Posted on 12/03/2005 10:00:30 PM PST by Straight Vermonter
Saudi Arabia's security forces detained 17 suspected al-Qaeda terrorists Saturday in early morning raids that included residential areas of Riyadh, according to the Saudi state news agency. Most of the arrests, those of 13 persons, occurred in the capital and the governorates of Kharij and Mujma. The other four individuals were picked up at undisclosed locations.
No injuries or damage were sustained during the operations during which security forces also seized weapons and ammunition.
Some of the detainees had been proven to have been involved with al-Qaeda while others were suspected of cooperating or sympathizing with the network, said the report.
2004 Saudi Scorecard
2005 Saudi Scorecard
SAMARRA, Iraq -- After keeping their distance for months, Iraqis in this Sunni Arab city suddenly began cooperating with U.S. troops, leading them to insurgents and hidden weapons caches. The reason: anger over the assassination by insurgents of a local tribal chief.
"That's when they decided to make a stand," said Capt. Ryan Wylie of Lincoln, Neb., commander of Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored Regiment. "They definitely had an idea of the terrorists and where they hang out."
U.S. commanders cite other reasons for a lull in violence in this city 60 miles north of Baghdad. They include construction of an 11-mile berm around the city to block gun runners and a greater reliance by the military on covert monitoring positions.
Tribes of Iraq  |
| Click the map for a larger view & legend |
But almost everyone agrees that the biggest reason for the reduction in violence here was the public backlash against the insurgents after the Oct. 11 assassination of Sheik Hikmat Mumtaz al-Bazi, chief of one of the area's seven tribes.
The reason for the killing remains unclear. Some say he was targeted for working with U.S. forces. Others believe he was killed because of a contract dispute over a U.S.-funded project. Most agree that the sheik's American connection cost him his life.
"They killed him to send a message that you can't be working with coalition forces," said Lt. Col. Mark Wald, commander of the 3rd Battalion. "I think they were trying to rein him back in."
Tribalism is deeply rooted in Iraqi society and adds a dimension to the insurgency that outsiders find difficult to understand. Some tribes support the insurgency, while others back the government. In many cases, tribes are divided in their loyalties.
Before al-Bazi's death, U.S. forces in Samarra had struggled to cope with the insurgent threat in this city of 200,000, many of whom strongly opposed the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
Last year, al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, openly operated in Samarra, and the group's black flags fluttered from rooftops until U.S. forces regained control.
U.S. soldiers heard some Samarra residents speak openly of the right of "legitimate resistance" to the American presence.
Others admitted they could not cooperate with the Americans for fear of insurgent reprisals.
Those fears vanished when one of their own leaders was slain. All of a sudden, Iraqis began coming forward with information about insurgent hideouts and weapons caches.
The flood of intelligence was welcomed. Attacks against U.S. forces tapered off after al-Bazi's death, dropping to one or two a day - compared with seven a day in January. The decline prompted a U.S. decision to remove about two-thirds of the American soldiers inside the city and replace them with Iraqi paramilitary commandos.
"It really speaks to the potential this city has when tribesmen get fed up and take action against terrorists," said Lt. Nathan Adams of Savannah, Ga. "It's as simple as one tribe having something happen to them and motivating them to take action."
In western Anbar province, also dominated by Sunni Arabs, the Marine command reported tribal fighting last summer between those who supported dealings with the U.S. military and those opposed.
Last month, American forces in Anbar began raising a scout force, known as the "Desert Protectors," from the ranks of a tribe whose rivals had ties to al-Qaida.
Samarra is still far from peaceful, and some soldiers said the wealth of information revealed how deeply rooted the insurgency was in the city.
One tribe is believed to have knocked out phone service to a rival group's neighborhood to prevent people from phoning tips to the police. A car bombing last Monday destroyed a gas station and killed six people, police said.
And no foreign fighter has been caught by Wylie's company after nearly a year in this city.
In addition, soldiers say, it is difficult to say whether the trend toward greater cooperation will last. Some caution that the surge in tips has recently tapered off. Samarra's population could return to the old habit of looking the other way when insurgents plant roadside bombs or launch mortars from the streets.
"There was definitely a surge at the beginning," Wylie said of the tips. "I don't think it's to the same extent that it had been."
