launched in Swat in early May.

The local Taleban, under their leader Maulana Fuzlullah, have extended their control throughout Swat, especially in areas of policing and its judicial system.

Maulana Fazlullah is the son-in-law of radical cleric Sufi Mohammad who led an insurgency in the 1990s. Sufi Mohammad brokered the failed peace deal in Swat.

There are a number of pockets in and around Swat where the Taleban are known to have hidden when in danger or as a tactic when pushed back by the military. Such safe havens could prove useful to them if political pressure mounts against them in Swat. The militants could melt away into the north of the district where they are in even fuller control.

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TANK (Taleban presence)

Baitullah Mehsud's Taleban fighters from South Waziristan first started making incursions into the nearby city of Tank in 2005. Music stores, barbers' shops and police stations were their primary targets. That situation still remains, with a slight difference. Taleban groups composed of Bhittani tribesmen have been confronting Mehsud loyalists in the region. The Bhittani is the native tribe of Tank district and its largest, but is in a minority in the city of Tank, the administrative centre, where the Mehsuds dominate.

It is thought the Bhittani Taleban are supported by the government. Nevertheless, the writ of the government runs thin in Tank, where fully armed members of rival groups roam the streets freely and run offices in different parts of the city. The police initially offered resistance, but have now downgraded their mandate to one of self-preservation. They stay inside heavily-barricaded police stations. The civil administration is almost completely paralysed.

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UPPER DIR (Taleban presence)

Recent reports suggest Upper Dir has started showing some signs of increasing religious radicalisation, but local extremists claim to have no link with the Taleban and do not call themselves Taleban. Instead they are known to be involved in criminal activities, which does not fit with typical Taleban activity.

One notable incident of militancy in Upper Dir in February saw a paramilitary post captured. Militants refused to abandon it despite repeated requests from a local jirga (tribal council). In April five policemen were killed by unknown attackers.

It is thought however the Taleban could gather support from Upper Dir if they wanted. Radical cleric Sufi Mohammad's TNSM organisation has established offices in Upper Dir and some locals sympathise with the movement.

[Casey]

Taliban : Q&A-Who are Pakistani Taliban insurgents?
Thu May 7, 2009 1:45pm IST

May 7 (Reuters) - Pakistani security forces are battling Taliban militants in the northwest's Swat valley after a pact aimed at ending violence in the region collapsed.

Surging violence and spreading Taliban influence have sent jitters across Pakistan and compounded Washington's worries about the stability of its nuclear-armed ally, vital for efforts to defeat al Qaeda and stabilise neighbouring Afghanistan.

Here are few facts about Pakistani Taliban.

WHO ARE THE PAKISTANI TALIBAN?

Most Pakistani Taliban fighters are ethnic Pashtuns from northwestern regions on the Afghan border. They support the Afghan Taliban, most of whom are also Pashtun and many of whom fled to the Pakistani Pashtun lands after U.S.-led forces ousted Afghanistan's Taliban government in late 2001.

Thirteen factions based in different parts of northwest Pakistan have formed a loose umbrella group, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, led by Baitullah Mehsud, based in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.

The United States in March announced a reward of $5 million for information leading to Mehsud's location or arrest.

Mehsud has been accused by Pakistani officials of being behind a wave of suicide attacks across Pakistan since the army stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque in July 2007 to crush a militant movement based there.

But it was when government officials named Mehsud as the prime suspect in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in a gun and bomb attack in the city of Rawalpindi in December 2007 that Mehsud's notoriety rocketed.

The Taliban fighting in Swat are part of the TTP and are led by a commander called Fazlullah, the son-in-law of a pro-Taliban cleric who led thousands of tribesmen to Afghanistan to fight alongside Taliban after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

While many senior Taliban are veterans of Afghan fighting, they have been able to exploit poverty, frustration over an ineffective judiciary, anger against landlords and widespread anti-U.S. feelings to attract recruits. Intelligence officials say they also press families to send sons to fight.

ARE THE PAKISTANI TALIBAN LINKED TO AL QAEDA?

Intelligence officials and security experts say Mehsud is an al Qaeda ally. He has given refuge to a large number of foreign militants, including Arabs and Central Asians, but the nature of his links with al Qaeda's leaders, believed to be hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border, is not clear.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AFGHAN TALIBAN?

The TTP swears allegiance to Mullah Omar, chief of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, and acknowledges sending fighters across the border to Afghanistan where they aim to fight and expel what they call Western "occupation" forces.

However, there are differences between the groups on whether to fight Pakistani security forces. Some groups oppose violence in Pakistan and want all Taliban to focus on fighting in Afghanistan.

However, groups such as those headed by Mehsud and Fazlullah argue that fighting Pakistani security forces is justified because of Pakistan's support for the U.S.-led campaign against al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.

Militant groups focused on fighting in Afghanistan recently set up the Ittehad-e-Shura-e-Mujahideen, or Union of the Consultative Council of Mujahideen, with the TTP. Analysts saw the move as aimed at forging unity among all factions in the face of a sharp build-up of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

ANY LINKS WITH OTHER MILITANT GROUPS?

Intelligence officials say the Pakistani Taliban have also forged links with militants groups mainly drawn from central Punjab province, giving the militants the ability to expand their influence out of the Pashtun-dominated northwest. One of these groups, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), a Sunni Muslim militant group, is regarded as one of al Qaeda's main fronts in Pakistan. The LeJ specialises in targeting minority Shi'ite Muslims but graduated to high-profile attacks. It is suspected of organising a suicide truck bombing of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel last year that killed 55 people.

The Pakistani Taliban are also believed to have forged links with the Jaish-e-Mohammad group, which has focused on fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. (For other stories on Pakistan and Afghanistan click on [ID:nSP102615]) (Reporting by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)

http://in.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idINISL22063120090507?sp=true

[The 801]

Held terrorists reveal militants’ strategies
Friday, June 05, 2009
By Salis bin Perwaiz

Karachi

As the incidents of violence and terrorist activities are rearing their ugly head again, a senior investigation officer while discussing the issue said that terrorism has badly the damage the image of Pakistan internationally. Several Investigations were carried out from held suspects belonging to Baitullah Mehsud group, local Taliban group working in Pakistan and other militant organisations like Lashker-i-Jhangvi, Harkat-ul-Jihad-i-Islami who were linked with Baitullah.

It was found that these terrorists organisation have a vast Intelligence network and some investigations reveals that they had sent their men to various institutions including security companies and banks. Furthermore, these terrorist organisations have much support from foreign countries who are the enemies of Pakistan and they financially support them.

The investigations revealed that these groups has hijacked the persons residing in the tribal areas of Pakistan and threatened them and their families that if they won’t work for their organisation they will be killed.

These militant organisations established their training camps in outskirts of Pak-Afghan borders and there were also reports that these militant organisations have training camps in Tank and Azam Wersick areas of Waziristan agency. Here the terrorists were how to carry out bomb blast, learn sniper shooting, making bombs and suicide jackets. Moreover, investigations from the held terrorists reveal that they were also trained how to rob banks or money changers, as Baitullah Mehsud sent his men to Karachi and directed them to get job in security agencies working here and collect information of banks when they were posted.

The officer maintained that, the militant organisation including Baitullah Mehsud group hire young boys from different parts of the country who are in their teen years as its easy to brain-wash and prepare them for suicide bombings.

The officer maintained that, Taliban have their shelter houses in Karachi, mostly in the vicinity of Sohrab Goth, Afghan Basti and other border parts of Karachi, where they buried arms and provided shelter to the terrorists who escape from Waziristan. During recent investigation from the held terrorist it was also discovered that many of the terrorists who got injured in Waziristan and Swat during encounter with the security forces came to Karachi and interior Sindh areas where they were operated. Some doctors were also sent from Karachi to operate these injured militants.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=181274

Nice.

[The 801]

Great Overview by the man who knows. If you read nothing else here, read this to help understand the situation on the ground....


Pakistan fights for its tribal soul
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Pakistan's month-long military operation in the Malakand Division of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which includes the scene of especially heavy fighting in the Swat Valley, has, per official figures, cost the lives of over 1,300 militants and led to the displacement of 3.5 million civilians.

The battle is far from over.

Under relentless pressure from the United States to get the job done once and for all, Pakistan is opening up new fronts in an attempt to wipe out Taliban militants and the al-Qaeda "franchise" under which they operate.

On Thursday morning, the Pakistan Air Force conducted strikes in Orakzai Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and ground and air operations have started in the Frontier Regions (Jani Khel - the tribal areas adjacent to the city) of Bannu district in NWFP. Al-Qaeda's shura (council) is believed to operate from Jani Khel.

The military is also expected to move in strength into the South Waziristan tribal area to go after a nexus that includes Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, Punjabi militants, Uzbeks and al-Qaeda. Clashes are reported to have already taken place.

Washington has reacted positively to the Pakistani initiatives, but garrison headquarters in Rawalpindi, the twin city of the capital Islamabad, are nervous. The top brass are aware of the tough fight their troops have had in Malakand Division and the resentment the operations have caused across the country.

Tuesday's attack on the Pearl Continental Hotel
in Peshawar, the capital of NWFP, in which 19 people, including two United Nations staff, were killed and 70 wounded, is a stark reminder of the dangers of fighting the American war in the region.

Contacts familiar with the background to the attack told Asia Times Online it was approved by al-Qaeda and carried out by a nexus of militants that included Hakeemullah Mehsud of Orakzai Agency (a relative of Baitullah Mehsud), members of the Sunni militant group Laskhar-e-Jhangvi from the town of Darra Adam Khel in NWFP and the Omar group from the Frontier Regions of Peshawar.

In a message to Asia Times Online, a senior militant leader maintained that the operation had also aimed to take out US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials staying at the hotel. They were said to be in talks with Pakistani officials to work out ways to protect the 90% of NATO supplies for Afghanistan that pass through Peshawar.

This account, however, was disputed by Qudsia Qadri, editor-in-chief of the Pakistani Daily Financial Post, who told Asia Times Online that she stayed in the five-star hotel for a few days until Tuesday afternoon and she had not seen any FBI or NATO officials.

"The occupancy of the hotel was hardly 5%. I met a few foreigners, in the gym and at breakfast, but they were all working with NGOs [non-governmental agencies] to help the internally displaced people of Malakand," said Qadri.

How the attack was conceived
Baitullah Mehsud, al-Qaeda members and Punjabi militants live in North Waziristan and South Waziristan, remote regions on the border with Afghanistan far from Khyber Agency, through which NATO supplies pass, Kurram Agency, a hub of anti-Taliban Shi'ite forces, and Peshawar.

None of these three areas has indigenous Taliban. Therefore, Orakzai Agency, the only tribal area that does not have a border with Afghanistan, was chosen to station Taliban from South Waziristan and other regions.

By the beginning of this year, Orakzai Agency had been taken over by the Taliban and declared an Islamic emirate. The amir (leader) was Moulvi Saeed, but the public face was Hakeemullah Mehsud, a lieutenant of Baitullah Mehsud imported from South Waziristan.

