A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| How Bin Laadin slipped away |
|---|
| remote |
| 08/13/02 at 12:20:02 |
| Source: Newsweek The Afghan foot patrol was so hot on the trail of fleeing Qaeda troops that the pursuers could literally smell blood. Across the high passes of the Tora Bora range they raced, with blankets drawn over their shoulders and their turbans wrapped around their faces against the freezing December wind. They came upon a man’s severed leg, its stump still oozing blood. The owner couldn’t have gotten far. Ahead was a high intermontane valley, and beyond it an even more formidable barrier, the Spin Ghar range—the White Mountains. The fugitives were as good as dead or captured. American B-52s and attack helicopters were plastering the hillsides; some 1,500 pro-Western Afghans had joined the chase, and on the far side of the White Mountains the Pakistanis had ostensibly closed the border. The pursuit team, under the command of the pro-U.S. warlord Hazrat Ali, finally outran its quarry. In a remote valley strewn with discarded blankets and empty ammo clips, Ali’s men fought a three-hour fire fight with 30 or so foreign guerrillas, all of whom had fled from the siege of Tora Bora. The Afghans killed most of the Qaeda fighters that day, Ali says. Then they returned home to proclaim victory. On The Loose But even the boastful Hazrat Ali acknowledges that the dead were only stragglers, and that other Qaeda fighters got away. Some Afghans now claim that Qaeda leaders paid off another (supposedly pro-American) warlord to allow safe passage. Others blame American forces: the B-52s, they say, dropped their 2,000-pound ordnance on the wrong escape route. Still others, including Ali, claim that mysterious black helicopters swept in, flying low over the mountains at night, and scooped up Al Qaeda’s top leaders. (Pentagon sources suggest the choppers were theirs, dropping or plucking up Special Forces.) What is not in dispute is that by mid-December, 1,000 or more Qaeda operatives, including most of the chief planners and almost certainly Osama bin Laden himself, had managed to escape. Efforts to capture them since then had one notable success—the capture of key operative Abu Zubaydah in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad in late March. But most of the top echelon and even rank-and-file fighters are still on the loose. What went wrong? American officials, both civilian and military, prefer to focus on what went right. In only three months, U.S. forces and Afghan proxies managed to rout the Taliban and deprive Al Qaeda of its base, at modest cost in American lives. American officials concede that there was a mass escape from Tora Bora—as well as a broader exodus by various routes into Pakistan and Iran—but insist that Al Qaeda now is crippled and too busy running to do much damage. “Perhaps we could have got them wholesale,” says one senior Defense official. “Now we’re doing it retail. In the end, it doesn’t make much difference. We’re getting them.” But it does make a difference. Some European and Arab intelligence experts believe, in fact, that Al Qaeda has mutated into a form that is no less deadly and even more difficult to combat. “We are confronted with cells that are all over the place, developing in a very horizontal structure without any evident big center of coordination,” a top European counterterrorist investigator told NEWSWEEK. “Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us.” Few Critiques At a time when leaders in Washington are agitating to move on to the next war—to remove Saddam Hussein—it’s perhaps surprising that few if any are critiquing the Afghan campaign. Criticism is deemed to be almost unpatriotic. But the Afghan war is not over, and the primary mission is not accomplished. The fledgling regime of Hamid Karzai has little power beyond the capital, and Karzai himself needs U.S. Special Forces to ensure his safety. Qaeda operatives and their Taliban allies may not coordinate their activities, transfer funds and mount sophisticated operations as easily as they used to, but those activities do continue around the world. Inside Afghanistan, they still plot and sometimes mount hit-and-run raids against U.S. and allied Afghan forces. Last week, in the deadliest violence in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban, Qaeda fighters who apparently escaped from a local jail attacked an Afghan Army post, igniting a three-hour battle that left 16 people dead. In a separate incident, unknown gunmen ambushed an American patrol, shooting one soldier in the chest. Even more worrisome, hundreds if not thousands of Qaeda operatives have fled their Afghan base and dispersed across the map, sometimes with explicit directions to attack Western targets. This is the story, based on interviews with eyewitnesses and participants, of how they got away. Karim had never seen such a sight, according to his father, a 65-year-old Pakistani shepherd named Durkhan. At dusk on Nov. 16, the first day of Ramadan, Karim