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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (42440)	4/22/2002 6:17:04 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Osama in Peshawar, tribal chief claims Daily Times Report PESHAWAR: Osama Bin Laden (OBL) has been hidden by sympathizers in Peshawar since early December, United Press International (UPI) quoted an influential tribal leader as saying. Speaking on condition his name not be used, the man who commands the loyalty of over half a million tribesmen said that his information was that the Osama crossed over into Pakistan on December 9 as the Pakistani army began deploying a brigade of 4,500 troops along a 30-mile-long stretch of mountainous border. He is the same tribal chieftain who told UPI last December that his tribal scouts knew “within one square kilometre” the whereabouts of Osama in the Tora Bora mountain range, even as US-allied Afghan forces with American air support scoured that area for him, and engaged his fighters. Pakistani military officers conceded privately it would have taken almost 100,000 men to hermetically seal the frontier - as the government announced it had done - from the Khyber Pass, the report said. The Pakistani deployment was subsequently increased to 12,500 and then gradually decreased as the Tora Bora battle subsided and the crisis with India threatened to explode into a military confrontation between two nuclear powers. This was the first time the Pakistani army had entered Federally Administered Tribal Areas since independence. Osama, according to the tribal chief, escaped from Tora Bora with about 50 of his fighters through the Tirah Valley - the most inaccessible part of Pakistan’s tribal belt, populated by fiercely independent tribesmen traditionally hostile to Pakistan. A Pakistani battalion negotiated its way into Tirah two days after Osama and his cohorts had made it safely out of the valley. There they split up into smaller groups, according to this same account. Pakistani roadblocks were not set up until December 17 after word got out that Al Qaeda fighters were escaping from Tora Bora into Pakistan by the hundreds. Eventually about 1,000 of them - mostly Arabs and Pakistanis - fled Afghanistan. Pakistani army patrols and police arrested some 400 but the rest disappeared, presumably in Peshawar rather than smaller towns and villages where they would be quickly spotted. Osama, the chieftain said, made it into Peshawar by truck and has been in hiding “with medical attention” ever since. He could not confirm whether Osama’s second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri, a former physician, was with him. The tribal leader said he thought Osama was safe in Peshawar as he was still a hero to the man-in-the-street. Locating the whereabouts of an individual concealed in this capital of the Northwest Frontier Province is like hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. dailytimes.com.pk