Posted on 07/28/2004 3:20:58 AM PDT by Dog
Surrendered militants suspected to Omar's associates Islamabad, July 26. (PTI): Four al Qaeda militants, who surrendered along with their family members at Pakistan's Gujarat town, were suspected to be close associates of Taliban Chief Mullah Omar.
Police yesterday raided a house in Gujarat town after a tip off that some foreigners resided there. The four men of Kenyan, Sudan, South African and Pakistani origin surrendered along with three women and six children. One of the surrendered woman was an Afghan.
The arrested were suspected key Al Qaeda activists and some of the close associates of Mullah Omar, media reports here said today.
Police recovered a huge quantity of explosive material besides large amounts of foreign currency notes including US dollars and Euro bonds worth eight millions in Pakistani currency from the house they were residing in.
Omar, however, made a brief appearance on the radars of US and Afghan intelligence agencies early this month after the capture of his relative and Taliban commander of the Southern Afghanistan, Mullah Sakhi Dad Mujahid, a report in the local daily 'The Nation' said.
Significantly, Omar carried a Pakistani mobile number used in and around Quetta, capital of South West Baluchistan, bordering Afghanistan.
fyi..
Every time you post news like this, please be sure to tag it WWKD (What would Kerry do?)
Where is Gujarat located?
Poke him in the other eye!!
wherever Guja is.
Feed all terrorists to the pigs.
any news on OBL's top assistant - Zaraweinee (sp), the Egyptian doctor who was the planner for AQ? I haven't read anything about him for quite some time.
The recent capture of key relatives and aides to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive leader of the Taliban, is enabling US and Afghan intelligence officials to tighten the net around him and putting pressure on Pakistan to curb Taliban activities on its soil.
On July 6, Afghan soldiers captured Mullah Sakhi Dad Mujahid, the Taliban commander of southern and western Afghanistan, along with a satellite phone, a notebook of expenses and a diary of telephone numbers including that of Mullah Omar, said General Bismillah Khan, chief of staff of the Afghan army.
’’Afghan agents made Mujahid ring Omar’s number, but Omar put the phone down after Mujahid mentioned a code word that meant he had been captured,’’ said General Khan. ’’It was just bad luck.’’
Omar’s number, according to another senior Afghan official, was not from a Thuraya satellite phone, which can be easily monitored by US intelligence, but was a local Pakistani number in or around the town of Quetta, the capital of neighboring Baluchistan province.
Mujahid is now being intensely interrogated at the US base at Bagram near Kabul, but a US military spokesman declined to say what additional information had been gained from him.
General Khan said that the notebook Mujahid carried showed that in the month of June alone, Mujahid had distributed $1.8 million to Taliban fighters and sympathizers for buying weapons and other supplies.
"It shows the large sums of money the Taliban receive from their sponsors, which include al Qaeda," said Khan. "Taliban fighters are being paid large sums to carry out attacks," he added.
Mujahid was held as a Northern Alliance prisoner from 1997 to 2000 during the bitter civil war with the Taliban that ravaged Afghanistan before September 11. At the time, Mujahid was the Taliban’s deputy defense minister. He was released in a prisoner exchange deal in 2000.
Western and Afghan officials have said they have received no concrete information about Osama bin Laden and his top aides, who are believed to be hiding along the mountainous Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.
Meanwhile on July 19, in the southern province of Uruzghan, US and Afghan forces captured Mullah Amanullah, Omar’s brother-in-law. He is also being intensely interrogated at Bagram.
Two days later in the same areas, troops killed three brothers of Mullah Abbas, another top Taliban commander, who is also close to Mullah Omar and whose family also lives in Pakistan.
Pakistani officials vehemently deny that Omar is in Pakistan, but US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage raised the issue with Pakistani officials when he visited Islamabad last week. A July 26 meeting between Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf meant to address the topic was postponed.
In his remarks, Armitage admitted for the first time that the Taliban are using Pakistan as a base. "If these Taliban elements are able to cross into Afghanistan to conduct destabilizing activities, this is clearly not in Afghanistan’s interest, and it’s not in Pakistan’s interest either," Armitage said in Kabul on July 16.
In a recent interview with The Nation, a Pakistani newspaper, Karzai said that "the more we cooperate with our neighbor, brother and friend Pakistan, the more we will succeed and I am glad that Pakistan has begun a series of operations to capture members of al Qaeda from its tribal territories."
’’We are doing the same in Afghanistan. We must continue the fight and it’s good for both countries to resist terrorism and extremism to ensure peace and prosperity.’’
US, British and Afghan officials have said that while Pakistan is cooperating closely with them in hunting down al Qaeda in the country’s North West Frontier Province, it has declined to arrest top Taliban leaders and fighters living in Baluchistan.
The Taliban have been launching between two and four attacks per day in southern Afghanistan with a declared strategy to disrupt the presidential elections scheduled for October 9. On July 23, a remote-controlled bomb detonated in a street in the southern town of Kandahar, injuring four US servicemen. The attack was preceded by a well-laid Taliban ambush in nearby Helmand province that killed 11 Afghan soldiers.
The Taliban are also targeting UN voter registration teams and foreign aid workers in a bid to drive them out of the country before the elections.
However, Karzai said that the major threat to stability is the growing power of warlords and their militias. ’’Militias are a bigger problem than the Taliban,’’ he said.
President Karzai’s July 26 announcement that he would drop Vice President and Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, a powerful Tajik warlord, as his running mate for the October 9 presidential ballot has heightened those concerns still further. In Fahim’s place, Karzai has named Ahmed Zia Masood, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia and brother to the late Taliban resistance hero Ahmed Shah Masood. Masood, like Fahim, is an ethnic Tajik.
Fahim is now expected to back Education Minister Yunos Qanooni, a fellow Tajik who declared his own presidential candidacy in a surprise announcement the same day. Meanwhile, a second warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, has also entered the presidential stakes.
The decision to remove Fahim was preceded by the July 22 dismissal of three corps commanders from their positions for refusing to obey the central government. One of the commanders, powerful militia leader General Ustad Atta Mohammad, has been reappointed as governor of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan, while the remaining two men – Hazrat Ali, commander for eastern Nangarhar, and Khan Mohammed, commander of southern Kandahar – have been named police chiefs for the respective provinces.
As the political wrangling over Karzai’s decision gathers heat, North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeepers have stepped up their patrols in Kabul and US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has appealed for calm among the country’s power brokers and ethnic clans. "I do understand that there are some hurt feelings," Khalilzad told a July 27 news conference in reference to Fahim’s removal from the ballot, "but the interests of the nation must be put above personal feelings."
Editor’s Note: Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistan-based journalist and author of the book "Taliban: Militant Islam and Fundamentalism in Central Asia."
Thanks for posting this. If it weren't for you finding this article, none of us would know what is going on. The media is too busy extolling Kerry, bashing Bush, and carrying the Kobe/Michael/Scott stuff.
They are rounding up his inner circle it sounds like....we are close.
Thanks for posting. I was reading about this yesterday, although this article has more details. Whether or not it ultimately leads to the one-eyed coward, there are more bad guys and lotsa explosives off the streets. That's a very good thing.
They should be thinking rock not concrete.
I knew you would show up.....LOL!
Cool. Keep Omar looking over his shoulder with his one good eye, sooner or later, he'll be blindsided. .
Thanks Dog, I guess that it was very close to get the major target:
http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=4602
Islamabad, July 27 (ANI):
Contrary to reports issued on Monday that the suspected chief of the Al Qaeda operations in Asia had been nabbed, police on Tuesday said it was untrue.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a police officer participating in the operation in the Islamnagar precinct of Pakistan's Gujarat area, told The News that some Al-Qaeda suspects had arrested after a shootout, but they did not include the terrorist outfit's chief.
Other sources said that earlier security agencies had received information that he was hiding somewhere in Gujarat.
"It was strongly believed that the wanted member of Al Qaeda, who carried millions of rupees on his head, was inside the house and it was for this reason the government wanted to arrest the terrorists alive," the sources were quoted as saying.
They, however, added that the real target could not be captured.
Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, the head of National Crisis Management Cell, was in charge of the operation.
Thanks for posting this Dog. I forwarded it on to email list who I know is swept up in campaign coverage and the other pablum the MSM chooses to feed them.
Prairie
We'll get that c sucker and then he'll change his tune the way these conniving scumbags do all the time. Worry our women and children with bombastic threats of impending destruction of the USA (presumably by the use of nukes) and then go all girlie when he's finally snatched. Feed this offal to the pigs once we are through giving him the captured William Wallace treatment. Someone find Billy Barty.
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