Gradually, they brought in criminal elements, including anti-Shi'ite fugitives of the Laskhar-e-Jhangvi, and placed them in Darra Adam Khel, just on the outskirts of Peshawar. The Omar group was assigned to the frontier regions of Peshawar. With these groups in place, Khyber Agency and Peshawar could easily be accessed - exactly as happened with Tuesday's hotel attack.

The Pakistani security forces are braced for similar attacks now that the battle is being extended into South Waziristan and other tribal areas. At the same time, ethnic and political clashes have risen to unprecedented levels in the southern port city of Karachi, through which most of NATO's supplies enter Pakistan.

In the past week, over 50 people have been killed. The anti-Taliban Muttahida Quami Movement is attributed with most of the killing in a fight against members of a breakaway faction. Retaliation is expected in the coming days, which could result in even heavier bloodshed. The situation could become so bad that the military would have to intervene. The problem is, its forces are already spread thin in the north.

For the time being, these northern areas remain the prime concern, and the militants and al-Qaeda are ready.

Safe havens in the Hindu Kush
The Eastern Hindu Kush range, also known as the High Hindu Kush range, is mostly located in northern Pakistan and the Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces of Afghanistan.

This chain of mountains connects with several smaller ranges, such as Spin Ghar, the Tora Bora, the Suleman Range, Toba Kakar, and creates a natural corridor that passes through the entire Pakistani tribal areas and the Afghan border provinces all the way to the Pakistani coastal area in Balochistan province.

By 2008, al-Qaeda had taken control of the 1,500-square-kilometer corridor - something it had planned to do since fleeing Afghanistan when the Taliban were defeated by US-led forces in December 2001.

Al-Qaeda decided then to build a regional ideologically motivated franchise in South Asia to thwart the strategic designs of Western powers in the area.

While US forces were vainly trying to hunt down al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountains, the group was focused on establishing links with organizations such as the Jaishul al-Qiba al-Jihadi al-Siri al-Alami and Jundallah in the Pakistani tribal areas and organizing the recruitment of Pakistanis and Afghans to those organizations. The underlying reason for doing this was to destroy the local political and social structures and in their place establish an al-Qaeda franchise.

The plan worked. Today, in many parts of the Hindu Kush corridor, centuries-old tribal systems and their connections with the Pakistani establishment through an appointed political agent have been replaced by a system of Islamic warlordism.

The old breed of tribal elders, religious clerics and tribal chiefs, loyal to Pakistan and its systems, has been wiped out, to be replaced by warlords such as Haji Omar, Baitullah Mehsud, (slain) Nek Mohammad and (slain) Abdullah Mehsud. They are all al-Qaeda allies, and allow al-Qaeda freedom of movement in their areas within the corridor.

Al-Qaeda members from abroad also use the corridor to enter the Pakistani tribal areas. It is not always safe. Recently, security agencies arrested four Saudi nationals in Mohmand Agency. They were named only as Ahmed, Ali, Mohammad and Obaidullah and had arrived in Pakistan from Saudi Arabia in 2008-09 after passing through Iran
. Had they traveled through Pakistani cities towards the tribal areas, they would most likely have been arrested much earlier.

Recently, al-Qaeda broadened its network by forging closer links with the Pakistani-based Iranian insurgency group Jundallah, which operates from around Turbat in Pakistan's Balochistan province.

Pakistan at a crossroads
This situation has brought Pakistan to a crossroads. Al-Qaeda has in many areas devastated the traditional tribal systems and established its franchise in very strategic terrain.

The country's administrative systems and law-enforcing agencies were not designed to cope with such developments. The only response it has been able to come up with is to mobilize the military - a controversial decision that could yet backfire.

There are several reasons why the militants were able to undermine the tribes. The militant organizations are highly organized, battle-hardened, heavily armed and well funded. And importantly, while tribal influence is limited to its own area, its own people, the militant organizations have cross-tribal, cross-border and international linkages. And while the tribes are bound by their tribal traditions and customary laws (riwaj), the militant organizations are not. They have out-gunned, out-funded and out-organized the tribal malik (leader) and his tribe.

Pakistan had planned to prop up the tribes, as the real strength of a country is its people. No government, whether civilian or military, can function or succeed until it has public support behind it.

This it started doing by signing agreements with selected tribes. These included ones with Sufi Mohammad in Malakand to prop up the administrative system. However, international pressure - mainly from Washington - forced Pakistan to abandon this roadmap in place of full-frontal military engagement with the militants.

Up until the latest offensive that began in Swat and which is now being extended, military action usually petered out after securing only temporary success. The government of the day generally lacked the will to go for the kill, and there remained segments within the intelligence apparatus and military sympathetic to the militants.

It now appears the government is prepared for a long fight, but ultimately it will have to take control of the corridor that provides the militants with the space from which to attack, regroup and attack again.

This would have to involve stepped-up cooperation with forces in Afghanistan to jointly patrol the border, and most importantly, a renewed attempt to revive the tribal systems where they have been infiltrated by militants.

Individually, these are mammoth tasks, in combination almost impossible. And as the planes and tanks roll in greater numbers across greater areas of Pakistan, these goals risk being lost in the fog of war.

Syed Saleem Shahzad

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KF12Df02.html

[The 801]

Taliban leaders report progress in secret talks with the US and Afghanistan
Moderate Taliban make headway in negotiations with militants.
By C.M. Sennott - GlobalPost

KABUL — Moderate leaders of the Taliban say they have quietly and steadily made progress in third-party talks between the active Taliban insurgency and representatives of the Afghan and U.S. governments.

Two Taliban leaders — who held high-ranking positions in the now-deposed Taliban government and who are directly involved in the talks — say they’ve recently established a framework of an agreement through the shuttle negotiations. They say the process has included contact with the spiritual leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The talks began last year under the auspices of Saudi Arabia and have involved a series of secret meetings in Mecca, including a gathering several months ago. Observers have for months maintained that the Saudi talks have produced more rumors than real progress.

But now, in extensive interviews with GlobalPost two former Taliban officials directly involved — Abdul Hakim Muhajid and Arsenal Rahmani — said negotiations have gained momentum and laid the groundwork for real movement.

Rahmani went so far as to say a deal could be reached before Afghanistan’s August presidential elections.

Within the Taliban government that was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rahmani held several cabinet postings as head of the Ministry of Higher Education and as minister of the Haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhajid and Rahmani said they have provided a “third party channel” to the Afghan government and had “limited” and “unofficial” contact with U.S. representatives.

The talks are built primarily around contacts within the Taliban’s still-underground leadership, including Mullah Omar, who is believed to be hiding in Quetta, Pakistan along with other clerical leaders of active insurgent wings. These other Taliban clerical leaders involved in the talks include Mullah Bradar, Mullah Mamsur and Mullah Abdul Jalil.

Also included in the negotiations is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious renegade Afghan warlord whose active insurgency continues to fight against U.S. and coalition forces.
Two former Pakistani intelligence officials say a deal was underway in which Hekmatyar would call for an end to his insurgency and be allowed to live above ground in Saudi Arabia with a budget of $85 million. At least one Afghan government official confirmed that a deal with Hekmatyar was being assembled.

It is widely considered unlikely that the U.S. would accept any deal in which Mullah Omar or Hekmatyar is granted immunity from prosecution.


Both former Taliban leaders — Muhajid and Rahmani — met with GlobalPost in a heavily guarded residence in the western end of Kabul. Over several meetings, they said that a core of basic issues had been agreed upon by the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government.

The Taliban insurgents would end attacks on reconstruction teams and stop shutting down and burning schools. The Afghan government and U.S. and coalition forces would agree to release a list of 100 prisoners who are being held on charges that the Taliban say are baseless. Assurances would be sought by the international community that the U.S. will stop random searches of homes and attacks that kill civilians.

U.S. officials in the region said they were aware of the talks and are following them, but are not aware of any significant movement. U.S. officials would not comment on whether the U.S. has had contact with former Taliban officials in the now-deposed Taliban government who represent the more moderate wing of the Taliban.

Afghan government officials confirm that the government of Hamid Karzai is constructing a framework for reconciliation with Taliban insurgents and Hekmatyar aimed at ending cross-border attacks from hideouts in Pakistan on U.S.-led coalition and Afghan government positions inside Afghanistan.

Deputy minister of parliamentary affairs, Mohammad Karim Baz, said the government was still working toward constructing a process for reconciliation that can build on the talks already underway.

He said the greatest opportunity in these talks was with the large grouping of rural Taliban supporters who provide assistance to the insurgency largely in the south and east of Afghanistan. He sees this Taliban group as separate from the smaller number of perhaps 15,000 active, hard-line Taliban insurgents.

“We are hoping all of these things will fall into place before the election [in August]. We are confident this will happen. There is a good feeling of movement,” said Karim Baz.

But other Afghan government officials and insiders close to the government who spoke with GlobalPost on background are divided on how productive these talks can be and whether there is substantive movement on key issues.

August presidential elections have created an urgency within the talks for both the Afghan government, which wants a peaceful election, and the moderate elements of the Taliban, who have a stake in its outcome. Observers here say the Taliban, and the Pashtuns as an ethnic group, have historically only negotiated from strength. An argument is made by some here that they have that strength now and may not be in as good a position once the U.S. military offensive kicks into gear over the next few months.

All sides seem to agree a new diplomatic tone and military strategy set by Washington has contributed to the momentum. President Barack Obama earlier this year called for negotiations with moderate elements of the Taliban. CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus has discussed the need for a more complex approach to dealing with what he calls “reconcilables” within the insurgency.

Muhajid, who was the Taliban’s U.N. representative in New York for four years until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has long played a diplomatic role between the U.S. and the Taliban.

He was living in Flushing, Queens at the time of the attacks and for several weeks afterwards he met with State Department officials before he requested U.S. government permission to return to Pakistan to join his government leaders. The request was granted, he said, and he lived in Pakistan for several years until returning to Afghanistan four years ago and agreeing to try to fulfill a conciliatory role between the Afghan government and the active Taliban insurgents.

He has also had what he described as “limited” contact with U.S. officials, but said that he believed under the Obama administration there was a noticeable change in tone by U.S. diplomats.

“They declare mutual respect and mutual understanding. This is very important between the U.S. and Islamic countries, but in practice we do not see much change on the ground,” he said.
He said he was encouraged that the U.S. was supporting a policy of reconciliation and added that he believed Washington “will achieve many more advantages and many more objectives in the dialogue than if they were fighting with the opposition.”

Not all of the Taliban leadership are as optimistic about these talks. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former ambassador to Pakistan for the Taliban who spent the better part of four years in Guantanamo and now lives under a form of house arrest in Kabul, was skeptical that the talks would produce real results. He said a “deep mistrust” of the U.S. government would prevent the true Taliban leadership from going forward with an agreement that they do not believe the U.S. would honor.

“There are talks and talking is good, but there is a long way to go,” said Zaeef, who attended one of the meetings in Saudi Arabia that launched the process.

Still others more directly involved in the talks are optimistic.

Rahmani, who was appointed by President Karzai to the lower house of parliament in the current Afghan government, said the talks are progressing steadily but that regional players, such as Pakistan, India, China and Iran all have stakes in their outcome and can directly affect the outcome.

“We cannot say with 100 percent certainty that these talks will succeed, but there is a very good chance that we will have something in place very soon,” he said.

“What’s important is trust and that is being built,” Rahmani said.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/090617/taliban-talks?page=0,0

Well, those of us who follow such things have always known that there would be no military solution to this problem. Glad to see some inkling of a mature approach to this region moving forward.- 801

[The 801]

David Rohde, New York Times Reporter Held By Taliban, Escapes

KABUL — A New York Times reporter known for making investigative trips deep inside dangerous conflict zones escaped from militant captors after more than seven months in captivity by climbing over a wall, the newspaper said Saturday.

David S. Rohde was abducted Nov. 10 along with an Afghan reporter colleague and a driver south of the Afghan capital, Kabul. He had been traveling through Logar province to interview a Taliban commander, but was apparently intercepted and taken by other militants on the way.

The Times reported that Rohde and Afghan reporter Tahi Ludin on Friday climbed over the wall of a compound where they were held captive in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan.

The two then found a Pakistani army scout, who led them to a nearby base, the Times said. On Saturday, the two were flown to the U.S. military base in Bagram, the Times reported.

A U.S. military spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Chrstine Sidenstricker, said the military had not been involved. She could not say whether the State Department or CIA had flown the two to the military facility.

Rohde, reported to be in good health, said his driver remained with their captors.

In Washington, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the U.S. is "very pleased" that Rohde is safe and returning home. He said the escape "marks the end of a long and difficult ordeal."

Afghan officials confirmed the kidnapping in the days after the abduction, but The Associated Press and most other Western news outlets respected a request from the Times to not report on the abductions because the publicity could negatively affect hostage rescue efforts and imperil Rohde's life.

"From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David's family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much," Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, said in a story posted on the Times' Web site.

"We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David's plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support."

"We are very relieved that our New York Times colleague escaped safely, and this episode has ended happily," said AP Senior Managing Editor John Daniszewski. "It was an unusual and difficult news judgment to withhold reporting on his abduction, but our practice is to avoid transmitting stories if we believe they endanger someone's life."

The Times said there had been "sporadic communication" from Rohde and his kidnappers during the last seven months but that no ransom money had been paid.

Kristen Mulvihill, Rohde's wife, told the Times that the two had been married for nine months, "and seven of those David has been in captivity." She thanked the Times, the U.S. government and "all the others" who helped the family during the kidnapping.

Rohde was on leave from the Times when he was taken. He had traveled to Afghanistan to work on a book about the history of American involvement in Afghanistan when he went to Logar to interview a Taliban commander. Before setting out, he notified the Times' bureau in Kabul on whom to notify if he did not return, the Times said.

Logar province, where Rohde was seized, has seen an influx of militants over the last two years. Residents last year said the government had little control outside the provincial capital and that Taliban and other militants frequently set up checkpoints on highways.

In January, the U.S. military deployed more than 3,000 troops to Logar and neighboring Wardak to combat the insurgent safe havens near Kabul's doorstep.

It was not clear who took Rohde captive, and the Times did not reveal his abductors. Logar province has militants loyal to Taliban leader Mullah Omar but also to renegade warlord Siraj Haqqani, whom the U.S. has accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings.

Violence has risen steadily across Afghanistan over the last three years, and Rohde was taken during a period when attacks against Westerners spiked. A Canadian journalist, Mellissa Fung, was kidnapped in Kabul and a Dutch reporter was taken just outside Kabul around the time Rohde was abducted. Both were released within a month.

The militants who kidnapped Rohde transferred him about 100 miles (165 kilometers) southeast to Pakistan's North Waziristan region. The Pakistan government said in a statement earlier this year that Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, had asked for its help in obtaining Rohde's release.

Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President George W. Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, were actively involved in seeking Rohde's release.

Rohde's father, Harvey Rohde, told the Times that he regretted that his son had made the trip but that he understood his motivation "to get both sides of the story, to have his book honestly portray not just the one side but the other side as well."

Rohde was part of the Times reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in May for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.

He also won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting while working for The Christian Science Monitor for reporting on the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

During that time, Rohde was taken prisoner by Serbian officials and held for 10 days, during which he was deprived of sleep and interrogated relentlessly, according to a Web page on Rohde created by journalism students at Columbia University. Serb officials accused him of being a NATO spy, the page says.

The Columbia site says Rohde knew the reporting trip would be dangerous and that his editors would likely not allow him to make it. So he sent his editors an e-mail that he knew they would receive too late to stop the trip, the site says.

When he was released, he was greeted by many cameras at the airport, which he did not like, his older brother, Lee Rohde, told the Times.

"The last thing he ever wants is to be the story. He's supposed to be the storyteller," Lee Rohde said.

Rohde is the author of "Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/20/david-rohde-new-york-time_n_218400.html

[The 801]

How Serious is the Taliban's Cash Flow Problem?
By Evan Kohlmann

Several recent statements issued by such Al-Qaida luminaries as Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid (Al-Qaida's former treasurer) have suggested that Al-Qaida and the Taliban may be suffering from at least a temporary shortfall in funding. In an audio recording released last month, Abu al-Yazid stated, "Jihad needs a lot of money, and the Jihad battlefields need much money." He continued, "Jihad with money is also an obligation. And here we, in the battlefield in Afghanistan, are lacking a lot of money and a weakness in operations because of lack of money, and many mujahideen are absent from Jihad because of lack or absence of money with which they can carry out Jihad. Even many brothers…who want to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Allah, we cannot prepare them because of lack of money."

The NEFA Foundation has now obtained a new online plea posted on a prominent jihadi forum by an individual claiming to be fighting alongside the Taliban, and offering similar sentiments. After discussing the plundering of trucks "carrying supplies for the heretics", the poster stated, "Let the brothers know that I published this news only after being asked by the leaders of the Taliban to do so, to publish this information so that the Muslims will know that we are in urgent need for money until we'll drive out the heretics... Some of the Taliban brothers went out with us with no weapon, since they have no money, I mean, 400 dollars to buy a Kalashnikov…There are some in the Taliban brotherhood who hold Kalashnikovs in one armory. They don't have money for bullets."

An English translation of the posting can be downloaded from the NEFA Foundation website

http://www.nefafoundation.org/documents-area-afghanistan.html

[The 801]

Pakistani held over Polish death
Syed Shoaib Hasan
BBC News, Islamabad

Mr Stanczak was abducted about 70km from Islamabad and beheaded

Police in Pakistan have arrested a former right-wing parliamentarian who is accused of ordering the murder of a Polish engineer by the Taliban.

Shah Abdul Aziz, who was arrested on Friday, is known for his close links to the Taliban and Islamic militants.

He had gone missing in May after allegedly being detained by security agencies.

The engineer, Peter Stanczak, was kidnapped by the Taliban in September 2008.

Mr Stanczak had been working on a project in the volatile north-west of Pakistan. He was beheaded by the militants in February after talks with the government for the release of captured Taliban members broke down.

Identification

Ataullah Khan, a Taliban militant, said in a confessional statement before a magistrate on Saturday:

"I kidnapped the Polish engineer with the help of Commander Tariq, Mufti Ilyas and others."

He was speaking in an anti-terrorism court in the northern garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"Later, we killed him on the orders of Shah Abdul Aziz after negotiations broke down."

Baitullah Mehsud
Baitullah Mehsud is the leader of the Pakistani Taliban

Officials say Mr Khan clearly indentified Shah Abdul Aziz in court as the man who gave the order for Mr Stanczak to be killed.

Ataullah Khan was arrested on 16 July by the Islamabad police at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city.

Police officials said a substantial number of arms and explosives were found in his possession.

He has since been in police custody.

During interrogation, officials say, he has confessed to being part of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) Darra Adam Khel wing led by Taliban commander Tariq Afridi.

He also admitted to having being involved in 50 murders, including that of Mr Stanczak, officials say.

Mr Afridi's group is held to be responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Mr Stanczak.

It operates under the larger aegis of Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud's TTP organisation.

Mr Aziz is known to have close links to Mr Mehsud and his organisation.

He had recently been trying to negotiate a peace deal between them and the Pakistan army.

The army is currently engaged in an operation in Baitullah Mehsud's South Waziristan stronghold.


Elders from Pakistan"s Jani Khail tribes arrive to attend a meeting to discuss the situation of the area, Sunday, June 28, 2009 in Bannu, Pakistan

Pakistan's South Waziristan puzzle

Army officials say they were aware of Mr Aziz's efforts, but added the army was "not interested in dealing with miscreants".

In this regard, it is interesting to note that Mr Aziz was said to have been carrying a letter to Pakistan's army chief with a proposed outline of a peace deal.

Pakistan's top army spokesman, Gen Athar Abbas, had earlier denied the existence of such a letter, calling it "utter speculation".

But the most interesting aspect about this entire episode is that Mr Aziz had been missing since 27 May 2009 from Islamabad.

A police complaint in this regard had been registered on the same day by his friend, Khalid Khawaja, in Islamabad's Aapara police station.

Sworn affidavit

Mr Khawaja had nominated police and security officials in his complaint, saying Mr Aziz was in government custody.

But the Islamabad police expressed their ignorance over Mr Aziz's whereabouts.

In fact, on 21 July, Islamabad police officials had submitted a sworn affidavit saying they had looked everywhere for Mr Aziz and could not find him.

"The government is implicating an innocent man," Mr Khawaja told the BBC.

"How can he have been arrested yesterday, when he was taken away two months ago.

"The Punjab government is guilty of gross human rights violation and illegal detention.

"They should first ask Mr Aziz where he was all this time before making such statements about him. "We intend to approach the supreme court on this matter."

The anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi has given custody of Shah Abdul Aziz to the police for three days.

Mr Aziz is a former member of Pakistan's national parliament.

He was elected from the district of Karak in North West Frontier Province in the 2002 and subsequently lost his re-election bid in 2008.

Mr Aziz is a member of the right wing MMA political alliance.

The next hearing is to be held on 28 July.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8169076.stm


http://asiantribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Slain-Peter-Stanczak.JPG
Slain Peter Stanczak

Pakistani ex-parliamentarian arrested in connection with Polish engineer’s murder
Published by editor Pakistan Jul 26, 2009

By Farzana Shah-Asian Tribune Correspondent in Pakistan
Slain Peter Stanczak



Islamabad, 26 July, (Asiantribune.com): A former member of Pakistani parliament was arrested on connection with the murder of Polish engineer Peter Stanczak.

Islamabad police on Saturday apprehended former member of national assembly Shah Abdul Aziz who is allegedly involved in Polish engineer murder case.

Police arrested the former MNA after an accused Attaullah, arrested in the same case, confessed in the court that he abducted and killed Polish engineer Peter Stanczak on the directives of MNA Maulana Shah Abdul Aziz.

Police have got three-day remand of the accused from Court for further investigation.

Attaullah was arrested by Federal Police a few days back. Police had also recovered a hand grenade, a tape recorder and explosive material from his possession.

