Afghan and NATO security forces have recently rounded up several men like Hafiz Daoud Shah, a 21-year-old unemployed Afghan refugee who says he drove across the border to Afghanistan in September in a taxi with three other would-be suicide bombers, according to a New York Times article. Every case, Afghan security officials say, is similar to that of Shah, who repeated his story in a rare jailhouse interview with a reporter in Kabul. The trail of organising, financing and recruiting the bombers who have carried out a rising number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan traces back to Pakistan, they say.
| “Every single bomber or Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in one way or another is linked to Pakistan,” a senior Afghan intelligence official said. |
The arrests of Shah and others like him, Afghan and NATO officials say, show that groups intent on carrying out attacks in Afghanistan continue to operate easily inside Pakistan. Shah said he was one of four would-be suicide bombers who arrived in Kabul from Pakistan on September 30. One of them killed 12 people and wounded 40 at the pedestrian entrance to the Interior Ministry the same day. The attack was the first suicide bomb aimed not at foreign troops but at Afghans, and it terrified Kabul residents.
Shah recounted his own involvement in the presence of two Afghan intelligence officers at a jail run by the National Directorate of Security. The Afghan intelligence officers offered up Shah because, unlike others in custody facing similar charges, his investigation was over. He is now awaiting trial. At first Shah denied that he intended to be a suicide bomber, but by the end of the hour-long conversation, he admitted that he had intended to blow himself up in Kabul, and said he regretted his actions.
| He and his companions had all studied at the same madrassa, Masjid-e-Noor, in Karachi. The madrassa was run, until recently, by Maulavi Abdul Shakoor Khairpuri, who, Shah said, was a member of the banned jihadi group Harkatul Mujahedeen and had sent Shah and three others on the suicide mission. |
Shah himself is one of the 2.5 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and who, officials on both sides of the border agree, frequently cycle through the ranks of the Taliban and other militant Islamic groups. Like Shah, several other would-be bombers arrested recently have also come from Pakistan or were run by commanders based there, Afghan and NATO officials said. In ShahÂ’s case, he and his companions had all studied at the same madrassa, Masjid-e-Noor, in Karachi. The madrassa was run, until recently, by Maulavi Abdul Shakoor Khairpuri, who, Shah said, was a member of the banned jihadi group Harkatul Mujahedeen and had sent Shah and three others on the suicide mission.
The Afghan intelligence official confirmed much of ShahÂ’s story. So did ShahÂ’s father, though he said he did not know where his son had gone after leaving home three weeks earlier. The gaps and discrepancies in the fatherÂ’s and sonÂ’s accounts seemed to indicate that neither was telling the full story. Khairpuri, also contradicted ShahÂ’s account, saying, he had no idea that Shah had gone to Afghanistan and denied sending him on the suicide mission.