[A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Gun battle uproots terror suspects
Firefight during raid on al Qaeda cell in city
The Herald, 12 September 2002

Pakistani police shot dead two suspected al Qaeda members and captured
five others in a ferocious four-hour gunfight yesterday, stepping up
pressure on the remnants of the terrorist movement a year after it made
its mark on the world.

Six officers, including two intelligence agents, were wounded when
police stormed a top-floor flat and its rooftop, where the gunmen held
out against hundreds of troops in the street below and on the roofs of
nearby blocks of flats. Two of the wounded were in critical condition.

Police said one of the dead militants and one of those arrested were
Arabs, but their nationalities were not known. The rest were said to be
Afghans.

The interior ministry in Islamabad confirmed all the gunmen were
foreigners but released no further information. A neighbour said the men
moved into the flat in an upmarket area about three months ago.

Police seized a laptop computer and literature, plus assault rifles,
submachine guns, pistols and hand grenades.

Police retracted an earlier report that a four-year-old girl was killed
in the crossfire.

Karachi, a warren-like city of 12 million, has become a refuge for al
Qaeda and Taliban fighters who fled Afghanistan when US-led coalition
forces chased them into the mountains bordering Pakistan after the
collapse of the Taliban regime.

Authorities have captured 402 al Qaeda activists in Pakistan since the
start of the war on terrorism. Karachi has also been the scene of
several attacks this year attributed to al Qaeda or its supporters.

In January, Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, was kidnapped here.
His body was found in May. British-born Sheikh Omar was sentenced to
death in July for the murder in July, while three other Islamic
militants received life sentences.

A car bomb in May killed 11 French engineers and three others, including
the suicide attacker. Twelve Pakistanis were killed in June when a car
bomb exploded outside the US consulate.

In other developments in the war against terrorism, soldiers from the US
82nd airborne division have begun a search-and-destroy operation in
Afghanistan's Barmal Valley, less than 10 miles from Osama bin Laden's
suspected refuge.

Hundreds of heavily-armed paratroopers have spent two days combing the
9000ft mountain passes which border South Waziristan, the tribal
territory on the Pakistan side of the border, where the last sighting
was reported of the world's most wanted man.

Barmal, a known al Qaeda stronghold, also bestrides the main
infiltration route from Pakistan back into five Afghan provinces.

Intelligence reports said there was evidence that several hundred of the
routed Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who fled into Pakistan in December
were starting to filter back into Afghanistan in small groups for
hit-and-run raids against the Karzai regime in Kabul and US forces.

A spokesman for the US command headquarters at Bagram airbase on the
outskirts of the Afghan capital confirmed that the operation was under
way "to capture or kill al Qaeda members and deny them the ability to
conduct operations in the area".

Several Afghans have been arrested and flown to Bagram for questioning
and one firefight has taken place. No casualties were reported. Several
weapons caches have also been found.

In Washington, meanwhile, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US
joint chiefs of staff, said hunting down Saddam Hussein's mobile Scud
missile launchers would be "job number one" if America attacks Iraq.

Hundreds of US Delta Force commandos and at least one 72-man squadron of
British SAS troopers have been training secretly in Jordan and Oman, and
several teams are believed to have carried out Scud-spotting missions
behind Iraqi lines.

Saddam managed to conceal between nine and 18 of the missiles from UN
weapons inspectors after the 1991 Gulf war. Most of these are now
deployed near H3, the command and control base for Iraq's western air
defence sector, which allied aircraft bombed last Thursday.

The prime worry for Pentagon planners is that the Iraqi dictator would
launch Scuds tipped with germ or nerve-gas warheads against Tel Aviv to
provoke Israel into a retaliation, which would unite most of the Arab
and Muslim world behind Iraq.

However, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that satellite and other
surveillance technology had advanced "by a quantum leap" in the 11 years
since the last Gulf conflict. The time between detecting and tackling a
mobile launcher, known in military parlance as the "kill gap", has
decreased from hours to minutes.