-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: November 14, 2006 2:23:59 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Terrorists in Afghanistan Trained by "US Ally in War on
Terror" Pakistan
Pakistan Link Seen in Afghan Suicide Attacks
By CARLOTTA GALL
New York Times, November 13, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/world/asia/14afghan.html?
_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 13 — Afghan and NATO security forces have
recently rounded up several men like Hafiz Daoud Shah, a 21-year-
old unemployed Afghan refugee who says he drove across the border
to Afghanistan in September in a taxi with three other would-be
suicide bombers.
Every case, Afghan security officials say, is similar to that of
Mr. Shah, who repeated his story in a rare jailhouse interview with
a reporter in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The trail of organizing,
financing and recruiting the bombers who have carried out a rising
number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan traces back to Pakistan,
they say.
“Every single bomber or I.E.D. in one way or another is linked to
Pakistan,” a senior Afghan intelligence official said, referring to
improvised explosive devices like roadside bombs. “Their reasons
are to keep Afghanistan destabilized, to make us fail, and to keep
us fragmented.” He would speak on the subject only if not identified.
A senior United States military official based in Afghanistan
agreed for the most part. “The strong belief is that recruiting,
training and provision of technical equipment for I.E.D.’s in the
main takes place outside Afghanistan,” he said. By I.E.D.’s he
meant suicide bombers as well. He, too, did not want his name used
because he knew his remarks were likely to offend Pakistani leaders.
The charge is in fact one of the most contentious that Afghan and
American officials have leveled at the Pakistani leadership, which
frequently denies the infiltration problem and insists that the
roots of the Taliban insurgency lie in Afghanistan.
The dispute continues to divide Afghan and Pakistani leaders, even
as the Bush administration tries to push them toward greater
cooperation in fighting the Taliban, whose ranks have swelled to as
many as 10,000 fighters this year.
A year ago, roadside bombs and suicide attacks were rare
occurrences in Afghanistan. But they have grown more frequent and
more deadly. There have been more than 90 suicide attacks in
Afghanistan this year. In September and October, nearly 100 people
were killed in such attacks.
Afghan security forces say that in the same period, they captured
17 suspected bombers, two of them would-be suicide bombers; NATO
forces say they caught 10 people planning suicide bomb attacks in
recent weeks.
Last week, for the first time, a Pakistani intelligence official
acknowledged that suicide bombers were being trained in Bajaur, a
small Pathan tribal area along the border. In a briefing given only
on condition of anonymity, the official cited the training as one
reason for an airstrike this month on a religious school there that
killed more than 80 people.
The arrests of Mr. Shah and others like him, Afghan and NATO
officials say, show that groups intent on carrying out attacks in
Afghanistan continue to operate easily inside Pakistan.
Mr. Shah said he was one of four would-be suicide bombers who
arrived in Kabul from Pakistan on Sept. 30. One of them killed 12
people and wounded 40 at the pedestrian entrance to the Interior
Ministry the same day.
The attack was the first suicide bomb aimed not at foreign troops
but at Afghans, and it terrified Kabul residents. The dead included
a woman and her child.
By Mr. Shah’s account, it could have been far worse. Mr. Shah said
he and his cohort had planned to blow themselves up in four
separate attacks in the capital. That they failed was due partly to
luck and partly to vigilance by Afghan and NATO security forces.
But their plot represented a clear escalation in the bombers’
ambitions in Afghanistan.
Wearing a black prayer cap and long beard, Mr. Shah recounted his
own involvement in the presence of two Afghan intelligence officers
at a jail run by the National Directorate of Security. The Afghan
intelligence officers offered up Mr. Shah because, unlike others in
custody facing similar charges, his investigation was over. He is
now awaiting trial.
Mr. Shah showed no signs of fear or discomfort in front of his
guards. But after two weeks in detention, he complained of
tiredness and headaches from a longstanding but unspecified mental
ailment, something his father confirmed in a separate interview at
the family home in Karachi, the southern Pakistani port city.
At first Mr. Shah, who was educated through the sixth grade, denied
that he intended to be a suicide bomber, but said he had gone to
Afghanistan only to fight a jihad, or holy war. “I was just
thinking of fighting a jihad against the infidels,” he said. “I was
hearing there was fighting in Afghanistan and seeing it in the
newspapers.”
But by the end of the hourlong conversation, he admitted that he
had intended to blow himself up in Kabul, and said he regretted his
actions. He was vague about the target of his suicide mission. “I
did not know where I was going to do it,” he said.
After he was arrested, Mr. Shah said, he learned that one member of
his group, whom he called Abdullah, succeeded in carrying out a
suicide attack outside the Interior Ministry. “When I was arrested
I heard about it and I thought it must be him,” he said.
“They came here to be martyred,” he said of his three companions,
all Pakistanis, all around the same age, and all also from Karachi.
Mr. Shah himself is one of the 2.5 million Afghans who live as
refugees in Pakistan and who, officials on both sides of the border
agree, frequently cycle through the ranks of the Taliban and other
militant Islamic groups.
The would-be suicide bombers arrested recently, the Afghan
intelligence official said, emerge from two clear strands.
Some are linked to extremist groups that have long been set up and
run by Pakistani intelligence as an arm of foreign policy toward
rival governments in Afghanistan and India. They are technically
illegal and the government now says it has cracked down on them.
Others are allied with Afghan groups like the Taliban and the
renegade militia commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also a longtime
protégé of Pakistani intelligence, who has now allied himself with
the Taliban, Afghan and NATO officials say.
Like Mr. Shah, several other would-be bombers arrested recently
have come from Pakistan or were run by commanders based there, they
said.
After a bombing cell of 12 people was picked up in Kabul recently,
two of the men continued to receive cellphone calls while in
custody, urging them to explode their bombs, the intelligence
official said. The calls came from an Afghan commander called Pir
Farouq, who lives in the Shamshatoo Afghan refugee camp in
Peshawar, a frontier town, and is closely allied with Mr. Hekmatyar.
When Afghan intelligence, at NATO’s behest, passed on the cellphone
number of Pir Farouq to Pakistani intelligence officers, their
informer, a member of the commander’s inner circle, was swiftly
killed, his body cut into eight pieces and dumped in the camp. NATO
officials described the killing to journalists.
Another group of bombers was captured as they were planning attacks
on NATO forces in northern Afghanistan. That cell was also
connected to Mr. Hekmatyar, but organized by another of his
commanders who lives in Quetta, a Pakistani border town, the
intelligence official said.
In Mr. Shah’s case, he and his companions had all studied at the
same religious school, or madrasa, at Masjid-e-Noor, a mosque in
Mansehra Colony, a working-class district in northeastern Karachi.
Mr. Shah said he studied there for four years, earning the title
hafiz, given to one who has memorized the Koran.
The madrasa was run until recently by Maulavi Abdul Shakoor
Khairpuri, who, Mr. Shah said, was a member of a banned jihadi
group, Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen. Mr. Shah said it was the maulavi who
sent them on the suicide mission.
The maulavi had given him a note addressed to a man called only
Umar, who was waiting for them when they arrived in Kabul. Bearded,
aged 28 or 29, Umar was a Taliban member from Kandahar, Mr. Shah said.
The note directed Umar to give the group explosives and stated that
the equivalent of about $1,400 would be given to the families of
each bomber after they finished their mission, Mr. Shah said.
Umar handed them a white rice bag. Inside were four khaki vests,
with three pockets sewn on each side of the chest where the
explosives were placed. “It has wires leading to a remote control
and when you press the button it explodes,” Mr. Shah said.
“The vests were heavy,” he added. “There were a lot of explosives.”
Mr. Shah then started looking for a taxi. Someone, apparently an
intelligence agent, offered to show him but led him instead to the
intelligence office, where he was arrested. The other bombers
slipped away with their vests. So did Umar.
The Afghan intelligence official confirmed much of Mr. Shah’s
story. So did Mr. Shah’s father, Ahmed Shah, interviewed last month
at his home in a run-down tenement on the east side of Karachi,
though he said he did not know where his son had gone after leaving
home three weeks before. The gaps and discrepancies in the father’s
and son’s accounts seemed to indicate that neither was telling the
full story.
When told why his son was in jail in Kabul, the father grew angry,
but showed no surprise. “How can one feel when someone leaves the
house without caring for his children — he has two small children,”
he said, a boy of 4 and a girl of 2.
“We got tired of talking to him; you could not talk to him,” the
father said. “Such a disobedient child, who does not care about
anyone, who does not look after his parents, should go to hell.”
Mr. Shah’s teacher at the local mosque also contradicted Mr. Shah’s
account.
Maulavi Khairpuri, interviewed at his home next to the Noor mosque,
denied being a member of the banned Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, as Mr.
Shah had said. But he did acknowledge being the local secretary of
a pro-Taliban party, Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Islam.
The maulavi said he had no idea that Mr. Shah had gone to
Afghanistan. He denied sending Mr. Shah on the suicide mission. “He
was not brave enough to do that,” he said dismissively.
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