Outwardly, Osama bin Laden’s protectors in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan affect a haughty unconcern. Taliban fighters in Pakistan, interviewed last week, laughed at the spectacle of a disheveled and down-and-out Saddam Hussein getting hoisted out of his hole, utterly abandoned by aides and bodyguards who once pledged to die for him. Taliban fighters hiding in plain sight in Pakistan say this will never be the fate of bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Mullah Mohammed Omar, the ousted Taliban leader who remains their closest political ally. The terror chieftains are well protected by their bodyguards, by the local population and by Afghanistan’s forbidding geography. While Saddam faced a 130,000-strong U.S. Army relentlessly tightening the noose, bin Laden is up against a scant 10,000-man U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. And unlike Saddam’s henchmen, supporters of bin Laden and Omar are "linked by Islam, not by money," these Taliban sources boast. "We have a small, strongly Islamic population, thousands of high mountains and millions of caves to hide in," says a senior Taliban planner and fund-raiser who goes by the nom de guerre Zabihullah. Taliban operatives also say that wherever bin Laden stops these days, he tells his followers to plant land mines and pockets of high explosives around his clandestine bivouac. These booby traps are meant to protect him—but also to make sure that if "the sheik" can’t escape, he is quickly "martyred" and his body destroyed. Bin Laden has told his confidants that he "would welcome death as a martyr," and that he would never allow himself to be captured alive, Zabihullah says.
| Of course, Sammy always used to say that, too. Strutting around with a tin hat or a turban and ordering the cannon fodder to die for The Cause™ is kind of different from approximating the caliber of the shootin' arn in your face... |
Some Taliban and Qaeda fighters say that, far from running, bin Laden will likely capitalize on Saddam’s humiliating arrest—seeing it as a chance to radicalize and Islamicize the anti-U.S resistance in Iraq.
| "Far from running"? What's he been doing for the past couple years? If he's not been decomposing, he's been on the run. |
They say Saddam’s capture has not changed bin Laden’s plans—reported recently in NEWSWEEK—to shift anti-American forces from Afghanistan to Iraq, Turkey and the Mideast. "The arrest of Saddam will have a positive affect on the anti-U.S. jihad and Qaeda operations in Iraq," says Rahman Hotaki, a Taliban official who works with Qaeda fighters in Waziristan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "Many Iraqis hated Saddam, so they didn’t join the fight. Now that he is gone, more Iraqis will join a holy jihad against the U.S."
| And at least an equivalent number will drop out of the fight because the money's not going to be coming in anymore. And probably just as many because they're tired of the whole thing. |
Brave words. But in the assessment of former associates, bin Laden is likely worried. A former mujahed companion of bin Laden’s named Commander Hamat speculates that the Qaeda leader has added an extra "circle" of security around him in the aftermath of Saddam’s capture.
| Just smothering himself in security, isn't he? |
Even Zabihullah says that bin Laden had a close call not long ago. He says the terror chieftain and his protective entourage scurried into the bushes when a U.S. aircraft streaked overhead as they were walking along a mountain trail. The plane did not see them. Another Taliban fighter who calls himself Assadullah Zarafat says that several months ago, U.S. and Afghan forces brushed by Mullah Omar in Uruzgan province without recognizing him. Omar and his security detachment had stopped at a local mosque to say their afternoon prayers. As they were finishing, several pickup trucks and Humvees carrying Afghan and U.S. soldiers pulled up to the mosque and the Afghans went in to pray. Mullah Omar told his men to hide their weapons and not to react. He then led the newcomers in prayer.
Sounds more like a war story to me than anything else ...
Finally, bin Laden may someday, somewhere, make a mistake. An exhausted Saddam was caught eight months after he had to abandon his lavish palaces. Bin Laden, of course, has been roughing it for far longer. Still, life on the lam can wear down the toughest outlaw. A veteran Islamic militant who is known by the nom de guerre Abdullah claimed that last February he was assigned to deliver medicines to an ailing bin Laden in Afghanistan’s thickly forested Kunar province. "He looked weak and frail," said Abdullah. "He moves with a few close aides and guards and never stays at any place for long. To avoid detection he often travels during nights and in bad weather," he said. So who knows? Maybe a really bad cold—and a decision to linger one night too many in the same place to recover—will be enough to do in the man who has yet to answer for the worst attack on American soil. |