If President Bush and his ‘terror threatened’ administration thought that capturing major leaders of Al Qaeda would bring the end of the organisation closer, well they could not be more wrong. The fact that Al Qaeda training and restructuring in Pakistan is on the rise is no longer under any doubt.
The latest US intelligence reports show that a new generation of leaders has emerged under Osama bin Laden to cement control over the network’s operations.
It has been predicted that the new leaders have risen after many of the senior leaders have been captured or killed since 9/11. The US reports have been pointing to Pakistan as a hub of the Al Qaeda operations for a while now, but a more succinct picture is now being seen about the training camps and the people running them.
The intelligence reports are based on evidence-gathering that took place during terrorism investigations in the past two years.Particularly important were interrogations of suspects and material evidence connected to a plot British and American investigators said they averted last summer to destroy multiple commercial airliners after takeoff from London. The investigation into the airline plot led officials to conclude that Egyptian paramilitary commander Abu Ubaidah al-Masri was the Qaeda operative in Pakistan orchestrating the attack.
Mr Masri is now seen to have emerged as one of Al Qaeda’s senior operatives after the death of Abu Hamza Rabia, another Egyptian who was killed by a missile strike in Pakistan in 2005.
Other sources of information include intercepted communications between operatives in Pakistan’s tribal areas, although officials said the group has a complex network of human couriers to evade electronic tapping.
Officials have said that they are in the process of gathering more information about people such as Masri. This has, more than anything else, led to a reassessment within the American intelligence community about the strength of the group’s core in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and its role in some of the most significant terrorism plots of the past two years.
Via: New York Times
