Asia Times has a long, seemingly well-researched article (it's not by Pepe Escobar) on the breakup of al-Qaeda — and, of course, the significance of Karachi.
There are presently three concentrations of the International Islamic Front inside Pakistan - the Uzbek and the Chechen dregs have taken shelter in the NWFP and the FATA; the Arabs of al-Qaeda, and some Pashtuns of the Taliban, have taken refuge in Karachi; and the Pakistanis of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) have taken shelter in Karachi, the POK and the NA. While the LET is mostly based in the POK and the NA, the other four Pakistani components of the International Islamic Front have split themselves into a number of small groups and are operating from sanctuaries in Karachi, as well as the POK [Pak-Occupied Kashmir] and the NA [Gilgit and Baltistan]. This is along the same lines of the Pluchinsky article in WashTimes a few days ago. I wouldn't be surprised to see a high concentration of Chechens and Uzbeks working with Hekmatyar and the Secret Army of Doom. The domestic International Islamic Front thugs are pretty much drawn from the Kashmiri groups, and we'd expect to see them subsumed back into the United Jihad Council with the external organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah left to sink or swim — sink, most places but Indonesia. That leaves the Karachi bunch. Investigations by Sindh police into all the terrorist incidents directed against US and other Western nationals and interests since the beginning of this year on Pakistani territory brought out that all these attacks were carried out by the Pakistani dregs of the International Islamic Front and that the conspiracies were hatched and the planning was done in Karachi, even though in some cases the attacks were carried out in places other than Karachi. That was a process that eventually became as obvious as the nose on your face. Only it's not only the Pak dregs: there's a healthy leavening of Arabs, especially Yemenis, who like to do the blood work...Even though the members of the LJ [Lashkar e-Jhangvi] detained by the Sindh police spoke about the involvement of Yemeni-Balochis in the murder of Pearl, no attempt was made to trace them. The encounter at Karachi on September 11, which led to the death of two terrorists (Mohammad Khalid and Saleh Ibrahim, both reported to be Yemenis) and the capture of one Saudi, one Egyptian and eight Yemenis clearly establishes that the hard core of al-Qaeda has been living in Karachi and operating from there and not from the NWFP or the FATA. There aren't a lot of Pakistanis in that number. In fact, there aren't any...Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also uses the aliases Abdul Majid, Salim Ali, Ashrai Refaat, Nabith Renin, Khalid Abdul Waddod and Fahd Bin Abdullah Bin Khalid. Police in the Philippines have described him as a Kuwaiti-born and US-educated Pakistani. If he is definitively established to be a Pakistani, this would show that September 11 was masterminded by a Pakistani assisting bin Laden. It may be recalled that Sheikh Omar, who has already been convicted in the Pearl murder case and has appealed against it, was reported to have told Karachi police that during a visit to Afghanistan before September 11 he had come to know of the plans for the terrorist strikes in the US and had immediately informed Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present director general of the ISI, who was at that time Corps Commander, Peshawar. That's probably not a fact that Perv and the ISI want to dwell upon. I don't buy the argument that the Paks are Binny's right-hand men. I think they're cheap muscle, and the guys with real influence in al-Qaeda were all Arabs — Khalid Sheikh Mohammad being the exception only because he's probably more Kuwaiti in outlook than Pak.An interesting aspect of the raid in Karachi of September 11 has not received the attention it deserves. The so-called encounter lasted nearly four hours before the terrorists could be arrested. The authorities of the ISI have claimed that this was because the terrorists were heavily armed. Sindh police sources have, however, denied this. According to them, the security forces led by an ISI officer fired about 5,000 rounds as against about 100 fired by the terrorists. The police authorities allege that the ISI officer, who led the raiding group, deliberately kept up heavy firing without any need for it in the hope that this would either kill Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or enable them to escape. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems to have escaped, Binalshib was caught alive. I was hoping that Khalid Mohammad was Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Guess he wasn't. I can share the suspicions of the Sindh coppers, though. 5000 to 100 is a pretty high ratio, even though the Bad Guys (relatively, in this case) were the ones who had the field of fire and could conserve their ammunition. |