was in the village of Mulla Bagh, less than a mile from the Afghan border, when he happened to look up the mountain. Through a light snowfall, he noticed a swarm of tiny lights on Zaran peak, descending toward him. When they got closer, he recognized them as flashlights. They were carried by hundreds of heavily armed strangers, who began pouring into the village. Most wore black turbans and carried AK-47 automatic rifles. Some were dressed in military uniforms, others wore shalwar kameez, the traditional long shirts and baggy pants, in multiple layers against the freezing winds. Many of them were barely old enough to grow beards. Altogether, there were roughly 600 fighters. A local guide named Yaqub had led them on a seven-hour trek through the snow from Tora Bora, through the Afghan village of Malawa and across Zaran peak into Pakistan. Most of the men were clearly Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Karim escorted a group of early arrivals down to Sarrakanda, his home village, where Durkhan and other local tribesmen were preparing to break the Ramadan fast with a meager meal of green tea, bread and onions. “We gave them everything,” says Durkhan. “They were our Muslim brothers.” One of the fugitives, a Bahraini named Salahuddin, said it was his first meal in five days. ‘They Were In A Hurry’ Some of the men slept; others merely rested. One group, even more heavily armed than the rest, paused just long enough to catch their breath, Durkhan says. Declining all offers of food, they quickly shouldered their weapons and pushed on. “Some of the men seemed very important,” says Durkhan. “They were in a hurry. And they seemed to know where they were going.” The villagers recognized several senior Taliban officials among the group, including Mulvi Abdul Qabir, Mullah Omar’s deputy; Mulvi Sadar Azam, the governor of Nangahar province, and Mulvi Taj Mir, Nangahar’s intelligence director. But if bin Laden was there, he apparently went unnoticed in the darkness. The fighters kept on. As they made their way through the valley, local men treated them like conquering heroes, offering them food and shelter. Children ran among the marching soldiers. Even the women were allowed to emerge from their mud houses and offer them tea. A stocky, mustached young man tagged along. He uses the alias Sharif Gul. The Arabs told him they were coming from Tora Bora, where U.S. bombers had begun relentlessly pounding the mountains and cave complexes. Curious, Sharif set off across the mountains to see for him-self. He was surprised to find little evidence of bombing on the way. He knew there were two main routes out of the cave complex: one the way he had come, across the White Mountains, and the other leading down to the Afghan border city of Khowst. The Americans were bombing the latter route, he says, but ignoring the former: “The Americans are stupid. They were bombing the wrong place.” Sharif decided to go into business as a guide. Over the next month he made five round trips from Tora Bora across the White Mountains and back, escorting roughly 20 Qaeda at a time into Pakistan. He was one of several guides working with a middleman known as the son of Sherzai, who collected money and extra weapons from the Arabs, whom he delivered to Sharif for the journey. From Tora Bora Sharif led his groups to a camp at Sulaiman Khial, then onto Malawa and finally across the White Mountains and into the Gandab valley. He refuses to say how much money he made. “Thank God I was able to help the Arabs,” is all he will say. “I did my duty for my Muslim brothers.” Sharif says each trip took from seven to 10 hours. He and his groups would set off at nightfall, following old smuggling paths through the mountains. He says he doesn’t remember the men’s faces. It was dark, he says. Most were Saudis, but there were also some Yemenis and Algerians. Almost all were big and physically fit. One of the Saudis said Osama bin Laden and his son Abdullah had left Tora Bora around Dec. 1 “for an unknown place.” Desperate Faces NEWSWEEK retraced the fugitives’ trail east from the White Mountains to the Pakistani tribal areas where they vanished among sympathetic locals. From Sarrakanda it led through the villages of Mukhrani, Sivit and Doggar. The Arabs passed near the small town of Maidan, in the White Mountain foothills, although few locals there admit having seen them. An exception is a pickup-truck driver by the name of Sharbata Khan. He says he saw “lots of Arabs.” The memory of their desperate faces kept him awake at night. They avoided the main roads and stuck to dirt paths used mostly by cattle, goats and shepherds. A local mullah in Gundab nervously fingers his AK-47 as he denies that any Arabs stopped at his religious school. In fact, townspeople say, it was a way station for fleeing Qaeda forces. East of town, the fugitives split up. Half turned south toward Orakzai, while the others kept on into the Khyber Agency. Hundreds of fugitives would follow them over the next few weeks. The U.S. plan for the Tora Bora operation was based on using Afghan troops as “beaters” to drive the Qaeda fugitives into the sights of snipers. It sounded good, but it proved to be impossible. There weren’t enough U.S. troops to cover the possible escape routes, and Pakistani forces had serious problems sealing the border. They had entered the autonomous tribal areas only once before, in 1973, to put down a revolt. It was a bloody, 18-month fight, and Pakistani officers hoped never to repeat it. President Pervez Musharraf would spend two weeks negotiating with tribal chieftains before they finally agreed to the deployment. December was well underway before Musharraf moved two brigades into position along the Parachinar Salient—and then armed gunmen stormed the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13. Responsibility was claimed by a Kashmiri separatist group based in Pakistan and allied with Al Qaeda. India immediately went on a war footing, and Musharraf halted troop deployments to the Afghan border. He had to protect his eastern border instead. Tora Bora fell three days later, on Dec. 16—after the last holdouts bought extra time to slip away by pretending to agree to a surrender plan. By that time hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had escaped into Pakistan, including many senior leaders. Captured And Disarmed The smuggler Sharif Gul finally ran out of luck. Pakistani soldiers caught him trying to enter Afghanistan on Dec. 18 and threw him in jail. The last big group of Arabs from Tora Bora limped into the village of Manghal the next day. This time Pakistani security forces were waiting. Sharif says they were the survivors of a team who had stayed behind to cover the retreat of their Qaeda comrades from Tora Bora. After more than a month of merciless pounding, they were too exhausted, wounded, sick and hungry to put up a fight. They were quickly captured and disarmed, and the next morning they were herded aboard three buses for the trip to Kohat prison, about 100 miles east. Their captors didn’t bother handcuffing them. Nizar Hussain, 24, one of nine armed guards on one of the buses, says the prisoners kept asking for something to eat. “We ignored them,” he says. But as the bus approached the small town of Alizai one of the other guards, a militant Shia who spoke some Arabic, began taunting the prisoners: “Death to Arabs! Soon you will be handcuffed and handed over to the Americans. Then you dirty Arabs will find out what life is really like.” The driver was getting nervous and told the guard to shut up, but he paid no attention. Finally several prisoners shouted “Allahu akbar!”—”God is great!”—and jumped him, setting off a melee aboard the bus. One prisoner grabbed the wheel and veered into a ditch. The two other buses drove on into town, where their prisoners were deposited in the local jail. In the confusion aboard the hijacked bus, roughly 15 Arabs escaped. Ten others were killed, along with six guards. The graves of the 10 have become a local shrine, draped with banners: LONG LIVE AL QAEDA! LONG LIVE TALIBAN! THESE MEN ARE HOLY MARTYRS! A visitor at the site told NEWSWEEK, “I have received the anti-American spirit from visiting the shrine.” Soldiers and police launched a massive manhunt for the escapees, and eventually 10 were recaptured. The biggest mystery remains the whereabouts of bin Laden. “The United States does not know where he is,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress on July 31. “He may be dead. He may be seriously wounded. He may be in Afghanistan; he may be somewhere else. But wherever he is, if he is, you can be certain he is having one dickens of a time operating his apparatus.” Germany’s intelligence chief, August Henning, says he is convinced that bin Laden is “still alive, and is hiding in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is still Al Qaeda’s symbolic figure, but apparently moves around very little, and when he does, he moves in extreme secrecy.” One apparent sign bin Laden is not dead is the relative lack of background chatter picked up by U.S. intelligence officers monitoring radio and other electronic transmissions. Many analysts doubt the Qaeda leader could die without setting off a storm of message traffic among his followers. No Positive Id In mid-December, U.S. intelligence picked up a brief radio message that sounded like bin Laden encouraging his forces at Tora Bora. The message was not caught on tape, and the voice could not be positively identified. Since then the story has taken on a life of its own. In one popular version, the intercepted call was only a recording of bin Laden’s voice, transmitted as a ruse to conceal his escape from Tora Bora. But U.S. officials discount that explanation. NEWSWEEK has interviewed two sources who gave plausible accounts of having seen bin Laden. One is a professional guide and former Taliban official, whose story seems to fit the known facts. He says he led bin Laden and an entourage of 28 people on horseback out of Tora Bora around the time of the supposed radio message. They headed for the caves of Shahikot, another Afghan mountain stronghold, via a twisting route that led into Pakistan and back to Afghanistan. “It was the hardest trip in my whole 23 years of jihad,” says the guide. “We faced such a zigzag and complicated route and often had to get down from our horses.” Traveling at night, often through heavy snow, the group finally reached Shahikot after four or five days. “Osama rarely got down from his horse, he was such an expert rider,” says the guide. (Bin Laden, a devoted horseman, had his own stable in Jalalabad.) The second source, a Taliban soldier named Ali Mohammad, 26, who has no connection to the guide and was interviewed separately, tells of seeing bin Laden at Shahikot. In mid-February, Ali’s unit was ordered to prepare for an American attack. As the fighters took up fighting positions, Ali spotted a tall man walking down the rocky mountainside from Chilam Kass peak, accompanied by 15 armed security men. When he got closer, Ali recognized the tall, lanky man as bin Laden. The Qaeda leader spoke briefly to the guerrillas and shook hands with them. “Be honest with each other and be true and sincere with your commander and keep your morale and spirits high,” Ali recalls his saying. “Take care of the injured and be confident that God will award you on Judgment Day.” Ali says he later fought the Americans for five days at Shahikot before being forced to retreat into Pakistan. He’s now living with his brother in Karachi. There are hundreds of fighters like Ali, lying low outside Afghanistan but still loyal to bin Laden and what he represents. Intelligence agencies around the world are scrambling to keep up with the jihadists. Al Qaeda’s structure has become so diffuse that it’s almost impossible to track. Before, its core was in Afghanistan. “Now the whole world is their field of operations,” says the counterterrorism chief of one Arab intelligence service that works closely with Washington. “The art of predicting an operation has become, if not impossible, very difficult.” Arab analysts are particularly worried about Iran as a key transit hub—and possibly a haven as well. “The most important destination is Iran,” the chief adds. Hundreds of Al Qaeda fugitives have taken that route. Escort To Iran Many of them left from the Taliban capital in Kandahar, traveling west via Herat. When warlord Ismail Khan shut down that route, others found escape routes to Iran farther south. As with the Tora Bora exodus, the flight to Iran required knowledgeable local guides. Mullah Nadar, 30, a Taliban soldier who manned an antiaircraft gun at Kandahar airport, told NEWSWEEK he was summoned by his commander on Dec. 1 to escort a group of Qaeda allies to Iran because he knew the back roads. The commander, named Rahmatullah, drove Nadar to a long-abandoned foreign-aid office in Kandahar, where he met about a dozen Arabs. Nadar says they looked “miserable.” They were afraid of U.S. bombing; the local population was turning against them, and the town was said to be full of U.S. spies. Nadar recalls he was half asleep that night when an Arab walked in carrying a large briefcase. As the man opened the case, Nadar saw that it was full of foreign passports of different colors, rubber stamps, visa stickers and ID photos of men in shirts and ties. The Arab got to work right away, affixing the photos and stickers to dozens of passports. At 1 a.m., Nadar and the Arabs were told to move out. The number of Arabs had grown to about 120; most had been working at a Qaeda camp for elite guards near Mullah Omar’s and bin Laden’s houses in Kandahar. They drove through the night in six 4x4 pickups, with their headlights off and a gap of 100 meters between vehicles. But when they reached the district of Gharmsiar, guards at a Taliban checkpoint told them it was too dangerous to proceed—and commandeered their trucks. The men then found three larger trucks, used by smugglers in the area, to carry them farther on. The following day, when they finally reached the Iranian frontier at the town of Rabat, Nadar says, an Arab named Abu Zubir radioed comrades across the border. It was night again when they finally slipped across. The men carefully buried their weapons on the Afghan side, then followed an Iranian guide in the direction of the town of Zahedan. As he left, Abu Zubir thanked Nadar for his help: “The Taliban government was perfect according to Islamic law. But you made mistakes such as a lack of discipline in the ranks. Every Talib thinks he is a commander,” he said, adding: “Allah is only testing our will with these present miseries.” Key Plotter The threat posed by such escapees is exemplified by the story of three Saudis who were arrested this May in Morocco. According to an account provided by Moroccan officials, the three had trained in Afghanistan before September 11. One of them, Zouhair Hilal Mohamed Tabiti, claimed to have joined bin Laden several times for meals. But as the pressure of the American offensive mounted, Tabiti and many others made their way to Gardez, where they were briefed by a key official in the Qaeda organization: Ahmed el Mullah Bilal, a Yemeni. He told them to go wherever they had previous experience and carry out new operations. But Bilal, identified by the FBI and other intelligence services as a key plotter in the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, tasked Tabiti with a specific assignment, Moroccan officials say. Tabiti and two other Saudis were supposed to lay the groundwork for attacks on American warships in or near the Strait of Gibraltar by reconnoitering and buying Zodiac boats. According to Moroccan court documents, Tabiti had previously served as a Qaeda recruiter in Morocco. He arrived back there on Jan. 13 this year on a connecting flight from Tehran. But the Moroccans didn’t focus their attention on him until they were given a chance to interview their 17 captives at the U.S. prison facility in Guantanamo Bay in February. One of those prisoners, known as Abu Omar, was “a longtime veteran of Afghanistan,” says one Arab official familiar with the case. “He was practically responsible for the close-up security of Osama bin Laden.” And he revealed enough about Tabiti’s identity for the Moroccans to find him and put him under surveillance. Tabiti had set up an e-mail account to communicate with Bilal, according to Moroccan court documents. He and another alleged conspirator were given $5,000 seed money to get things started, the same documents say. But Tabiti had always thought the attack on the ships was too ambitious. He allegedly wanted to change the plan and set off bombs in tourist areas of Marrakech, or on tourist buses. One of his partners who had sworn to be a suicide bomber refused. Tabiti tried to reach Bilal by telephone to sort this out, but failed. He was later arrested as he tried to board a flight to Saudi Arabia in May, and the others were rounded up soon thereafter. What did the U.S. military learn from these and other episodes of terrorists who got away? “The lesson was pretty simple,” says one senior U.S. military officer: “There are limits to which you can rely on the Afghan militia.” The U.S. Central Command chief, Gen. Tommy Franks, has his own carefully couched assessment. “I am satisfied with the way the operation was conducted,” he recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “No, I won’t say that. I am satisfied with the decision process that permitted the Afghans to go to work in the Tora Bora area.” In truth, he had little choice. In early December there were only about 1,300 U.S. troops in country, spread among 17 areas, and hardly a third were acclimated to the altitude. The low ground at Tora Bora is a mile high, and the mountain passes where the Arabs were getting away are more than two miles up. Keeping the U.S. presence as small as possible had been a conscious decision. For one thing, the Pentagon desperately wanted to avoid a replay of the Soviets’ disastrous Afghan experience. For another, the country posed horrendous logistics problems, and each additional U.S. soldier would have added to the strain on an already teetering supply system. Finally, Franks could hardly say no to the warlords who volunteered to go into Tora Bora. After all, it was their war as well as America’s. So far, success in the war on terror is measured largely by what hasn’t happened: no more suicide planes, no bioweapons attacks, no September 11-scale attack. As Rumsfeld and others point out, U.S. and other intelligence agencies have succeeded in harassing Qaeda and foiling at least some of their plots. But patience has always been one of Al Qaeda’s strengths—the patience of people who believe in the everlasting. In death, in fact, the holy warriors gain a respect that few of them could ever have achieved in life. Dozens of Chechens are said to have volunteered to stay behind and fight at Tora Bora when everyone else left. “They were poor, easily recognizable because they looked like Russians, and had nowhere to go,” says Sharif, the people smuggler. “They became martyrs.” A small memorial to them, enclosed by a three-foot-high rock wall, now stands at Tora Bora near the village of Agam. It’s not difficult to find. The spot is marked by pink, green and white flags atop 20-foot poles. Locals say five or six carloads of visitors come to the site every day. At night, according to Reyhan Khopolwar, 31, a doctor in nearby Deh Bala, you can still hear their battle cry, “Allahu akbar,” echoing through the valley. Driving the flesh-and-blood Taliban from power was relatively easy. The global war against Al Qaeda—and the ideology that helped bring the Taliban to power in the first place—will be far longer and far tougher. Editors Note: The Unseen tape that Jihad Unspun obtained in June clearly shows Osama bin Laden escaped Tora Bora and was alive in early March. You can view this tape in its entirety with english subtitles on JUSPLUS, our Premium Content Channel. |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |