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| Afghanistan |
| Al Qaeda Bigs may have been at Shah-i-Kot |
| 2002-03-18 |
This is either a valuable intelligence resource or a bunch of yokels who're spinning yarns and maybe hoping for a few bucks in payoff to get their stories. Since Christian Science Monitor was able to get the story, we assume the people on the ground also have it and that interrogators are chatting up the boys in separate sites to see how well their stories mesh. If the workers and mullah are to be believed, the Al Qaeda base that was attacked but not destroyed by Operation Anaconda included computers, satellite phones, maps of major American cities, and pictures of US bridges... "They gave us food and goat meat, and we were laughing every day. We were having a very good time – it was like a picnic," one of the workers said. Can't imagine they thought the complex was going to stay hidden forever and it didn't seem to be impregnable. So why the pictures of US bridges and the US city maps? Maybe they were playing at being International Criminal Masterminds, but that seems a waste of effort when the time could be better spent on operations planning. That picnic ended hastily when word spread that the US would begin bombing the next day. A few of the some 100 workers helping the Al Qaeda fighters were also "working" with US forces. So they were able to give the mostly Arab and Chechen fighters a day's notice that Operation Anaconda was about to begin. Yep. Sure was nice of them to tip them off. New op lesson: don't employ the locals. If you do, don't let them off site. That information enabled the fighters to send the families traveling with them to a safer place, and spurred the comfortable departure of some of the more senior Al Qaeda figures, who also sent their extraordinarily well-paid workers home. As usual, the Bigs aren't the ones who catch the bullets. The seniors meandered back to Pakland to watch from the sidelines, where their valuable hides would be safe. Several of the men interviewed say that the fighters were extremely deferential to the apparent leader on site, a portly, bespectacled man who was referred to as either the "sheikh" or the "doctor." A local mullah here, who served as a foreman for several of the villagers he helped recruit, says the leader was probably Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who is bin Laden's right-hand man, because his face matches the picture on flyers that were dropped over this area by American planes a while back. Zawahri was reported injured and possibly dead back in December, and a wife and some kids were confirmed killed. Last month there were indications he and Binny were still alive. If there's any credibility to these boys, it could be taken as confirmation. The men also say that they overheard a live address – via satellite phone – to all the Al Qaeda troops by a man they referred to as "al Qaed," or the leader. The workers believe it was bin Laden, but cannot be sure. The phone connection was cut off. Afterward, the fighters seemed buoyed by the pep talk, which would have been given three weeks to one month ago. Could have been Binny, if he's alive, or it could be his successor - there was a report in December that named Zain Al-Abedin Hasan, a 30-year-old Palestinian as the man. Or it could have been someone like Fazlur Rahman or Mir Hamza. If they're really communicating by satphone, somebody's looking really hard for that signal and wants to know its terminus, preferably to within a hundred meters. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |