| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Yet more details on who was coming to Ayman's dinner |
| 2006-01-19 |
| The bodies of the men have not been recovered, but the two officials said the Pakistani authorities had been able to establish through intelligence sources the names of three of those killed in the strikes, and maybe a fourth. Both of the officials have provided reliable information in the past, but neither would be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. American counterterrorism officials declined to say whether the four Qaeda members were in fact killed in the raid, or whether the men were among those who were the targets of it. But one American official said, "These are the kinds of people we would have expected to have been there." If any or all were indeed killed, it would be a stinging blow to Al Qaeda's operations, said the American officials, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized by their agencies to speak for attribution. They said all four men named by the Pakistani officials were among the top level of Al Qaeda's inner circle of leadership. The Pakistani officials agreed that the deaths would be a strong setback to Al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas, but acknowledged that hundreds of foreign militants might still be at large in the region. Among those Abu Khabab trained was Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's No. 3 operative, who was captured in 2002 in the Pakistani town of Faisalabad, one of the Pakistani officials said. Another Egyptian, known by the alias Abu Ubayda al-Misri, was also believed killed, the Pakistani officials said. He was the chief of insurgent operations in the southern Afghan province of Kunar, which borders Bajaur in Pakistan, the area where the airstrikes occurred, according to one of the Pakistani officials. As chief of operations, Abu Ubayda commanded attacks on American forces in his part of southern Afghanistan, and trained the insurgent groups active in the area. He also served as a liaison for senior Qaeda leaders, and provided logistics and security for the top Qaeda people in the region, the official said. After the fall of the Taliban, Abu Ubayda moved to the Pakistani town of Shakai, in South Waziristan, but left the area when the Pakistani military mounted operations against the foreign militants there in February 2004, the officials said. The third man believed to have been killed was a Moroccan, Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi, who is the son-in-law of Mr. Zawahiri, the officials said. Mr. Maghrebi was in charge of Qaeda propaganda in the region, and may have been responsible for distributing a number of CD's showing the activities of Taliban and Qaeda fighters in southern Afghanistan in recent months. A fourth man, Mustafa Osman, another Egyptian and an associate of Mr. Zawahiri's, may also have been killed, one Pakistani security official said. But he was less certain of his fate. There may have been one or two more foreign militants killed as well, he said. One of the American officials said another senior Qaeda figure, identified as Khalid Habib, might have been at the site of the attack. His name was circulating among Pakistani officials as someone who might also have been killed, though again they were uncertain. Mr. Habib is Al Qaeda's overall operational commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan, an important post, and would be the most significant of those who might have been at the site of the attack, which occurred in the village of Damadola, about 3:15 a.m. last Friday. After an initial investigation into the strike, Pakistani provincial authorities said in a statement on Tuesday that 10 to 12 foreign militants were believed to have been invited to a dinner in the village on the night of the Jan. 13 strike. One of the men who died with his family in the wreckage of his home, Bakhtpur Khan, was named by a Qaeda operative, Faraj al-Libi, as a sympathizer, one of the Pakistani officials said. Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan last summer, told an interrogator that he had met Mr. Zawahiri in Mr. Khan's house in Damadola previously, the official said. It is unlikely that Mr. Zawahiri was in the house at the time of the bombing, because he would have been accompanied by a larger entourage, one of the Pakistani officials said. Villagers, many of whom are sympathetic to Taliban and Qaeda elements, continue to insist there were no foreign militants in the village at the time of the airstrikes. Al Arabiya television reported that Mr. Zawahiri was alive, quoting a member of Al Qaeda, in the days after the strike. A news agency in Afghanistan, Pajhwok Afghan News, has also reported that a Qaeda member telephoned the agency to say that Mr. Zawahiri was safe. The news agency identified the caller as Ahmad Solaiman, a Moroccan who serves as a spokesman for the group. In a dispatch Wednesday, the agency quoted him saying that "Mr. Zawahiri is alive. Reports about his death are false." An American counterterrorism official said the claim was being viewed with skepticism, because Al Qaeda usually chooses more mainstream outlets to issue public statements. A Pakistani security official said soon after the strikes that he was confident that Mr. Zawahiri had survived. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 ...And the best part is that now Zawahiri has to do an al-Zarkawi every night - no more than one night in the same place, can't trust anybody with him, never know if that glint you see in the sky is a far-off airliner or a Predator that has finally come for you. Gee, Ayman...not as much fun when they shoot back, is it? Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2006-01-19 14:30 |
| #1 "One of the men who died with his family in the wreckage of his home, Bakhtpur Khan, was named by a Qaeda operative, Faraj al-Libi, as a sympathizer, one of the Pakistani officials said." With these kinds of hits, it does appear that if Dr. Zawahiri has a mole within his ranks. Assuming that he indeed was NOT vaporized in this latest attack, the good doctor's rest and relaxation time is over. No more comfortable sleep-overs and if you're inclined to have him over for dinner or tea, you might want to rethink the invite. |
| Posted by: The Happy Fliegerabwehrkanonen 2006-01-19 10:11 |