He confessed of crime before the judicial Magistrate, saying that he along with Commander Taqriq, Mufti Ilyas, Hussain and Bilal abducted the Polish engineer on the directives of Shah Abdul Aziz, and later killed him when their demands were not met.

He (Attaullah) also confessed killing more than 50 people including security personnel, adding that he had also been involved in more than 15 suicide blasts particularly, in Kohat, D I Khan, Peshawar and other cities.

The arrested ex-MNA won election in 2002 under the platform of religious parties’ alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) from Karak District of North West Frontier Province after defeating former cricketer Imran Khan.

Earlier last month there were reports suggesting that MNA Maulana Shah Abdul Aziz, was picked up by an intelligence agency after his meeting with Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz and his alleged links with chief of terrorist outfit Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Baitullah Mehsud.

There were also reports that Shah Aziz was found travelling with Fidaullah, one of the Taliban leaders and considered to be the mastermind of the suicide bombing in Islamabad and other areas in the recent past.

Peter Stanczak, who worked for Geofizyka Krakow Limited, was kidnapped on September 28, 2008 after the Taliban killed his driver and a guard near Pind Sultani village in Attock district of Punjab. Later Dara Adamkhel chapter of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) had claimed to have killed Stanczakn after the government of Pakistan failed to release some Taliban from custody.

http://asiantribune.com/07/26/pakistani-ex-parliamentarian-arrested-in-connection-with-polish-engineer

- Asian Tribune -

[The 801]

Pakistan: New Taliban group formed in northwest

Wana, 22 July (AKI) - Syed Saleem Shahzad - Three arch rivals of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud - Turkistan Bathni, Haji Tehsil Khan Wazir and Ikhals Khan Mehsud - have formed a new group before the army mobilises its ground troops against the Al-Qaeda linked warlord in Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas.

The new group has taken the name of Abullah Mehsud, a slain Taliban commander killed by the Pakistani security forces in southwestern Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

Ikhlas Khan alias Waziristan Baba, aged 42, was on Tuesday appointed as the group's leader.

Pakistani security forces have significantly beefed up their positions in the northwestern cities of Bannu bordering the North Waziristan tribal region and Dera Ismail Khan, bordering the South Waziristan tribal region.

The moves come ahead of a fresh offensive that will aim to target the powerful network made up of militants including Baitullah Mehsud, the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked insurgents.

Pakistan previously promoted pro-Taliban commanders Qari Zainuddin Mehsud and Haji Turkistan Bathni as Mehsud’s rivals, and both men were interviewed on all the national TV channels.

The pair claimed Baitullah Mehsud a Zionist and an Indian agent and portrayed themselves as the true followers of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Neither Qari Zainuddin Mehsud nor Bathni can muster more than a few dozen fighters, but they claimed to have 3,000 fighters to unleash against Mehsud.

The killing last month of Baitullah Mehsud's rival and former aide, Qari Zainuddin Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan revealed that his own network was heavily infiltrated by Baitullah Mehsud.

Qari Zainuddin Mehsud was killed by one of his own men while he was living under the protection of Pakistani security forces.

Haji Turkistan Bathni disappeared from the scene after the killing of Qari Zainuddin Mehsud, whose body could not be taken to his native town in South Waziristan for burial.

He was first taken first to Abbotabad, considered out of reach for Baitullah Mehsud for his burial rites. Then he was secretly transferred to Dera Ismail Khan for burial.

The Pakistani government has ordered the military to go on the offensive in the northwest against warlord Baitullah Mehsud. It has launched airstrikes on Mehsud’s bases in the South Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan.

The United States has offered a reward of 5 million dollars for information leading to Mehsud’s location or arrest. The military operation in South Waziristan is seen as a potential turning point in the fight against militancy in Pakistan.

Mehsud is accused of launching dozens of bomb and suicide attacks against security forces and civilians in the country.

The government alleges he was behind the murder of Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=3.0.3571444865

[Casey]

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: McCrystal on the Path of Defeat at the Hands of the Lions


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: McCrystal on the Path of Defeat at the Hands of the Lions





Safar 04, 1431 A.H, Monday January 19, 2010


In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate


The White House nominated its most callous general, General Mc Crystal to command US forces in Afghanistan – ironically, after failure of General Mc Kiernen and Eikenberry in Afghanistan.


Apparently, rulers of the White House announced that the shift at leadership level was aimed at speeding up reconstruction work and ending civilian casualties which are frequently caused by US blind bombardment.


But, Mc. Crystal as a commander, has a black history of assassination and kidnapping. As a Head of Joint Special Operations, he has kidnapped, terrorized and martyred thousands of innocent people in Iraq. Interrogators under Mc. Crystal supervision and command regularly tortured Iraqi Muslim detainees and Mujahideen In NAMA Camp and Abu Gharib jail. These crimes have not been made public so far. On May 11 and 13, 2009, US President Obama issued orders, banning these violence and brutalities to become public. Ostensibly, because of his hostility to Muslims and Islam, Mc. Crystal was appointed by Obama as top commander on the suggestion of General Petraes who is a close friend of General Mc. Crystal.


In general, his presence as chief of American invading forces in Afghanistan has had no impact on the activities of Mujahideen, and it seems, it will have no negative effect on the progress and expansion of Mujahideen activities in the country. However, his appointment as a top general in Afghanistan points to the fact that US has a secret, wicked and long-term program up her sleeve to kidnap and assassinate prominent political and military personalities in Afghanistan and the neighboring countries.


Being true to his brutal record, Mc. Crystal immediately launched a ruthless campaign in rural Afghanistan soon after assumption as top commander. For the past months, the American troops have been carrying out night raids on houses, taking out the inhabitants mercilessly, and killing them on the spot. Such gruesome incidents have taken place in Bagh, Khulbissat and Yaqubi areas of Khust province.





The American Special Forces have killed people in their houses and streets in the said areas and have let loose trained dogs to devour their corpses. Similarly, American brutal forces recently raided people houses in Narang district, Kunar province at night and killed a number of young students of local school. There are reports of similar brutal incidents in Paktika, Paktia, Laghman, Helmand and Kandahar provinces where hundreds of our countrymen have been killed after having been taken out of their houses. Despite these brutality and terrorism shown by forces under Mc. Crystal, they have achieved no victory but contrarily, he has failed in Afghanistan more than his predecessor, General Mc. Kiernen.


In 2009, Mujahideen faced the invading forces in Helmand province with defeat. Earlier, the invaders had launched military operations in the province, named as Khanjar and Panther’s Claws under the command of Mc. Crystal. Even now, the mere mention of the name of Helmand, makes the hairs of soldiers and officials in Washington and London stand on end. Their recent operations in Nawzad district has also failed. A British deputy of Mc. Crystal general Nick Parker says, they have lost initiatives against Taliban.


Mujahideen captured some important American military bases in Kunar and Nooristan provinces. In addition to this, they liberated districts headquarters of Bergmatal and Kamdesh in the said provinces; the Mujahideen killed so many Americans soldiers in Korangal valley that now the American soldiers refer to it as the Valley of Death.


Last year, when Mc. Crystal had the American forces in Afghanistan under his command, the Mujahideen further spread their influence in the country. According to International Council on Security and Development (ICCD), the Mujahideen have influence in 80% of Afghanistan. During the stewardship of general Mc. Keirnen, this figure was 72%. ICCD Chief and Researcher, Mc Donald says Mujahideen spread their influence in Afghanistan with the passage of each day.


Mujahideen attacked the UNAMA Guest House in the capital Kabul where foreign members of election monitoring team were staying. They killed a number of foreign nationals and their internal lackeys. As a result, the United Nations announced to pull out their employees from Afghanistan. The recent brazen martyrdom-seeking attack in Chapman Base in Khust is another sign of victory of the Mujahideen, clearly exposing the failure of the butcher General Mc. Crystal.


To end, we advise Mc. Crystal, his chiefs at the Pentagon and Washington, the clique of the neo-conservatives, that you will not be able to continue the occupation of Afghanistan by resorting to Genghis-style brutality and the framing of new strategies and nominating new generals. Afghanistan is the home of the Afghans. Leave it to the Afghans.


You call yourself as democrats and advocates of human rights, then do not take out innocent people from their houses at night and martyr them. But if you still want to continue with the terror and consider it as a short-cut for your victory, then wait until the massive upheaval of Mujahideen and the people emerge in the coming spring. You will come to know that it is more vast and severe than those in the past.


Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

[The 801]

Fantastic explanation.

Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad


By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI
Published: February 27, 2010

LAHORE, Pakistan — Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.
The New York Times

Lahore has enduring social problems like chronic unemployment.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press


A car bombing in Lahore last May killed 23. Officials said it was a failed strike on Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.

Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in a shootout with the police at the age of 29.

Mr. Kundi and members of his circle — educated strivers who come from the lower middle class — are part of a new generation that has made militant networks in Pakistan more sophisticated and deadly. Al Qaeda has harnessed their aimless ambition and anger at Pakistan’s alliance with the United States, their generation’s most electrifying enemy.

“These are guys who use Google Maps to plan their attacks,” said a senior Punjab Province police official. “Their training is better than our national police academy.”

Like Mr. Kundi, many came of age in the 1990s, when jihad was state policy — aimed at challenging Indian control in Kashmir — and jihadi groups recruited openly in universities. Under the influence of Al Qaeda, their energies have been redirected and turned inward, against Pakistan’s own government and people.

That shift has fractured long-established militant networks, which were once supported by the state, producing a patchwork of new associations that are fluid and defy easy categorization.

“The situation now is quite confusing,” said Tariq Parvez, director of the National Counterterrorism Authority in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “We can no longer talk in terms of organizations. Now it’s a question of like-minded militants.”

The result has been deadly. In 2009, militant attacks killed 3,021 Pakistanis, three times as many as in 2006.

The issue is urgent. Pakistan is in the midst of a youth bulge, with more than a million people a year pouring into the job market, and the economy — at its current rate — is not growing fast enough to absorb them. Only a tiny fraction choose militancy, but acute joblessness exacerbates the risk.

A Student’s Education

Mr. Kundi’s journey and the ways he veered off course parallel Pakistan’s own recent history. Born to Pashtun parents, he grew up in a small town in southwestern Punjab, where camels lumber in slow clumps, and sand stings the eyes. His father’s monthly income of $255 put them at the lower edge of Pakistan’s middle class. But life still took patience. Meat was a luxury. His father could afford to visit him in medical school only once.

He brought that past — part shyness, part shame — with him to college in Faisalabad, the third-biggest city in Pakistan. The city was an explosion of things modern. Traffic jams. Fancy restaurants. Uncovered women. For young people from small towns, unfamiliar with city life, the atmosphere can arouse a rigid defensiveness, said Mughees-uddin Sheikh, a dean at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.

“The student is tempted, but he doesn’t understand it because he wasn’t educated,” said Mr. Sheikh. “He’s been deprived of things like this.”

To ease the adjustment, young people join student groups, which, like powerful inner-city gangs, help them navigate life — how to use a bank, which mosque to pray in — but also offer protection.

