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Zawahri: 9/11 paved way for Arab Spring
Taliban ambushes school van in Pak; 5 kids dead
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War Crimes
ISI ‘helped’ Laden to escape American dragnet in Tora Bora
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Zawahri: 9/11 paved way for Arab Spring
Cairo, September 13 Ayman al-Zawahri and other Al-Qaida figures have issued a number of messages seeking to associate themselves with the Arab uprisings that toppled autocratic leaders in his native Egypt, as well as Tunisia and Libya, and which threaten others. In the messages, they urge Arabs to replace toppled regimes with Islamic rule. The wave of unrest transforming the Middle East, however, was largely the work of young, peaceful protesters seeking democratic freedoms, and political observers say it showed the failure of Al-Qaida’s extremist ideology and how out of touch the terror group is with Arab youth. “By striking the head of the world criminal,” Al-Qaida forced America to press its allies in the Middle East to change their policies, which helped the “Arab volcano” to build up and explode, Al-Zawahri said in the hour-long audio message. Al-Zawahri was Osama bin Laden’s deputy and became head of Al-Qaida in June after bin Laden’s death. Al-Zawahri had a long history of fighting against Hosni Mubarak’s rule in his home nation, leading militants who carried out deadly bombing and shooting attacks in the 1990s. Islamic militants considered the regimes of Mubarak and other US-allied autocrats in the Middle East to be corrupt, godless and too closely aligned with the West. Their attacks were met with a crackdown by Mubarak’s security forces that largely crushed their operations in Egypt. In the hour-long recording, titled “The Dawn of Imminent Victory”, Zawahri expressed hope that the fall of Arab rulers would usher in an era of true Islam and Sharia-based governance. “The blessed rebellious Arab earthquake has turned America’s calculations head over heels,” he said, adding the United States had lost key regional allies in the upheaval. “We ask God that the spring of strength and liberation be the bitter winter of America and a dark tunnel from which it will not emerge except in defeat,” Zawahri said in the audio message played over a still photograph of him brandishing a gun. —
Agencies
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Taliban ambushes school van in Pak; 5 kids dead Islamabad, September 13 The gunmen targeted the van of a private school in Mattani area this afternoon. Five children and the driver were killed instantly, state-run PTV reported. Fifteen others, mostly children, were injured in the brazen attack. The condition of two children and a teacher was serious, officials of the Lady Reading Hospital said. The gunmen struck as the van was taking the children back to their homes. Reports said the attackers fired a rocket at the van of Khyber Model School. Footage on television showed bloodstains on the side of the van while a heap of school bags lay inside the vehicle. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, Mattani has been the scene of a struggle between militants and a local anti-Taliban ‘lashkar’ or militia. — PTI
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War Crimes
Chandani Kirinde in Colombo US Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asian Affairs, Blake’s Jaffna tour came after his talks with President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the main Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance on Monday. His tour coincides with the sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva where there are calls again for a probe of alleged war crimes that took place during the last days of the war against Tamil Tigers which ended in May 2009. He met students and community leaders in addition to government officials to check first hand on the progress of normalisation of civilian life in Jaffna after the end of decades old fighting. (With inputs from PTI)
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ISI ‘helped’ Laden to escape American dragnet in Tora Bora New York, September 13 Former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh told the magazine’ writer Dexter Filkins, a Pulitzer prize winner, that an ISI operative Syed Akbar Sabir had escorted bin Laden from the Pakistani region of Chitral to Peshawar, passing through Kunar Province, in Afghanistan, along the way. “We believed that he was part of the ISI operation to care for bin Laden,” Saleh, who directed the Afghan intelligence service from 2004 to 2010, said. He said the ISI operative had been arrested by Afghan intelligence in 2005 when he narrated the events unfolding in Afghanistan, post 9/11. The article talks about another ISI agent Fida Muhammad, who too had been arrested by Afghan intelligence agents. The article says Muhammad, who described himself as a civilian employee of ISI, said in May that for much of the past decade, he had escorted Haqqani fighters from their sanctuaries in Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they fought against the Americans. Muhammad said his most memorable job came in December, 2001, when he was part of a large ISI operation intended to help jihadi fighters escape from Tora Bora-the mountainous region where bin Laden was trapped for several weeks, until he mysteriously slipped away. Muhammad said that when the American bombing of Tora Bora began, in late November, he and other ISI operatives had gone there, and into other parts of eastern Afghanistan, to evacuate training camps whose occupants included Al-Qaida fighters. Muhammad was part of a four-man team, and there were dozens of such teams. He estimated that the ISI teams evacuated as many as 1,500 militants from Tora Bora and other camps: “Not only Arabs but Pakistanis, Uzbeks, and Chechens. I didn’t see bin Laden. But there were so many Arabs.” The operation had been sanctioned at the highest levels of the ISI. However the ISI has denied Muhammad’s account. The magazine quotes Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer saying that former ISI chief Nadeem Taj was “deeply involved with Pakistani militants, particularly those fighting against India”. “Taj retired from the Pakistani Army in April, just days before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in Pakistan were unsuccessful.” Riedel said, “Taj is the right person at the right time. If the ISI was helping to hide bin Laden, then it would make sense to park him somewhere permanently.”— PTI
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In a message today marking the September 11 anniversary, Al-Qaida’s new leader sought to claim credit for this year’s Arab uprisings, saying the 2001 attacks on the United States paved the way for the “Arab volcano”.
Five Pakistani schoolchildren were today killed and over 15 others injured when unidentified gunmen attacked a school van on the outskirts of Peshawar city in the country’s northwest.