Two foreign terrorists, including a top commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba, were killed in separate encounters with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir since Friday night, official sources said in Sirnagar on Saturday. Lashkar commander Abdul Rehman, a Pakistani terrorist, was killed in an encounter with security forces at Mochua in Chanapora area of Budgam district on the stroke of midnight, the sources said.
Rehman, who was active for the past several years in Kashmir valley, had recently shifted base to Srinagar city after operating from Kupwara and Baramulla districts, they said.
Another foreign terrorist, whose identity was being ascertained, was killed in a gunbattle with security forces at Bommai in Sopore area of Baramulla district on Friday night, the sources added.
According to various reports from credible mujahideen sources, Abu Omar Mohammed bin Abdullah al-Saif (a.k.a. Mohammed bin Abdullah bin Saif al-Jaber)--a top tier Saudi Arabian Al-Qaida commander in Chechnya and personal military advisor to Shamil Basayev--has been killed during a Russian counterterrorism operation in neighboring Dagestan.
Unable to escape after Russian soldiers backed by helicopters surrounded his temporary hideout, Abu Omar allegedly detonated an explosive device he was carrying and collapsed the building on top of himself.
Known as the "Imam of the Chechen mujahideen", Abu Omar was an original founder of the Arab-Afghan mujahideen movement in Chechnya and was named by Russian officials as a suspect in numerous Caucasus-linked terrorist attacks, including the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage massacre.
Bangladesh police said Saturday more than 200 suspects had been rounded up as part of an investigation into a series of deadly bomb blasts by militants seeking the imposition of strict Islamic law.
The announcement came as police said a bomb had been found at a high school in southern Feni town just as classes were to begin. Children attend school on Saturdays in Bangladesh.
Private Bangladesh news agency UNB said it was a "powerful" time-bomb. But police told AFP they could not comment yet on the nature of the bomb or who might have planted it.
"We recovered the bomb from the headmaster's room after he found it planted there," Ruhul Amin Siddiqui, officer in-charge of Feni central police station, told AFP.
Nine insurgents arrested after planting explosives which damaged public utilities in Thailand's southernmost province of Narathiwat last month could face either life imprisonments or death sentences, senior officers said Saturday, if they are found guilty.
Lt. Gen. Kwanchart Klaharn, Commanding General of the Fourth Army Area Command and concurrently chief of the Southern Border Provinces Peace-building Command (SBPPC), and Pol. Maj. Gen. Adul Saengsingkaew, Commissioner of Provincial Police Region 9, announced that the nine men accused of planting bombs in the heart of Narathiwat on November 2 face five serious charges, which could lead to their execution.
They include instigating unrest, illegally possessing explosive weapons, planting explosives with the intention to kill innocent people, meditating to kill other people and damaging public utilities.
The nine men now face either life imprisonments or the death sentences, Pol. Maj. Gen. Adul said.
They include Mr. Aswan Awakaji, Mr. Sahebaha Sahe-asae, Mr. Hakim Bueraheng, Mr. Mahamalan Muso, Mr. Maroha Wa-ngoh, Mr. Ahama Yama, Mr. Asae Masae, Mr. Hasem Duerase and Mr. Abdulroman Paeloh.
Five of the accused have admitted their guilt, while the rest denied the charges, but investigative officers had sufficient evidence, Pol. Maj. Gen. Adulsaid, to bring convictions in all the cases.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra warned parents of southern youths to pay close attention to their children to prevent them from being lured by insurgent masterminds to get involved in the spate of unrest in the deep South.
WANTEDMidhat Mursi al-Sayid 'UmarUp to $5 Million Reward
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He's a mystery in a red beard, with a strange alias and a degree in chemical engineering. In the hands of this alleged al-Qaida operative, it's a specialty that summons visions of poison gas and mass terror.
Al-Qaida is "wedded to the spectacular," notes U.S. counterterrorism analyst Donald Van Duyn, and elusive Egyptian chemist Midhat Mursi was said to be exploring such possibilities when last seen, brewing up deadly compounds and gassing dogs in Afghanistan.
Van Duyn's FBI and other U.S. agencies are interested enough in Mursi to have posted a $5 million reward this year for his capture. Egypt's government reportedly is interested enough to have seized and locked up his two sons in an effort to track down the father.
The U.S. reward poster says the alleged bombmaker, also known as Abu Khabab, literally "Father of the Trotting Horse," may be in Pakistan. But "we don't think there's really a good fix on where he is," Van Duyn said in a Washington interview.
"Nobody knows," said Mohamed Salah, a Cairo expert on Islamic extremists. "He could be in any country, under another ID. Or he could be on the Afghan-Pakistani border, with Zawahri."
Unlike fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Mursi is largely an unknown figure. "Here in Egypt, his name doesn't represent anything for us," said Diaa Rashwan, who follows Islamic militancy for Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
A son of Alexandria's al-Asafirah, a noisy seaside district of rutted streets and crowded housing, Mursi, 52, graduated from Alexandria University in 1975, say the Islamist researchers of London's Islamic Observation Center. It was a period when Muslim militancy flared in this Mediterranean city, as zealots burned liquor stores and other "non-Islamic" targets.
Salah, who writes for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, said it isn't known what Mursi was doing in the 1980s, but he was not among scores of defendants in the terrorism conspiracy trials that followed President Anwar Sadat's 1981 assassination, the young men considered the core of Egyptian militancy.
The London center says Mursi left Egypt in 1987 for Saudi Arabia, and then Afghanistan, where Egyptian militants joined the war against Soviet occupation.
In 1998, Zawahri's group, Islamic Jihad, merged with bin Laden's al-Qaida, bringing what Rashwan says were at least 100 experienced Egyptian militants into al-Qaida ranks. But the director of the Islamic Observation Center questions whether Mursi was among them.
Yasser al-Sirri says the Egyptian chemist did "consult" with bin Laden's group, but "my information is that he is not a member of al-Qaida."
After the U.S. invasion in 2001, computer files uncovered by reporters in Afghanistan showed that by 1999 the man referred to as Abu Khabab, armed with a "startup" budget of $2,000 to $4,000, was working to develop chemical and biological weapons in Afghanistan.
His most notorious work was recorded on videotape, eventually obtained by CNN in 2002, showing dogs being killed in gas experiments. Intelligence sources said a voice heard on the tape was Mursi's, the cable network said.
Experts believe the gas was hydrogen cyanide, used in gas-chamber executions. But NATO chemical weapons specialist Rene Pita says that compound has long been viewed as an unsatisfactory mass-casualty chemical weapon because of its instability and low density.
Journalists in post-invasion Afghanistan found the "Abu Khabab laboratory," part of al-Qaida's Darunta complex 70 miles east of Kabul, to be a rudimentary site lighted by a single bulb among disorderly boxes of test tubes, syringes and vials.
Specialists doubt al-Qaida could produce sufficient amounts of sophisticated chemical weapons, such as nerve agents, without a large-scale, even state-sponsored operation. "Those were very crude labs in Afghanistan," said Washington expert Jonathan Tucker, of the Monterey Institute for International Studies.
Even before discovery of his Afghan operation, Mursi was quietly being hunted as an al-Qaida bombmaker, Salah said. He said the Egyptian was suspected of having helped train suicide bombers who attacked the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors.
Five months after that October 2000 attack, Egyptian authorities arrested Mursi's son Mohamed as he flew into Cairo with a fake Yemeni passport, Cairo's al-Ahram Weekly reported at the time.
"That indicates the family was in Yemen," said Salah. "Abu Khabab must have gone to Yemen. Why Yemen? Because of the USS Cole."
Then, early last year, another son, Hamzah, was deported from Pakistan into Egyptian custody, said London's al-Sirri. Mohamed at least is believed still held, Salah said, as authorities apparently seek to extract information or pressure the father.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry declined to discuss the continuing hunt for the mysterious Abu Khabab, about whom so little is confirmed that of 14 descriptors on the U.S. "Rewards for Justice" poster - from "Height" to "Status" - 10 are followed by "Unknown."
A senior suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban supporter in North Waziristan has surrendered to the government, a senior administration official said on Saturday.
Maulana Ajab Noor, a former resistance commander against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980s, has pledged allegiance to the anti-terror war.
The administration official in Miranshah said that Noor, along with hundreds of supporters, had surrendered to the political administration. “I and my comrades fully support the government’s policies against foreign elements and will remain loyal to the country,” Noor declared during the ceremony at a seminary in Khaisor, 10 kilometres south of Mir Ali, the town where top Al Qaeda commander Hamza Rabia and two other foreign militants were killed on December 1.
Senior administration officials attended the ceremony and praised the former resistance commander’s support to the government.
Noor, 55, assured the government that he will not shelter foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the official said.
Military spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan welcomed Noor’s surrender and hoped that the government will soon prevail in the war against terror in North Waziristan with the support of the local population. “It (Noor’s surrender) signifies that the government is also involving the tribal elders to support the operation against militants,” he said. Noor’s support comes in the wake of the surrender of 34 wanted tribal militants in Miranshah on November 28.
Meanwhile, Sultan said that the identity of the two other foreigners killed in the explosion in Mir Ali on December 1 had not yet been established. “The bodies of the three foreigners are in the security forces’ custody,” he said.
The administration official said that only three men, including Maulana Sadiq Noor, on the government’s list of wanted men were still on the run.
Another ‘surrender’ in Waziristan (34 come in from the cold)
(I certainly have to wonder if there is any connection between the Pakistani government's ability to turn these tribal leaders and the death of Abu Hamza Rabia)
*** ***
First, I think the reason that the operations guys keep getting caught or killed is because the very nature of their job requires them to be in contact with the outside world. If AQ is to be effective they can not simply hide in caves. Osama and Dr Evil Zawahiri can hide and remain almost completely out of touch with the world but this does nothing to further their agenda. That is a good thing.
The operations emir has to stay in touch with the various cells and each time he communicates he increases his chance of getting an unfriendly visit. That is also a good thing.
The success that we have had in eliminating those who are acting as operations emir (see below) shows that we a) have great intel as to the structure of their organization b) have excellent ability to intercept their communications c) have the ability to acquire their physical location and d) have the ability to kill/capture them once a, b and c has been achieved.
Finally, we often hear about these "mud huts" or "mud houses". While in some case they may be just the kind of primitive structures you envision, often they are far more substantial. The attached photo shows a mud-walled village that is typical in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Another point to consider is that the first 3 operations emirs were captured. al-Yemeni and Rabia were both apparently killed by hellfire missiles. It seems to me that the CIA or DIA may consider it no longer neccessary to capture these guys. This may be because our intelligence agencies have so compromised their communications net that we already know their minds. Alternately it may be that they don't consider the new guys important enough to risk sending an A-team to snatch them.
The history of "#3":
Abu Zubaida was captured in March of 2002. KSM suceeded him until he was catured in March of 2003. Abu Faraj al-Libi suceeded him until he was captured in May of 2005. At this point there is some confusion as to whether Haitham al-Yemeni or Abu Hamza Rabia succeeded al-Libi but it matters little since al-Yemeni got his virgins in May of this year and now Rabia is enjoying his virgins as well.
So ends (for now) the long sordid tale of the al-Qaeda "#3".
Ping
Senior administration officials attended the ceremony and praised the former resistance commander’s support to the government. Noor, 55, assured the government that he will not shelter foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the official said.
A lifetime of warring, "suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban supporter", and here he is now with the allies praising him.
The man is either lucky or GOOD. Probably both.
You may remember from the Afghan war in 2002 that changing sides is very common in this region. Diplomacy, threats and bribery can often accomplish a great deal.
BTTT
Man! the pictures of these evil people are seriously UGLY!!!
Look how much real reporting there is to be done all over the world. You have posted these examples.
And the MSM can only cover the IED and suicide bombings and the Democrats' attempts here at home to get ahead of the progress being made in Iraq.
And no foreign fighter has been caught by Wylie's company after nearly a year in this city(Samara).
Great reports..
>>You may remember from the Afghan war in 2002 that changing sides is very common in this region. Diplomacy, threats and bribery can often accomplish a great deal.
Not to mention outright well-applied violence administered with extreme prejudice.
Nothing like watching your "allies" getting blown up, to convince someone to turn around on the path to Jihad.
Bump
bump again
Get lost, punk.
Now that Iran has a known terrorist in charge, I can't say that I am surprised.
Get lost, punk.
Get lost, punk.
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