Al Qaeda Bomb Expert Killed in Pakistan Was a Paymaster

Documents found on an operative for Al Qaeda who was killed by Pakistani forces showed that he was an explosives expert and a money carrier who appeared to be distributing cash to the families of al Qaeda members, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the organization’s leader in Iraq, reported The New York Times. The operative, Marwan Hadid al-Suri, 38, also known as Abu Marwan, was shot to death during a gunfight. A diary written in Arabic contained a list of families of senior Qaeda operatives who received regular cash payments from the organization, including relatives of Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The list did not give the whereabouts of the families, but it described paying $2,500 per family every three months. According to the list, each family was also paid $500 per child every three months. Al Qaeda continues to receive financing from abroad and from private Arab donors in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Many al Qaeda members who had come from around the Arab world to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980′s and 1990′s married Afghan or Pakistani women and had children with them. The families, hunted by security agencies, move from house to house to avoid detection. The Syrian-born Suri married a woman in Afghanistan, but moved his family to the Bajaur region, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, from where he organized operations against United States forces in Afghanistan. Villages in Bajaur were hit by American missiles in January in an attempt to kill Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Four members of Al Qaeda are believed to have been killed in the strike.