When Mr. Kundi arrived at Punjab Medical College in the late 1990s, he chose a group with an Islamic focus, according to a classmate and friend, Muhammad, who asked that his last name not be used because he feared association with a militant. It was a typical choice for students from devout families, who want their sons to stay out of trouble in the city.

The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, ran charities and prayer meetings. It also offered training for jihad in Kashmir. Lashkar’s blend of adventure and patriotism appealed to restless young men. It even had an office on campus: Room 12D.

Such jihadi groups had become part of mainstream society in Pakistan in the 1980s, when the United States was financing Islamic radicals fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and when an American-supported Pakistani general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, empowered hard-line mullahs and injected Islam into school textbooks.

By the 1990s, recruiters for jihad in Kashmir were holding rallies on public university campuses. After 2001, Lashkar was driven underground, but it continues to operate through a charity wing. American, Indian and Pakistani officials say it carried out the attacks on hotels and other landmarks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008.

It is the lower middle class in Pakistan that is most vulnerable to radicalization, according to Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. They consume virulently anti-American media. They are recruited aggressively by Islamic student groups in public universities, which are attended almost exclusively by lower- and middle-class youth.

“They’re politically conscious, but it’s not mature,” Mr. Rana said. “They have big problems, but when they try to solve them, they get confused.”

Mr. Kundi threw himself into Lashkar’s activities, working summers at an eye clinic in Kashmir, his friend Muhammad said. He held Koran-reading sessions. He developed a close relationship with the group’s spiritual leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Mr. Kundi was a skilled recruiter, even winning over a secular classmate whose family lived in Canada.

“He had logic for every single point,” Muhammad said. “He could convince anyone.”

Despite his zeal for jihad, it was a relatively quiet time in Pakistan. The war against the Soviets was long over, and most of the country’s jihadi groups were drifting. All that changed when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, jolting young Pakistani jihadis who saw it as a war against Muslims.

“That was the beginning,” said a security official in Karachi. “They went from small local targets, to a much bigger global one, the United States.”

When Al Qaeda came to Pakistan, Mr. Kundi did not have to go far to find it. The American invasion had pushed many of its leaders over the border, including Abu Zubaydah, a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle. In 2002, he surfaced in Allied Hospital in Faisalabad, where Mr. Kundi was working. He was seeking treatment and preaching against Pakistan’s government for supporting the United States. His audience loved it, Muhammad said.

“Every doctor at the hospital was against the government,” he said. “They saw Abu Zubaydah as the hero of Muslims.”

Lashkar’s activities now seemed small, and embarrassingly pro-government. Mr. Kundi began to argue with Mr. Saeed, the group’s leader, picking fights with him in public about Lashkar’s mission. The United States, he argued, was killing Muslims, and Lashkar was doing nothing for them.

In a stinging insult, Muhammad recalled, Mr. Kundi began calling Mr. Saeed “the B team of the government,” a reference to the group’s not-so-secret connection to the state.

His frustration coincided with a bitter discovery. His father, who had retired, could not pay for schooling beyond Mr. Kundi’s basic medical degree. A pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and a family wedding had sapped the family’s savings, Mr. Kundi’s father, Dilawar, said in an interview. Without a specialization, Mr. Kundi faced a salary at a public hospital of less than $100 a month, too low to support a wife and children, a humiliating prospect.

“ ‘I’ve earned a degree, but I’m a zero,’ ” Muhammad recalled him saying.

His father begged him to return and open a practice in their hometown. Mr. Kundi refused.

It was 2005, the year he disappeared.

Life as a Militant

Conventional theory on militant organizations says that groups have hierarchies, members and sometimes territory. But in Pakistan after Sept. 11, 2001, those lines blurred. Of the half a dozen groups that were active in Punjab in the 1990s, many had splintered by the middle of the next decade, divided by differences over, among other things, whether jihad required attacking the Pakistani state.

Now, most acts of terrorism are carried out by loose associations of individual militants, making militancy more fluid.

“It’s more about networks than formal organizations now,” said an American defense official who studies the issue. “Their attacks are focused on aspects of the state in a way they haven’t been ever before.”

While the Pakistani Taliban have captured imaginations and headlines, many law enforcement officials say they believe that militancy in Pakistan is much more diffuse.

According to the police investigation, Mr. Kundi was one of eight jihadis under a man named Sheik Issa al-Masri, Arabic for “the Egyptian.” Most were born around 1980 and had come to jihad after the Sept. 11 attacks.

They moved between cities in Punjab and Waziristan, an area near the Afghan border where militants from Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups have set up bases.

They came together for attacks — on the Lahore office of Pakistan’s spy agency, on two police training academies and on the Sri Lankan cricket team — but more often for crimes to pay for their militant activities.

In Faisalabad, Mr. Kundi extorted a textile mill owner. In Lahore, his friend Asif Mehmoud stole cars. According to a police interrogation of Mr. Mehmoud, one kidnapping that brought $60,000 was split among themselves and Sheik Issa.

In an indication of how fluid their lives were, Mr. Mehmoud, a graduate of Lahore’s most prestigious engineering university, also held a string of ordinary jobs, as a repairman for textile equipment, a welding instructor in a cutlery institute, a worker in a call center. His résumé lists two hobbies: cooking and current affairs.

Sheik Issa, who is on the United States’ most-wanted list, provided the early intellectual justification for attacking Pakistan, a development the American defense official described as “very significant.” It was a common approach for Al Qaeda in other Muslim countries, but a sharp departure for Pakistan, whose militants had fought Soviets, Indians in Kashmir and Pakistani Shiites, but had never gone all-out against the state itself.

“Sheik Issa said the Pakistani Army has become the well-wisher of America,” stated a police interrogation report, citing a 29-year-old member of the network arrested last year. “It’s mandatory that we should give maximum losses to the agencies of Pakistan. This is also jihad.”

Their strikes were skillful. In last year’s attack against the Sri Lankan cricket team, led by another educated young man from a working-class family, a 29-year-old nursing assistant, Aqeel Ahmed, only three top people out of about 14 attackers knew the nature of the target, according to a police official who investigated the attack. The rest believed that the bus they were ambushing held an American delegation.

Their plans were ambitious. A computer memory stick found on a militant linked to Mr. Ahmed and killed last fall in a shootout with the police in the southern Punjab town of Dera Ghazi Khan contained plans to destroy bridges and railroads and to strike at the heart of the Pakistani state, its military. The language was in code: “Lentils” meant aluminum paste. “Wheat” was fertilizer.

“GHQ is an important task — do it immediately,” said the voice on the memory stick, referring to the military’s headquarters. “Don’t wait.”

A Powerful Addiction

When the attack on the army headquarters unfolded last October, Mr. Ahmed, the nursing assistant, was at the center of it. His father, Nazir, watched it on television. A photograph of his son’s face flashed on the screen. It was the first glimpse he had had of his boy since he disappeared in 2007. He froze, overcome with shock and shame. “My muscles were not with me,” Mr. Ahmed said in an interview in November.

Since then, a question has tormented him. His son earned A’s in high school, had a decent salary in a military hospital and received spending money from an uncle in Canada. How could he have gone so wrong?

A Pakistani military psychiatrist is trying to answer that question. In a study of 24 young men who were involved in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, the psychiatrist, Brig. Mowadat Hussain Rana, has found that they tend to be the younger or middle siblings in families of six or more children. The households are not always poor but are often violent, and the youngsters get lost in the chaos.

“He’s that boy who is not in a rigorous system of rule setting,” Brigadier Rana said in an interview in Rawalpindi. “He becomes someone who drifts, who spends afternoons hitting stray dogs, and no one notices.”

His parents, at their wits’ end, take him to a mullah, hoping to instill discipline, the theory goes. The two develop a close relationship, sometimes even sexual, giving the boy the attention he has long craved. The mullah then introduces him to others, men who make him feel important, as if he is part of something bigger than himself.

Of the 24 militants in the study, about a third attended college, though not all graduated.

But socio-economic theories explain only so much. For Mr. Kundi, an emotional young man with thwarted ambitions, militancy had a psychological pull. Mr. Parvez of the National Counterterrorism Authority said militants he had interviewed called jihad an addiction, a habit that made them feel powerful in a world that ignored them.

“Out there I’m a useless guy, unemployed and cursed by my family,” one militant said. “Here I’m a commander. My words have weight.”

The police in Punjab Province arrested about seven young militants last year who they say were connected to Mr. Kundi, weakening two groups, they said.

Since then, attacks in Pakistan’s main cities have dropped sharply. But militants’ capacity for regeneration has surprised the authorities before, and a deeper fix would be tackling some of Pakistan’s social problems, which the country’s political elite, preoccupied by power struggles, has ignored.

The last time Muhammad saw Mr. Kundi they were sitting together on a bench outside Allied Hospital in Faisalabad. A scruffy old man walked by, hunched over a cane. The man’s death, Mr. Kundi said, would be unimportant. His own, in contrast, would have meaning.

But did it? Muhammad disapproved of Mr. Kundi’s choice, because it led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. But he understood it. Mr. Kundi wanted badly to be important. Now, in a way, he is.

“He applied his mind,” Muhammad said. “He took what society offered.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html?sq=jihad&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

[The 801]

AN ATOL EXCLUSIVE
Confessions of a Pakistani spy
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja, a former Inter-Services Intelligence official and a close friend of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden during the resistance in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, has explained in videos sent to Asia Times Online how he was on a mission to broker a deal between militants and the army when he was captured by militants, and how he played a double game by deceiving a radical cleric into being arrested.

Khawaja was dismissed from the air force in the late 1980s and subsequently earned a reputation of having close ties to some militant groups. Khawaja has played an important behind-the-scenes role in both regional and national politics. Before the US (attack on Afghanistan in late 2001, he was a part of the back-room diplomacy between the US and the Taliban, which failed miserably.

The revelations appear in five video clips sent to Asia Times Online by an al-Qaeda-linked group of militants from the Pakistani North Waziristan tribal area. The clips appear to have been heavily edited, with some of Khawaja's sentences - he is speaking in Urdu - cut off. At times it appears that a frail Khawaja, in his early 60s, is under duress.

(SEE Link for path to videos - 801)
The following are five video clips sent to Asia Times Online featuring Khalid Khawaja, who is speaking in Urdu. Video files are approximately 2.5Mb each in MOV format.
Please click here to download the clips: 1 2 3 4 5

On March 25, Khawaja traveled to North Waziristan to interview commanders Sirajuddin Haqqani and Waliur Rahman Mehsud. He was accompanied by a British citizen, Asad Qureshi, a reporter with Channel 4, and Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, also a former long-time ISI official and once Pakistan's consul-general in Herat in Afghanistan.

Tarrar was nicknamed "Colonel Imam" by the mujahideen as he was instrumental in helping raise the Taliban militia and he trained present Taliban leader Mullah Omar and other top Afghan leaders, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the slain Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. "Colonel Imam" is widely referred to as the "Father of the Taliban."

The three men have not been heard from since March 25.

Soon after their disappearance, Punjabi militants calling themselves the "Asian Tigers" sent a video to the media in which they demanded a ransom of US$10 million for the release of Asad Qureshi and the freedom of Taliban leaders Mullah Baradar and Mansoor Dadullah in exchange for Khawaja and Colonel Imam.

The Afghan Taliban have distanced themselves from the kidnappings and their spokesman Zabiullah Muhajahid said they were working for the release of the two.

In the video footage, Khawaja confesses to a scheme to bring down the radical movement that had become centered around Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the capital, Islamabad. By mid-2007, the movement had become increasingly aggressive. Students from nearby educational faculties had taken to the streets to persuade video shops not to sell "vulgar" movies. The campaign took a turn for the worse when the students seized a suspected brothel owner in the Aapara area, where both the Taliban-supporting Lal Masjid and the ISI were situated.

Khawaja says he hatched a plan with Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the chief of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (the largest Islamic party in the country), the Gand Mufti of Pakistan, Mufti Rafi Usmani, and other scholars to eliminate the Lal Masjid movement from Islamabad.

Khawaja says he trapped Maulana Abdul Aziz, the prayer leader of the mosque and the brother of Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, with whom Aziz ran Lal Masjid.

Khawaja says he telephoned Aziz and lured him into being arrested. Rasheed was killed in the military raid on the mosque in which scores of militants also died.

"I am known among the media and masses as a thoroughbred gentleman, but in fact I was an ISI and CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency] mole ... I am remembering the burnt bodies of the innocent boys and girls of Lal Masjid ... I called Maulana Abdul Aziz and forced him to come out of the mosque wearing a woman's veil and gown, and that's how I got him arrested," Khawaja says in one of the video clips.

The Lal Masjid incident proved a defining moment in Pakistan's recent history: it culminated in the decline of president Pervez Musharraf, who stepped down in August 2008, and provoked a fierce reaction among militants against the Pakistani state.

Khawaja says that top jihadi commanders were the ISI's proxies and were given a free hand to collect funds. The leaders included Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil (who laid the foundations of the International Islamic Front with bin Laden in 1998), Maulana Masood Azhar (chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad), Abdullah Shah Mazhar (a former supreme commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammad.)

"I brought here a list of 14 commanders and was aiming to malign them among militant circles ... Abdullah Shah Mazhar, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, Masood Azhar and jihadi organizations like Laskhar-e-Taiba, al-Badr, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Harkatul Mujahideen, Jamiatul Mujahideen etc operate with the financial cooperation of the Pakistani secret services and they are allowed collect their funds inside Pakistan," Khawaja says in the video.

Khawaja was arrested immediately after the Lal Masjid operation and spent several months in jail. He had been involved in talks with the government to prevent the military from moving into the mosque and he had assured the government that he would resolve the matter without force. However, the government intercepted some of his messages in which he apparently urged those inside the mosque not to surrender and he was arrested as a collaborator with the Lal Masjid.

He was a known critic of the role of the Pakistani Intelligence agencies after September 11, 2001, when Pakistan sided with the US in the "war on terror".

He was one of the few prominent people to openly provide assistance to Arab-Afghan families whose male members had been arrested or killed during the US invasion on Afghanistan in 2001.

At the time of his disappearance, Khawaja was working for the cause of missing people - mostly militants. But because of his past links to the air force and the ISI, he has always been viewed with some suspicion by al-Qaeda.

Khawaja was retired from the air force in the late 1980s after he wrote a letter to the then-president, General Zia ul-Haq, in which he called him a hypocrite for not enforcing Islam in Pakistan. He then went to Afghanistan and fought alongside bin Laden. He was a recruiter and trainer of Pakistani fighters for the resistance against the Soviets.

Khawaja's name hit the headlines again in February 2002 in connection with the kidnapping, torture and murder by militants of American reporter Daniel Pearl. It was alleged that he was involved in the abduction at the behest of the ISI.

Khawaja gave several interviews to Asia Times Online in which he revealed how he had set up a meeting in Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s between bin Laden and then leader of the opposition, Nawaz Sharif, to dislodge Benazir Bhutto's government. Her government fell in 1990 and Sharif became premier. Khawaja also revealed that in the late 1980s he passed on funds from bin Laden to a former Pakistani minister, Sheikh Rasheed, for the operation of training camps for Kashmiri separatists.

It is unclear why Khawaja took Colonel Imam with him to North Waziristan. In the video footage, Khawaja says, "I was sent by the Pakistan army in North Waziristan because the army was badly caught in the middle of a conflict and was unable come out. I was sent to get reconciliation between the army and the militants so that the militants would give safe passage to the military to leave the area."

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD24Df04.html


Complicated enough for you?

[Casey]

Statement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Regarding the Anniversary of the 9/11 Event

It is now for nine years that Afghanistan has been burning in the flames of the invasion of the American invaders, that started under the pretext of avenging the September event. In the past nine years, thousands of Afghans have been martyred, injured and detained by the invading Americans and others forced to leave their houses. On the other hand, the Mujahideen punished thousands of Americans and their allies during armed confrontations and Jihad by killing and injuring them for their invasion.

Furthermore, they have had heavy financial losses amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. But still the Americans are bent on continuing the occupation of Afghanistan under the same hackneyed pretext and destroying and prosecuting the Afghans by further prolonging a war that could not be won. Americans have not achieved any tangible result to remedy the pains of the victims of 9/11 despite the continuation of the war for nine years.

The policy followed by the invading rulers of the White House under the pretext of avenging the September Event, unquestionably led to other hundreds of bloody events not only in Afghanistan but in others parts of the world. Hence in every part of the globe, the citizenship of USA has become a mark of danger. The people of America have been deprived of a peaceful and secure life. Their houses, cities, offices, airports and barracks have become battle fields. They are not able to find any solace and peace any where. Albeit that, they are regarded as invaders and aggressors at world’s level.

The war which they have started in Afghanistan, ironically thousands of kilometers away from the place of the occurrence of the event under the name of avenging the September event, is facing defeat because it is an illegitimate war which will eventually usher in the downfall of the American empire. Members of the global coalition which they had allied with at the beginning of he war, are now busy wriggling themselves of the entangle the Americans are grappling with, by pulling their forces out of Afghanistan after their having understood the realities behind it.

The confused rulers of America, instead of considering a rationale exit, persist in implementing plans which would lead to political and economic instability and law and order situation not only in Afghanistan, in the region but in America itself.

After the passage of nine years since the September Event and their resorting to the usage of all warfare tactics, they have now lost the chance of peace in Afghanistan. They have only once chance now and that is to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan unconditionally. They are not entitled to submitting (certain) conditions as a quid pro quo for withdrawal because the invasion of Afghanistan was an illegitimate action in the first place.

Despite that, they are facing a dashing defeat. Therefore, on this occasion of the ninth anniversary of the September Event, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan advises the American rulers to take advantage of this chance; lose not further chances and unconditionally withdraw forces from Afghanistan. Thus they may save themselves from the fate of the former Britain and Soviet Union and put an end to the knotty Afghan issue.

It is the legitimate right of the Afghans to determine the future destiny of Afghanistan and establish a strong and independent Islamic system there. The Islamic Emirate has started Jihad against the invaders in order to ensure realization of this objective. They will continue their Islamic sacred duty (Jihad) until and unless the invaders are no more in Afghanistan and an Islamic sovereignty is established there.

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan


Official website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban).

[Casey]

Statement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
on the Ninth Anniversary of American Invasion of Afghanistan
Shawwal 27, 1431 A.H, Thursday, October 07, 2010

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Nine years ago, the brutal Americans attacked Afghanistan in contradiction of all human and moral norms, under the leadership of the most disgustful president G. W. Bush in the name of furthering the Crusade. At the outset, no one believed that the Afghans, who had already passed through hardships because of long wars, would ever be able to confront the attack launched by the most arrogant and highly-trained forces of the 21st century.

Based on these predictions, former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfield, who was wallowing in his wishful delusions due to his arrogance, announced the end of the American military operations after six months of the invasion, thinking that the Afghans’ capability to face the invaders have come to and end.

But today, 9 years after that announcement, the strongholds of Jihad and resistance against the invading Americans and their allies are as strong as ever. Every day, tens of foreign invaders lose their lives. Throughout the past nine years, neither they have been able to implement their empty slogans nor could they stop the Jihadic activities of the Muslim Afghans. During that period, the invading Americans spent hundreds of billions of dollars in order to continue this illegitimate war; lost thousands of soldiers, with tens of thousands of them being injured, and faced heavy losses in terms of military hardware, but now after all that, they have only reached the conclusion to admit to the American public and to the public of the world that the current year 2010 was the most fatal year for the foreign forces. Nothing new they offered.

The invading Americans and their coalition allies have put to use all their military and economic capability to maintain their brutal occupation over Afghanistan and bring it to a successful end. Even they implemented different strategies; appointed the most sophisticated and veteran generals and launched various conspiracies with the help of their surrogates to stymie the popular resistance but, all that notwithstanding, we can make a cursory comparison regarding the achievements of both sides of the wars on this occasion of the ninth anniversary of the Americans invasion of Afghanistan as under:

1. All American rulers including Obama are disappointed of the results of the war in Afghanistan.

2. Internal differences have arisen among the rulers of the White House regarding the poor results of the failed Afghanistan war.

3. A number of coalition countries have pulled out of the military mission in Afghanistan because of the prolongation of the failed nine-year long war and the emergence of the atmosphere of lack of confidence.

4. All Americans and NATO military strategies have failed in face of the resistance of the Mujahideen.

Last but not least, the American arrogance and reputation plummeted at world level in view of the fact that the highly-trained American and NATO forces failed to wipe out the resistance of the empty-handed Afghan Mujahideen. Similarly, the American economy faced unprecedented melt-down.

Now the Achievement of the Mujahideen:

1. Mujahideen have control over 75% of land in Afghanistan according to the admission made by the Americans.

2. Mujahideen are able to target all American military bases, ranging from the gates of the presidential place to the Bagram military Base, to Kandahar and Nangarhar airports etc.

3. The public of the world, particularly the people of Afghanistan, have enhanced their support to the current Islamic resistance against the invaders.

4. Mujahideen now control all high ways of the country.

5. Mujahideen have obtained (new) military experiences and capability in killing and wiping out the American invaders.

On the basis of the above comparative statement, now every one can predict the Americans and their allies chance of success in Afghanistan. Only the confused rulers of the White House, due to their arrogance and stubbornness, are bent on continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and adding to the sufferings of the miserable Afghans.

Considering defense of the territorial integrity of the Islamic country and Jihad against the invading Americans as an Islamic obligation, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan advises the confused American rulers: come to yourselves and have mercy on your people by immediately pulling out of Afghanistan. The Mujahid Afghans consider every sacrifice including martyrdom at the strongholds of Jihad and defense as a pride, even now after nine years of continuous Jihad and resistance. However, the American people will not have the patience to see corpses of their dead soldiers who have lost their lives for the protection of the personal interests of the American capitalists.

“Those who have done wrong, will soon know how ( bad) come-back they will have (at the doomsday)” Al-Quran.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

[Casey]

The untold reality of Kandahar Operation (Part 1)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The untold reality of Kandahar Operation (Part 1)

As all the readers of Alemarah website might know that a major enemy operation is taking place in Kandahar province which has been ongoing since the last one and a half month. Lately the enemy, through its biased media, claims to have ridded the surrounding districts of Mujahideen presence and also claims to have gained substantial ground against Mujahideen in the areas. Alemarah website has recently had the opportunity to interview the district commander of Dand district, Mullah Abdullah Mubarak and ask him questions regarding the untold reality of the situation.



Alemarah: Firstly could you tell us about the ongoing enemy operations in Dand district and why did they come about?

Mullah Abdullah Mubarak: Dand district is located at a very close proximity to Kandahar city and it has a large number of Mujahideen operating inside so the enemy became frightened that it might, just like Dand, lose the entire city to Mujahideen and hence started their preparatory operation firstly in this district in the month of Ramadan. The enemy soldiers entered Mahlajat, Chalghor, Nakhoni, Khanjakak, Zila Khan and Salawat area by helicopters and in huge numbers. Mujahideen, due to a tactical maneuver, did not want to engage them in normal battle but decided to use guerilla warfare in order to cause them maximum damage. We decided to mine all the main roads and when the enemy could not make any inroads, they decided to bulldoze local’s farms and fields so to gain at least some ground but that attempt also proved futile as they suffered massive casualties due to Mujahideen also mining those ways, ambushes and missile attacks. To put it bluntly, a day hasn’t passed so far that at least 4 to 10 blasts do not detonate on their patrols. Due to their immense suffering, the enemy decided to bomb the area randomly using cruise and other missiles from which civilians were killed, their houses and fields wrecked and many were forced to flee the district. After this criminal act, the enemy turned the local’s houses into their military barracks. So far the enemy has abandoned most of those barracks and in the areas which they do exist, they have neither come out nor can they due to heavily mined areas and Mujahideen waiting in ambushes. But even these bases are located in such places that providing of logistics will be a big problem in the future.

Alemarah: It is said that the civilians are the only ones who have been affected by this operation. Could you elaborate on this?

Mullah Abdullah Mubarak: Yes, to sum up the genocidal behavior of the enemy in one sentence, it would be that this kind of crime against civilians has not been done in the entire history. I swear by Allah that so far only 5 of our Mujahideen have been Martyred, 3 have been injured and none have been captured but the prison of Kandahar has been filled by civilians. I would like to summarize the crimes against civilians of Dand by giving a few examples:

1. When the enemy came to Mahlajat in the morning, the blocked all the main roads and blind folded all those who came their way. Nearly all the locals of Dand have shops in the city where they sell fruits and vegetables so throughout the day the barbarians handcuffed and imprisoned around 300 civilians by the name of Taliban.

2. A few days earlier, the American invaders besieged Ghra and Mahi Village located in Zila Khan area of Dand district. Most of the people had emigrated from these villages except 97 people which were village elders and children who had come to collect some o their belongings but even those were not spared as they were stripped naked, blind folded and then imprisoned. They were released 12 days after enduring many hardships.

3. All their new barracks are built inside civilian houses and on their lands. They have bulldozed local’s lands, fields, farms and houses as they try to make inroads against Mujahideen. Some 500 homes and shops have been bulldozed due to this process in Nakhoni area alone. Similar crime has been carried out in Khanjakak, Chalghor and all the other areas. They recently blew up locals raisin houses in Chalghor. Nearly all incidents involve the demolition of homes with the owners belonging inside them.

Alemarah: The enemy says that they have killed and captured many Mujahideen, their leaders and many of their bases have been destroyed. How much of this is true?

Mullah Abdullah Mubarak: The American invaders decided that they would make check posts in very close proximity to the next one by destroying the homes and fields of civilians and that would rid Mujahideen from the area but did not realize that Mujahideen were going to use guerilla tactics. Now the enemy has barracks in various areas but don’t have control 50 meters beyond their posts and thus cannot come out. As for our casualties, only 5 of our Mujahideen have been Martyred and 3 wounded and none of our leaders have been either killed or captured.



Alemarah: How has this operation affected the Mujahideen and what do you say about the claims of Ahmad Wali Karzai that Mujahideen bases have been destroyed throughout Dand and Kandahar?

Mullah Abdullah Mubarak: I don’t know how Ahmad Wali can make such claims when in fact he cannot even peacefully sleep in his own house due to constant Mujahideen attacks on it. If he was really honest in his claims then he should just once, walk freely in Kandahar city let alone Dand and Panjwaee districts. All these claims are false. As for the number of our groups and bases, they have not decreased compared to spring and summer time. Due to the enemy operation we decreased the number of Mujahideen but now that the enemy has become tired and lost morale, those Mujahideen are coming back to carry out operations because their enemy numbers have become vast and much easier to target.

I want to congratulate the Afghan nation in particular for this victory of Mujahideen because we have not suffered any serious damage and the enemy has lost because they cannot sustain this large force for long especially that their newly built bases and barracks are becoming harder and harder to supply with logistics.

(to be continued)

[Casey]

The Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan:
The Untold Reality Of Kandahar Operation (Part 2)
Zul Qadah 21, 1431 A.H, Saturday, October 30, 2010

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Zhiri district is located to the south of Kandahar-Herat main highway and has been a solid base and under the control of Islamic Emirate Mujahideen for the past 9 years. Previously the invaders only had outposts on the main highway but due to the recent operations have expanded those to Pashmool and Sanzari areas. For recent information on the situation in the district, Alemarah interviewed the Military commander for this district, Mullah Ateequllah Agha.

Alemarah: Can you please give us information about the recent enemy operation and on the situation in the district?

Mullah Ateequllah Agha: As you might already know that Zhiri is known as the most hostile district for the enemy for the past 9 years and especially Sang-e-Sar and Pashmool areas where the enemy has not been able to take over and has proved very deadly for its forces. The southern parts of the districts have been completely under our control which the enemy has never even attempted to enter.

The enemy was real frustrated due to the constant attacks by Mujahideen on the main highway which immensely disrupted the movement of their military and logistical convoys and therefore started the huge push towards Sang-e-Sar, Pashmool and Sanzari areas by bringing hundreds of tanks, foot soldiers bombing the areas by Jets, cruise missiles etc. Due to their cruel and barbaric blind bombings, the residents of Pashmool and Sanzari have fled during a time when they were supposed to collect their harvests. Mujahideen countered their strategy by adopting guerilla warfare from which the enemy has suffered more damage than at any other time. You might have heard through the media of the tanks being blown up every day in Pashmool and Sanzari areas and the retaliatory ambushes and attacks against their foot patrols. Similarly the invaders arrested civilians after forcing their way into their homes at night.

So due to our resistance, the enemy has not gained any ground in some parts and in others where they have gains some ground, it has come after much suffering and deadly losses. Overall the enemy’s force is winded up, they have only added 2 outposts each in Pashmool and Sanzari areas and the Mujahideen numbers which were decreased for the initial enemy push have returned back to their normal levels.

Alemarah: How much new ground has the enemy gained from this operation?

Mullah Ateequllah Agha: The enemy has not gained an inch of territory in Sang-e-Sar, which is only 100 meters away from the main highway. They have gained some ground in Sanzari but after intense bombing and making headway by demolishing people’s homes, fields and other property. They also made ground towards the south of Pashmool up to Rod area but in all areas the advance has been short term because they have all returned to the 4 new outposts made in civilians homes and all their military equipment has also been vacated from the rest of the regions.

Alemarah: It is said that the enemy has severely bombed the areas bringing huge destruction to the civilians?

Mullah Ateequllah Agha: Like in the rest of Kandahar province, Zhiri has also experienced enormous destruction to civilian property from the barbaric enemy. Although the exact facts and figures have not been compiled but I will summarize some of the damage done that we have witnessed in a few points.

1. Nearly 80% of civilians have become homeless due to the ruthless bombings from cruise missiles, canon rounds and other types of bombs dropped in all of Zhiri from Kandahar airfield. The civilians have also suffered deaths and nearly all of the people’s homes and other property have been completely destroyed.

2. Hundreds of homes have been utterly demolished in the area between the main highway and Wyala of Sang-e-Sar as the enemy claims that their convoys and bases are always attacked from this area.

3. The barbaric enemy has filled streams with dirt, demolished homes and blown apart all the greenery in Pashmool, Sanzari, Syachowi and also the other areas to make new roads due to the other roads being completely mined.

4. In all these areas, the enemy has destroyed homes with all its belongings inside. The homes were either already abandoned and if they weren’t, they would force its owners to leave by bulldozing the property’s walls.

5. The enemy has dropped types of bombs which have created massive craters and which have also burnt people’s fields and plants so to make an alternative way to enter due to fear of mines being placed on the main roads.

6. In this process, the enemy has Martyred, wounded and imprisoned countless civilians but we don’t have their exact figures.

Alemarah: The enemy claims to have caused Mujahideen many casualties, killed their leaders and also broken their hold on the district?

Mullah Ateequllah Agha: So far 10 Mujahideen have been Martyred which includes a group’s leader and he was not Martyred in Zhiri but rather in Reag district by a night raid. In contrast, the enemy has suffered immense casualties as you might also have heard from the media.

Alemarah: How do you see the result of the current situation and the operations result?

Mullah Ateequllah Agha: The current situation does not differ a lot from the situation before the operation began. Our groups in Pashmool and Sanzari have become active like before and like before, the enemy is always attacked as they come out of their newly built outposts in these areas and also the ones built on the main highway. The only result coming out of the operation is the death and destruction caused to the civilians which deplorably, the foreign and domestic media have been silent about.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

[NYer]

Beverly "JihadUnspun" Giesbrecht has died while a guest of the Taliban. (http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/204721.php)

[Hound]

Nobody ponied up the $375K?

[Casey]

Beverly "JihadUnspun" Giesbrecht has died.

Canadian Foreign Affairs believes she is still alive.

Canadian woman abducted by Taliban has died: Report
By ALTHIA RAJ, Parliamentary Bureau

OTTAWA — A Canadian woman who was abducted by the Taliban has died, according to a report in the Indian Express.

The news site cites unnamed sources saying Beverly Giesbrecht, 56, who changed her name to Khadija Abdul Qahaar after converting to Islam, has died after a prolonged illness.

Giesbrecht was captured in Pakistan while travelling with her translator and driver in November 2008.

After both men were released, her translator Salman Khan said Giesbrecht was suffering from hepatitis and was mentally prepared for her death, the Indian Express reported.

Giesbrecht, a West Vancouver resident, converted to Islam after 9-11 and established the pro-Jihadist website, jihadunspun.com.

She refashioned herself as a journalist and sought to arrange interviews with top ranking Taliban officials.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs department suggested Wednesday they believe Giesbrecht is still alive.

“We are aware of recent media reports,” said Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Lisa Monette.

“We will not comment or release any information which may compromise ongoing efforts and endanger the safety of the individual involved. We continue to pursue all appropriate channels in seeking information with regard to Ms. Giesbrecht,” Monette said.

althia.raj@sunmedia.ca
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2010/11/03/15947506.html

[Casey]

http://worldanalysis.net/uploads/tal.jpg

Statement of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban) on the martyrdom of Sheikh Osama bin Laden

-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------

(From the believers are men true to their covenant with God, some have died and some of them still waiting) the parties are 23

Hearts are locked as far as God and serving the patient received the news of the martyrdom of Sheikh Abu Abdullah Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden, may God have mercy on him in a surprise attack of the U.S. aggressor forces. To God and to Him we return.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to extend condolences at this sad thing is great for the whole Islamic Ummah, and to the family of the martyr, and his followers, and to all Mujahideen, ask Allah to accept from the martyr Sheikh sacrifices, and that will save the Islamic nation from the tragic situation of the current pool of jihad, and martyrdom him.

The Martyr - Almighty God's mercy - the protectors of the Afghan Islamic Jihad against the Soviet Union the aggressor, and participated in all sincerity and courage in the struggle with the Afghans came out to the Soviet forces invading Afghanistan. And has been submitted in jihad for the sake of the great sacrifices of God are Sevikr the history of the Nation of Islam Always.

Moreover, the martyr Sheikh - Almighty God's mercy - it was one of the strongest advocates on the issue of Muslims kiss the first issue of the maximum and occupied Palestine, Islamic, and it was the greatest Mujahid indefatigable in their struggle against the Zionist crusader Alaatdaat in the Muslim world as a whole.

Was - may God have mercy on him - the Muslims involved in the tragedies and misfortunes in all parts of the world, and he was defending Muslims and the Mujahideen and vulnerable migrants. And he never stops to sacrifice for the freedom of the Islamic nation, and supporting it, and happiness.

The life of the sufferer Mujahid of Islam was brimming with fatigue, and trouble, and the sacrifices, and the history of Islam will retain his memory alive for future generations.

Since the path of jihad and the defense of Islam is the path of sacrifice, and sacrifice, and martyrdom, the martyr Osama - may God have mercy on him - like Mujahid last he wishes the certificate in this way, Here is today won his desire of all masculinity and jealousy for Islam, we ask God Almighty to accept it and give him the highest paradise.

The کan Alomrیکیon occupiers and their allies think that the ranks of the Mujahideen and their morale hostilities in Afghanistan and other occupied country would weaken the killing of Sheikh Osama bin Laden, God's mercy be upon him, this shows the naivety and lack Tvکیr Alomrیکییn Idraکhm of the meanings of jihad and martyrdom.

Artur Jihad because the tree, and grew up, and always resulted from the blood of the martyrs Zکیp. And after the martyrdom of Shahid each make a hundred others to the fields of sacrifice and redemption.

You know that America Aharکp jihadist now in Afghanistan grew from the center of the Afghan people, and reflects the feelings and hopes of this noble people. Oکl blow from the occupiers in this country generate a stronger response from the strike, and there is solidarity from the people of the Mujahideen.

To this people insured Oکan surrendering to the power of the enemy and Astکbarh not handed over to the demonic force Alasکrip of America in ten years ago. And Lکn experience and reality have proven that the results of the realization of the power in this country Tکon Maکosp, and that such Aharکp People's Movement, such as centrifugal, which return as often signed by the pressure Oکther, کan pay Alirjai stronger.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan believes that the martyrdom of Sheikh Osama, God rest his soul in this delicate phase of jihad blown new life in the jihad against the occupiers, and aggravate wave of Jihad and Oکther Oکther.

It will prove next to friend and foe together - in sha Allah, the Almighty - the truth of what we are saying.


Shura leadership of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan





بيان امارة أفغانستان الاسلامية (طالبان) بشأن استشهاد الشيخ أسامة بن لادن


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


(مِنَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ رِجَالٌ صَدَقُوا مَا عَاهَدُوا اللَّهَ عَلَيْهِ فَمِنْهُم مَّن قَضَى نَحْبَهُ وَمِنْهُم مَّن يَنتَظِرُ وَمَا بَدَّلُوا تَبْدِيلاً)الأحزاب23


بقلوب مؤمنة بقدر الله وصابرة على قضائه تلقينا نبأ استشهاد الشيخ أبو عبد الله أسامة بن محمد بن لادن رحمه الله في هجوم مباغت للقوات الأمريكية المعتدية . إنّا لله و إنّا إليه راجعون.


إنّ إمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية تقدّم مواساتها في هذه المصيبة العظيمة للأمة الإسلامية جمعاء، و لأسرة الشهيد، ولأتباعه، و لجميع المجاهدين، و تسأل الله تعالى أن يتقبل من الشيخ الشهيد تضحيّاته، و أن ينجّي الأمة الإسلامية من الوضع المأساوي الراهن ببركة جهاده ، و استشهاده في سبيله.


إن الشهيد - رحمه الله تعالى- كان من حماة جهاد الأفغان الإسلامي ضد الإتحاد السوفيتي المعتدي، و اشترك بكل إخلاص و شجاعة في الجهاد مع الأفغان إلى أن خرجت القوّات السوفيتية الغازية من أفغانستان. و قد قدّم في الجهاد في سبيل الله من التضحيات العظيمة ما سيفتخر بها تاريخ أمة الإسلام دوماً.

وعلاوة على هذا فإنّ الشيخ الشهيد- رحمه الله تعالى- كان من أقوى المدافعين عن قضية قبلة المسلمين الأولى،قضية الأقصى و فلسطين المحتلة الإسلامية، كما أنّه كان أعظم مجاهد لا يعرف الكلل في كفاحه ضدّ الاعتداآت الصهيو الصليبية في العالم الإسلامي أجمع.

كان - رحمه الله - يشارك المسلمين في مآسيهم و مصائبهم في كل أرجاء العالم، و كان يدافع عن المسلمين المستضعفين والمجاهدين والمهاجرين. و كان لا يتوقّف أبدا عن التضحية في سبيل حرّيّة الأمة الإسلامية، و نصرتها، وإسعادها.

إنّ حياة هذا المجاهد المتألم للإسلام كانت حافلة بالمشاقّ، و المتاعب، و التضحيات، و سيحتفظ تاريخ الإسلام ذكراه حيّة للأجيال القادمة.

وبما أنّ طريق الجهاد والدفاع عن الإسلام هو طريق التضحيّات، و الفداء، و الإستشهاد، والشهيد أسامة- رحمه الله- كأيّ مجاهد آخر كان يتمنى الشهادة في هذا السبيل، فها هو اليوم نال أمنيّته بكلّ رجولة و غيرة على الإسلام، نسأل الله تعالى أن يتقبله ويرزقه الفردوس الأعلى.

إن کان الأمریکیون المحتلّون و حلفاؤهم یظنون أن صفوف المجاهدین و معنویاتهم القتالیة في أفغانستان وغیرها من البلاد المحتلّة ستضعف بمقتل الشیخ أسامة بن لادن رحمة الله علیه، فإن هذا یدلّ علی سذاجة تفکیر الأمریکیین وعدم إدراکهم لمعاني الجهاد و الاستشهاد.

لأن شجرة الجهاد ارتوت، و ترعرت، و أثمرت دوماً من دماء الشهداء الزکیة. و بعد استشهاد کلّ شهید یتقدّم مئة آخرون إلی میادین التضحیة والفداء .

ولتعلم أمريكا أن الحرکة الجهادیة الموجودة الآن في أفغانستان نشأت من وسط الشعب الأفغاني، وهي تعبّر عن مشاعر وآمال هذا الشعب الأبيّ. وکل ضربة من المحتلّین في هذا البلد تُوَلّد ردّ فعل أقوی من الضربة، وتوجِد تضامناً من الشعب للمجاهدین .

ولوکان هذا الشعب المؤمن یستسلم لقوة العدوّ واستکباره لا ستسلم للقوّة العسکرية الشیطانیة الأمریکیة خلال عشر سنوات ماضیة. ولکن التجارب والواقع أثبتا أن نتائج إعمال القوّة في هذا البلد تکون معکوسة، و أن مَثَل هذه الحرکة الشعبیة مِثل حرکة نابذ الإرجاع الذي کلّما وقع علیه الضغط أکثر، کان دفعه الإرجاعي أقوی.

إن إمارة أفغانستان الإسلامیة تعتقد أن استشهاد الشیخ أسامة رحمة الله عليه في هذه المرحلة الحسّاسة من الجهاد سینفخ روحاً جدیدة في الجهاد ضدّ المحتلّین، وسیُهّیج الموجات الجهادیة أکثر وأکثر.

وسیثبت الزمن القادم للصدیق والعدوّ معاً- إن شاء الله تعالی – صدق ما نقوله.

الشورى القيادي لإمارة أفغانستان الإسلامية

[Casey]

Statement of the Islamic Emirate on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

Each year, the 9/11 reminds the Afghans of an event in which they had no role whatsoever, but, using this as a pretext and a clout, the American colonialism shed blood of tens of thousands of miserable and innocent Afghans. Still the atrocity has been continuing. Then it happened in a time that the Afghans had freshly floundered out of the vortex of a two decades-long war and were buoyed up by the newly-emerged vista of an Islamic regime.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, from the outset, has been calling for an impartial investigation into the event but, contrarily, the Americans and their coalition partners, far from positively responding to this rationale demand of the Islamic Emirate, are sending cruise missiles, poisonous and depleted uranium embedded weapons instead.

It will remain a permanent stigma on the face of the Western democracy that America and her Allies martyred tens of thousands of Muslims under the pretext of this ambiguous and murky event. Children, old men, women and even infant of a few days are among the victims. They destroyed our villages, orchards, standing plantations and even townships under the unjustified name of war on terror. Even now, the Americans and their Allies kill innocent Afghans through blind bombardments and night raids. They have been keeping thousands of Afghans in detention at Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar prisons and at Shindand, Nangarhar, Mazar-i-sharif, Khust and other bases where they are brutally tortured. Tens of best sons of this land have breathed their last under torture.

All these anti-human crimes are being perpetrated by those who claim being pioneers and leaders of democracy and advocates of human rights in the world. But notwithstanding their arrogance and brutalities, this also should be borne in mind that the Afghans as a proud honor-loving and principle-abiding people, have dealt such a jaw-breaking blow at the American tyrants that it was absolutely beyond their calculations and predictions. They are now biting their fingers of grief and worry.

The Afghans are armed with the weapon of belief and have infatuation with protecting their honor and dignity. Such weapon is neither available in the arsenal of America nor in the warehouse of her Allies. Likewise, the enemy has no deterrent to confront this weapon.

We believe the weapon of belief will ultimately overcome over that of the material prowess, if God willing. Furthermore, we urge all concerned circles of the world to press on the war-mongering American colonialist rulers to desist from gobbling down our land and natural resources under the so-called unjustified name of terrorism, nor they should shed the pure blood of the Afghans any more in order to obtain their colonialist goals. Otherwise, the Afghans have an endless stamina for a long war and, perceivably through a country-wise uprising, will send the Americans to the dustbin of the history like they did send other empires of the past to such a destination. (Inshallah)

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan