| Submit your comments on this article |
| Afghanistan |
| Mohammad Atef |
| 2001-09-27 |
| Michael Dobbs Washington Post The military commander. Born in Egypt about 1944, Mohammad Atef is a former Zawahiri aide who has worked closely with bin Laden for more than a decade. According to U.S. prosecutors investigating the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Atef sits on al Qaeda's military committee and had "primary responsibility" for supervising the training of new al Qaeda members at camps in Afghanistan. The United States has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. The indictment in the embassy bombings charged that Atef encouraged attacks on U.S. troops in Somalia in October 1993, as a result of which 18 U.S. Rangers were killed while hunting for Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed and trying to apprehend some of his aides. At the time, both Atef and bin Laden were based in neighboring Sudan. According to the indictment, Atef traveled to Somalia several times in 1992 and 1993 to provide "military training and assistance to Somali tribes opposed to the United Nations intervention in Somalia." Evidence presented during the embassy bombings trial also showed that Atef kept in touch by satellite phone with the conspirators preparing to strike the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. He was in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and held meetings with the conspirators in Peshawar, serving as an intermediary between them and bin Laden, according to the indictment. In addition to acting as al Qaeda's military commander, Atef was bin Laden's media adviser, according to Western journalists who have had dealings with him. Peter Bergen, a producer for CNN who met with bin Laden in Afghanistan, said he exchanged faxes and phone calls with Atef after the United States fired cruise missiles at a suspected al Qaeda training camp in August 1998 in retaliation for the embassy bombings. Like his chief, Atef is publicly contemptuous of U.S. leaders and American military power. "They are only human beings whose power has been exaggerated because of their huge media and the control they exert over the world's media," he told an Arab journalist in 1999. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |