|
Lashkar in Iraq
Take with a grain of salt.."The US is at our mercy. One leg caught in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq. Allaho-Akbar!" So said Prof.Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, the head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), while addressing a religious congregation earlier this month at Muridke, near Lahore, where it has its headquarters which contain, among other things, a mosque and a guest house constructed in the past with funds given by Osama bin Laden. In the years when bin Laden was not yet a persona non grata with the US, he used to stay in this guest house and pray in this mosque during his visits to Pakistan. After 1994, he stopped coming there. The guest house was thereafter being used to put up jihadi fugitives and trainees from Saudi Arabia and other countries. Many of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 strikes in the US had stayed there on their way to and back from the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. This guest house is one of the places in Pakistan reportedly being readied now for putting up another special guest â you guess who. Saddam Hussein. Yes, the former President of Iraq. The LET, which is a member of bin Ladenâs International Islamic Front (IIF) and which is now acting as the standard bearer of Al Qaeda and the IIF, claims that its martyrsâ squad in Iraq is protecting Saddam and trying to spirit him out of Iraq to Pakistan so that he could be saved from the hands of the American special forces, which are hunting for him. How will they spirit him out of Iraq since it will be almost impossible to do so by sea or air? By overland clandestine routes through Iran, they say. I think the problem with this is that the writer is assuming the Jihadis are telling the truth, but Hafiz Saeed in particular is always coming out with insane rantings, like controlling nuclear weapons, planning on conquering India, and other fantasies It is the same route which is being used by the LET and other members of the IIF to smuggle trained and well-motivated jihadis into Iraq to harass the American troops. One is not certain whether the Iranian authorities are aware of this. It is estimated by knowledgeable sources that at least 80 plus jihad-hardened terrorists from Pakistan, belonging to Al Qaeda and the Pakistani components of the IIF, have already managed to clandestinely move across Iran in ones and twos and join the anti-US jihad in Iraq. This does sound credible though Calls have been made in the Binori madrasa of Karachi and the Akora Khattak madrasa of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) for more Arabic-knowing volunteers to join the jihad in Iraq. The 80 plus contingent, which has already gone, reportedly includes Arabs, Pakistanis and at least four from South-East Asia. This number does not include those from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and other organisations who had travelled by air to Saudi Arabia under the guise of pilgrims during the Haj season and from there moved over to Iraq. No estimate of their number is available. Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-08-15 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=17651 |