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

War Comes Home
fourth floor, a hand grenade exploded, blocking their way. The hail
of bullets that followed forced them to retreat. ‘We never expected
that kind of resistance,’ recalled a police officer. The area was turned
into a veritable battleground with the militants firing from the topfloor
apartment. After an intense shoot-out lasting three hours, the
commandos succeeded in breaking down the apartment doors. Two
of the militants were mowed down while five others were captured. 29
A young woman clutching a child ran out bare-footed. She was the
wife of one of the slain men. The security personnel were horrified
when they saw one of the fatally wounded inscribing in his blood on
the wall as he died, ‘Laillaha illallah’ (There is no God, but one). Some
of them later repented their participation in what they described as an
‘unholy exercise’. 30 From a short distance away, FBI agents monitored
the operation.
The Pakistani intelligence officials, who emerged from the building
dragging a blindfolded young bearded man, did not have the slightest
idea that they were holding one of the world’s most notorious terrorists:
Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The defiant al-Qaeda leader shouted, ‘Allah-ho-
Akbar’ (God is great), as he was put into a police van. 31 The capture,
on the first anniversary of 9/11, of one of the planners of the attacks,
was certainly the biggest success in the war against al-Qaeda since the
arrest of Abu Zubaydah.
A roommate in Hamburg, Germany, of Mohammed Atta, the
ringleader of the 11 September plot, bin al-Shibh had played a vital
role in organizing 9/11. 32 From his base in Germany, he handled the
logistic and financial arrangements for the hijack team. Bin al-Shibh,
who worked closely with KSM, had spent much of the spring of
2001 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, helping to move the hijackers as
they passed through Karachi. He also reported directly to bin Laden
about the preparations for the attack in an al-Qaeda facility, known as
‘Compound Six’, near Kandahar. 33
Bin al-Shibh had moved to Karachi from Afghanistan soon after
the fall of the Taliban regime and tried to regroup al-Qaeda. Just a
week before his capture, the Arab television station Al-Jazeera had
broadcast an interview in which bin al-Shibh and KSM claimed to have
masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Bin al-Shibh called himself the head
of the al-Qaeda’s military wing. Pakistani investigators believed that
the American intelligence might have tracked down Bin al-Shibh by
intercepting his conversation with Al-Jazeera’s London’s bureau chief,
Yosri Fouda, who interviewed the al-Qaeda leader in Karachi. 34
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