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| Afghanistan |
| Taliban still getting aid in Pakistan |
| 2006-02-15 |
| Several suspects held in connection with three months of suicide bombings in southern Afghanistan have said the attacks were organized in Pakistan by members of the former Taliban regime who relied on Pakistani bombers, according to Afghan authorities. These officials also said the network had encountered little resistance from Pakistani authorities. Two Afghans and three Pakistanis who had been among 21 people arrested described their roles in interviews that were videotaped by an Afghan interrogator. The tape was shown to a New York Times reporter by an Afghan official, who insisted that he not be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents. The suspects described a chain of operations that began with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling port city of Karachi. The bombers were moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then into Afghanistan, where they were provided with cars and explosives and sent into the streets to find a target. The attacks have killed at least 70 people, mostly civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers. There have been 15 attacks in Kandahar, a tense city that had been the base for the Taliban. A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims. "This is a propaganda campaign of the government," he said, speaking by satellite telephone from an unknown location. "Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times." He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks. "They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers. But Afghan officials said breaking into the network gave them the proof to demand action from Pakistan. "I think there is a factory for these bombers," said an Afghan government official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity and saying he had not been authorized to discuss the matter. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is planning a trip to Pakistan to raise the issue with President Pervez Musharraf. In a televised speech last week, Karzai asked the bombers rhetorically: "If you are the ones blowing yourselves up, why are you making the explosion in front of the police headquarters, where people like you are standing in front getting passports?" He has spoken of the need to tackle the problem at the source. Sentiment against Pakistan has been rising in Afghanistan and a popular refrain is that the Taliban could not function without Pakistan's help. "Most of the attackers are non-Afghans," the governor of Kandahar Province, Asadullah Khaled, said Saturday at a memorial service for 14 victims of the latest bombing. "We have proof, we have prisoners." He added: "We have addresses, we have cassettes." But Karzai, in his speech last week, also suggested that the recruitment of bombers did not end in Pakistan. He cited the arrest of a man from Mali who is a suspect in a planned attack on a northern provincial governor. "Who is sending him?" Karzai said. "I don't think African countries are." Last week, an Iraqi and three Pakistanis from Kashmir were apprehended in Nimruz, a province in the southwest that borders Iran, according to local Afghan officials. Pakistan is not the only country in the region, an American military official in Afghanistan said pointedly. In the videotaped interviews, the three men who said they were Pakistanis, spoke in Urdu and said they were recruited as bombers. Two, who simply described themselves as Akhtar Ali and Sajjad, said they were recruited by a man named Jamal, who was working for the Taliban, and who they said owned a bookstore in Karachi. Sajjad, who seemed to be the youngest of the three, said he was from northwestern Pakistan, but had been staying with his brother in Karachi. According to the interviews, Jamal had shown them video cassettes in which Muslim clerics urged listeners to fight a holy war to earn a sure way to paradise. "I was doing nothing, walking around, playing cricket and football," Sajjad said. "The maulavi sahib," meaning the senior cleric, "talked to me and showed me a cassette, so I got involved. They were talking on the cassettes and telling us to do this and that, telling me to kill Americans." Ali, who is from Karachi and who looked to be in his mid-20s, sighed as he described how he had received training in fighting five years ago, when the Taliban were in power, by one of the militant Pakistani parties, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen. He did not go to Afghanistan at the time, and the militant parties have greatly restricted their activities now because the Pakistani government has cracked down on them, he said. It was the Muslim clerics speaking on the cassettes who persuaded him to go, he said. "I came to Afghanistan to fight jihad, to be a suicide attacker because I heard from the clerics there that if you fight jihad you would go to paradise," he said. "There are cassettes there and they say: 'There, there is jihad against non-Muslims.'" The third man, who gave his name as Abdullah, said he came from Peshawar, Pakistan, but was working in Karachi and was recruited by a co-worker named Iqbal. "Iqbal was talking of fighting against Americans, he was talking of going to fight jihad there," Abdullah said in his interview. "I said I cannot do it. Iqbal persuaded me." Separately, the three were sent to Quetta, they said in the tapes, and put in touch with an Afghan member of the Taliban, identified as Abdul Hadi. Sajjad, who made two attempts at a suicide attack, said he stayed in Quetta each time with a man called Farrouqi. His first attempt was supposed to be in Kabul but was aborted when the man preparing the car with explosives accidentally blew himself up. Before his second trip, he said, a mullah at Farrouqi's house made a video of him saying he was going on a suicide mission. Sajjad and Akhtar Ali were said to have been arrested in Kandahar, with their Afghan facilitator, Nur ul Baqi, before they reached their safe house. Abdullah, who seemed a hard man with a direct gaze, said he traveled into Afghanistan and was given shelter for two days and provided with a car filled with explosives and two gas cylinders. "My other friend told me which button to press," he said. He was caught by police in a car laden with explosives and tried to detonate the vehicle as police stopped him, the interrogator said on the tape. Abdullah denied trying to detonate the explosives and said he had changed his mind about carrying out the suicide mission after failing to catch up with an American convoy on a bumpy road. Wearing glasses, a white prayer cap and thin beard, Hafiz Bismillah was the last man to speak on the tape. He said nervously that he was from outside Kandahar, and had brought the bomber, Imran, to his house. "We knew he was going to do a suicide mission," Bismillah said. "We gave him a place to stay." The police found 80 mines inside large blue plastic barrels at his house, he said. Baqi, the Afghan arrested with two of the Pakistani would-be bombers, said on the tapes that he brought four would-be bombers into the country. "Most of the attackers are Pakistanis - I can tell you 99 percent are Pakistani," he said. He said he had not seen any Arabs coming through. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |