|
Pakistan claims 90 percent success { September 11 2001 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5920881http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5920881
Pakistan Claims '90 Percent' Success in Terror War
Tue Aug 10, 2004 04:19 AM ET
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said "90 percent" of Islamic militants in the country had been captured after a four-week crackdown that uncovered key al Qaeda suspects and plans to strike targets abroad.
In an interview published in Pakistan's "The News" daily on Tuesday, Musharraf said terrorist groups in the country operated on a three-tier system -- mastermind, planner and executor.
In al Qaeda's case, its top leader Osama bin Laden is either in hiding or dead. U.S. officials say he is most likely to be somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.
But key lieutenants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, have been seized.
"We have to kill the mastermind, arrest the planner," Musharraf said. Later in the interview, he added: "We have to eliminate al Qaeda, which is (the) ultimate objective."
He made no reference to bin Laden by name.
Musharraf described a strategy to rid his country of extremism altogether through reforming the education system while continuing to wipe out militants.
"Now everyone, even the Western press, has accepted the effectiveness of our intelligence network, which has marked 90 percent success in achieving the goal of nabbing terrorists," said Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terror.
More than 20 al Qaeda suspects, including foreigners and Pakistanis, have been arrested in the last month in the country's most successful crackdown on the network to date. Mohammed was seized in 2003.
Al Qaeda operatives, some of whom fled to Pakistan from neighboring Afghanistan when the United States went to war with the Taliban, have linked up with local Islamic militant groups to launch and plan attacks inside Pakistan and abroad.
Musharraf banned five militant groups following the September 11, 2001 attacks, but was criticized for allowing them to re-form under different names and their leaders to go free.
The dynamic changed since local groups were found to have been involved in two assassination attempts on Musharraf in December, which officials say were coordinated by al Qaeda.
In his interview, Musharraf mentioned the capture of Atta-ur Rehman, ringleader of a shadowy group called Jundullah suspected of carrying out an attack on Karachi's army chief in June. The commander survived but ten people were killed.
Pakistani authorities say Jundullah members received training in tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan where government forces have fought fierce battles with foreign militants and their local tribal allies in recent months.
Officials say they are hunting four or five key al Qaeda "planners," rather than top leaders like bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. These include an Egyptian known simply as Hamza and a Libyan called Abu Faraj.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a new generation of al Qaeda operatives appears to be filling a vacuum created when leaders were killed or captured.
In July Pakistan caught top al Qaeda figure, Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and computer engineer Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan.
Khan's capture led to American warnings of a possible al Qaeda attack on financial institutions and the arrest of an al Qaeda suspect in Britain believed to have been planning an attack on Heathrow airport.
Earlier this month, another senior al Qaeda operator, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was seized in Dubai and handed over to Pakistani custody.
|
|
