On Wednesday, a Pakistani Interior Ministry spokesman announced the arrest of Khalid bin al-Atash in Karachi, along with some Afghans and one Pakistani. Asia Times Online has reported on Khalid's movements showing that the one-legged al-Qaeda operations chief was very much back in business. Despite the claims of the Interior Ministry, intelligence sources have confirmed to Asia Times Online that Khalid was in fact arrested near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Balochistan. Khalid was said to be in the process of hiring local men to carry out an attack on Jacobad's Shehbaz airbase, which is used by the US Air Force.
| The Paks said they picked him up in Karachi, recall... |
Khalid was arrested by members of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pakistani law enforcers along with a few of his Afghani guards and a Pakistani Baloch, who was to be involved in the attack on the airport. Khalid was then taken to Karachi, where he was revealed to the press. The reason for this was that the Kabul government had recently made renewed charges of the infiltration of terrorists into Afghanistan from the Balochistan border areas, and the Pakistanis didn't want the arrest to lend credibility to the accusations.
| That's pretty devious. Admitting they grabbed hm there would have told the Americans and the Afghans that they were serious. And it's not like we wouldn't know, if the FBI was in on the arrest... |
Khalid has been connected to the Sheraton hotel bomb blast in Karachi last year in which several French engineers were killed. He had narrowly escaped arrest on several occasions, notably in Karachi and Quetta. He recently entered Afghanistan and made some border towns near Pakistan his base.
| Where he could be close to the remaining Qaeda largewigs... |
In the past few months, a number of people like Khalid have entered Afghanistan, including from Palestine, Lebanon and Kashmir, united in their desire to strike against American targets. The driver of this new international brigade is the Egyptian Jamaat al-Jehad, led by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right hand man. (This group merged with al-Qaeda, but it has an independent following in Egypt). In the context of the war in Iraq, Jamaat's leaders have redirected the energies of militants to concentrate purely on US targets, saying that it is the real enemy. Ayman's whereabouts are unknown, but recent reports have placed him in Yemen and Afghanistan. Wherever he is, though, he is the mastermind behind restructuring the International Islamic Front, given that al-Qaeda has been badly fractured. The emphasis will be on small operations with a nexus of local groups, and its main tool will be suicide attacks. This new face will be unveiled sooner rather later, but it will be identified more by its actions than by its name.
| The writer's discussing the International Islamic Front as though it's a new organization, but it's just another name for al-Qaeda. Binny was referring to it as early as 1990. |
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