Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
agitation if the troops did not stop the hunt for the al-Qaeda men
sheltered by the locals. Heavily armed fugitives would fiercely resist
Pakistani efforts to arrest them and scores were killed in clashes with
the security forces. When cornered they would fight to the death.
bin Laden had around 3,000 Arab fighters with him when the US-led
coalition forces invaded Afghanistan. There were many militants of
other nationalities – Chechens, Uzbeks and East Asians. According to
some estimates, only a few hundred of them were killed by US bombing
or taken prisoner. Among the top leadership, only Mohammed Atef,
the chief of al-Qaeda’s political wing, had been killed; almost the
entire leadership of the group was intact. Where did they go?
Fifteen hundred miles of a porous border with Pakistan was the
major exit point for the fleeing militants. Many of them used Pakistan as
a transit to the Gulf and other Arab countries. In many cases, they were
helped by sympathetic Pakistani security officials and Arab diplomats,
who provided the fugitives with money and transport to get out of the
country. A Saudi-owned vessel was reported to have smuggled 150 al-
Qaeda and Taliban to the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong. 7
Most had stayed in Pakistan. The non-Arab Uzbeks, Chechens
and Sudanese took shelter in the tribal region. It was, however, in
Pakistan’s crowded cities that most al-Qaeda operatives found refuge,
as opposed to the country’s network of fundamentalist Islamic schools
or its isolated tribal villages. With the help of their allies among
Pakistani militant organizations and supporters within the intelligence
agencies, many al-Qaeda leaders moved to big urban centres from
where they could regroup and revive contacts with operatives, within
the country and abroad. Al-Qaeda had mutated into a form that was no
less deadly and even more difficult to combat. Pakistani and American
investigators were confronted with cells that were all over the place,
developing a horizontal structure, without any apparent large centre
of coordination.
Pakistani militant groups provided al-Qaeda with logistical support,
safe houses, false documentation and, occasionally, manpower. The
Pakistani intelligence community received sound evidence suggesting
that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was al-Qaeda’s principal
contact with the Pakistani jihadist community. This nexus had been
strengthened when hundreds of Pakistani militants who had received
ideological and military training at al-Qaeda camps returned to Pakistan
following the fall of the Taliban.
Al-Qaeda’s connection with the local Islamic militant groups was