Bin Laden Hides out in Kashmir
debka.com
5 May: Osama bin Laden, his
deputy, Ayman Zawahiri,
and their top lieutenants
were reportedly sighted last
month at different places
between the Little Pamir
panhandle of northeastern
Afghanistan, the Hunza
region of Pakistani northwest
Jammu and Kashmir, and the
north Pakistani Karakoram
Mountains further to the south – according to
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive intelligence sources.
Despite the fierce campaign waged against him –
notably in the Tora Bora cave complex of Afghanistan
last December – the world’s most wanted terrorist
appears to be alive and kicking. Those sources stress
that bin Laden has in no way changed his appearance.
The wanted terrorist chiefs appear to have established
a new territorial base in these inaccessible regions,
aided by the very Pakistani ISI intelligence officers
whom President Pervez Musharraf purged earlier this
year at US insistence for their pro-Taliban proclivities.
Those ex-officers manned Pakistan’s
Inter-Service-Intelligence’s Afghanistan Desk, which
the United States demanded dismantled, accusing its
staff of frustrating the US-led anti-terror campaign in
Afghanistan and sabotaging every attempt to seal off
the Afghan-Pakistan escape route. Some of the fired
men were re-assigned to army units in remote parts of
Pakistan; 500 were forced into early retirement – and
many hired themselves out to bin Laden.
They have now set up for the al Qaeda chiefs a mobile
operational command center that affords them control
of the terrain and safety from hostile incursion by, say,
US special forces.
Intelligence sources in Kashmir who spoke with
DEBKA-Net-Weekly on condition of anonymity said
these officers used their good connections in Pakistan
and with tribal and village leaders to set up Bin Laden’
s new base in north Kashmir and Little Pamir. It cannot
compare with the formidable system of camps and
facilities al Qaeda commanded in central and western
Afghanistan under the Taliban. On the other hand, the
Saudi-born terror leader now holds sway over a
weighty strategic asset, daunting to fight over or even
access.
Till now, the US war effort in Afghanistan focused on
toppling the Taliban and taking control of the main
towns as well as the routes linking them. Bin Laden
and his command level have consistently eluded
pursuit. Now that he has put down new roots in one of
the most forbidding and rugged areas in the world, our
sources say that to go after bin Laden, the Americans
would need the help of at least four governments of
the countries abutting on his retreat – Russia, China,
Pakistan and India.
Those nations have disparate interests in the area. |
