Posted on 07/16/2007 7:40:40 AM PDT by nmh
DEBKAfile Exclusive: Pakistani forces backed by US special units are closing in on al Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman Zawahiri and possibly also Osama bin Laden
Our counter-terror sources report exclusively that a frantic effort by al Qaeda and Taliban to head off the pursuit set afoot the bloody battle in Islamabad’s Red Mosque, the attempts to shoot down President Pervez Musharraf’s plane and the suicide attacks on Pakistani military convoys, which cost 68 lives Saturday and Sunday, July 14-15.
Until the middle of last week, Zuwahiri sheltered with the local Pashtun tribes in Bannu, a town in the northwest Pakistan tribal federation of North Waziristan. The approach of Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces caused him to switch hiding places and move to Tank or Tang, a town 120 km south of Bannu.
On Saturday, two soldiers were injured by a bomb explosion in that town, having just missed their quarry.
Musharraf meanwhile decided last week to storm the Red Mosque on a tip-off from his own Inter-Service Intelligence that two of Zawahiri’s closest lieutenants, Majid Hassan al-Tawil and Mohammad Othman, were inside.
They were reported to be preparing a mega-attack in Islamabad and other important Pakistani towns to disrupt the combined Pakistani-US operation to capture their master.
At that point, Pakistani intelligence turned up a lead to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden himself.
(Excerpt) Read more at debka.org ...
COULD this be true?
(Had to abbreviate the title due to a character limitation for titles.)
May Debka’s stopped clock be right this time.
DEBKA does not have a good reputation for reliability, so I won’t hold my breath.
Debka’s right about 15% of the time. Just enough to keep you thinking it’s possible.
Interesting that the media played up the three repetitions of one line in Zawahiri’s last message. They were afraid it might be a coded signal for an attack.
Another poster on another thread (don’t have time to search) pointed out that the quotation was from one of the last messages from Mohammed telling his followers that he might not be around long.
I think it was Zawahiri’s good-bye speech...
Fits in with what we are reading here (though Debka is a stopped clock...)
DEBKA is generally unreliable.
But DEBKA has scooped other news sources before. I think they post every rumor they come across, and every now and then one of them is true.
Crossing my fingers they have this RIGHT!
I don’t care if the source that gets us OBL is the Bat Boy in the Weekly World News. ;)
I say we start a thread on what the Dems would say if it’s true.
I’ll go first:
“How do we know that actually OBL...there where so many doubles...”
“It’s about time this just proves Bush is an idiot.”
sadly, you answered the question I knew I had the answer for...
I don’t care either. I just want us to KILL him.
Deader than a doornail.
The article at least sounds plausible given the events in Pakistan. The pressure on Mushariff to clean out the rats nests in the NW Frontier is probably now greater than the pressure to let it be.
It sure would make Moore look sillier ... if that’s possible!
I hope it’s true.
Nothing on the ABC networks or Fox as of this timestamp.
One note. If this were to be true and we scratched both bad guys, the pressure from the Dems to not only leave Iraq, but end the GWOT would be enormous. From an Israeli viewpoint that might not be a bad thing as it may free them from any U.S. constraints on their operations.
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