Commentary, April 8, 2002

The Daily Star

Discovery of Al-Qaeda fugitives in Pakistani population centers undermines Musharraf’s assurances of sealed Afghan border

Ed Blanche, Special to The Daily star

The capture of Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants, in Pakistan on March 28 was a feather in the cap of the Pakistanis and the Americans ­ but it also underlined the extent to which Al-Qaeda fighters who fled the US campaign in Afghanistan have been able to burrow down into Pakistan’s population centers to regroup far from the Afghan border which had been the focal point of Pakistan’s drive to intercept the Islamic zealots.
Abu Zubaydah, considered to be bin Laden’s operations chief, was among around 30 suspected Al-Qaeda and Taleban members rounded up by Pakistan security authorities, supported by US Federal Bureau of Investigation operatives, in a middle class suburb of the industrial city of Faisalabad in Punjab Province in eastern Pakistan, 350 kilometers from the Afghan border. Another 30 were arrested in Lahore, also in the Punjab. It is the heartland of support for the government and home of the country’s political and cultural elite.
Clearly, the Pakistanis’ efforts to seal the notoriously porous border with Afghanistan, to cut off the fugitives from the North West Frontier Province where they could find sanctuary among the unruly tribes who live there had either failed or been initiated too late. The government had been insisting that few, if any, Al-Qaeda members had been able to slip through their military cordon.
The only reason that the authorities swooped on Faisalabad, Lahore and other centers in the Punjab was because they had discovered the location of the safehouses and hideouts there during the interrogation of seven people ­ Pakistanis, Sudanese, Mauritanians and Ugandans ­ caught in the border area several days earlier. According to police sources in Islamabad, authorities learned that five Al-Qaeda members who had escaped from custody in Pakistan in December were hiding in Faisalabad with some Taleban fugitives. Whether Abu Zubayadah was one of that group is not clear.
Police, backed by masked and armed FBI agents and, according to some accounts, US special forces, raided buildings in the Nishatabad, Samnabad, Sidhupura and Mansoorabad areas of Faisalabad. Twenty-six of those rounded up were Arabs and Afghans. “They had rented houses in Faisalabad and were living with their families,” one source reported.
The fact that they had been able to find such a sanctuary, presumably aided by Islamic activists, in the heart of Pakistan rather than the remote mountain tribal bastions, has led to speculation that bin Laden and his close associates who survived the US attacks in Afghanistan that began in October and have evaded capture since could be still holed up in suburban shelters in Pakistan themselves. It has also undermined President Pervez Musharraf’s assertions that his forces have cut off the escape route for Al-Qaeda and the Taleban.
Abu Zubaydah, a 31-year-old Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia and whose real name is Zein al-Abedin Mohammed Hussein Abu Zubaydah, is by far the most important Al-Qaeda leader captured since Sept. 11. It is not clear whether the Pakistanis knew who he was when he was arrested. He was a master of disguise and traveled around the world with virtual impunity using a variety of false identities, forged passports and other documents.
It seems that he was identified by other prisoners, and then admitted who he was. He was shot three times ­ in the groin, stomach and leg ­ while trying to escape, apparently during an exchange of gunfire during the raids. But US officials say he is recovering.
According to Agence France Presse, Abu Zubaydah was arrested by Pakistani authorities in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 1988, but got out on bail several months later and disappeared. He became a key bin Laden aide in the late 1990s and was given charge of screening recruits, later assigning those selected for special operations to different parts of the world.
Eventually he was one of bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, ranking only after Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, and Mohammed Atef, Al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations. As the coordinator of external Al-Qaeda networks he probably knows the identity and missions of virtually all of bin Laden’s operatives around the world.
US intelligence believes that when Atef was killed in a US air strike in November, Abu Zubaydah took his place. With bin Laden and Zawahiri lying low, he was given operational control and tasked, along with former Taleban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, with reorganizing scattered Al-Qaeda and Taleban forces and planning new attacks on the US and its allies.
US and Jordanian intelligence have linked him to the Millennium plots uncovered in December 1999 along with foiled plots to blow up the US embassies in Paris and Sarajevo in 2001. He was also believed to have been the field commander of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar-es Salaam and Nairobi and has been linked to the Sept. 11 carnage.

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