Al-Qaida helped to flee, US says
Anti-American agents in Pakistan and Iran accused of providing escape routes for terror suspects
Julian Borger in Washington Friday January 11, 2002 The Guardian
Al-Qaida fighters are escaping from Afghanistan in large numbers, eastwards through Pakistan and westwards through Iran, with the help of hardline anti-American elements in the security services of both countries, US intelligence sources said yesterday.
President George Bush warned Iran's rulers not to allow "al-Qaida murderers to hide in their country", but the CIA is just as worried about Pakistan's role as an escape conduit.
According to one intelligence source, al-Qaida members are being supplied with false travel documents by rogue officers in the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, and are flying out of Islamabad on commercial flights to destinations around the world.
"These are ISI working-level cadres doing this, but they're not being punished," the source said.
The claim was vigorously denied by Asad Hayauddin, the Pakistani embassy spokesman in Washington, who said: "We've intensified our patrolling along the border, and any al-Qaida member that has been captured has been handed over."
He added that more than 200 detainees had been transferred to US custody.
US intelligence also believes that another escape route to Iran ran through Pakistan. Al-Qaida members are crossing Afghanistan's mountainous and porous south-eastern border and then travelling to the remote region south of the Iranian city of Zahedan, with the help of members of Iranian intelligence.
Washington is unsure of the attitude of Iran's fractured government towards this infiltration. When US officials drew Tehran's attention to the problem, 200 Iranian Revolutionary Guards were moved up to the 370-mile long border with Pakistan, but so far Iran has not handed over or announced the capture of any al-Qaida members.
"We would hope that they would continue to be a positive force in helping us to bring people to justice. We would hope, for example, they wouldn't allow al-Qaida murderers to hide in their country. We would hope that if that be the case, if someone tries to flee into Iran, that they would hand them over to us," President Bush told reporters yesterday. "If they are part of the coalition, then they need to be an active part of the coalition."
The Shi'ite government in Tehran has had a mutually hostile relationship with the Sunni extremists in al-Qaida and their Taliban allies. Iran has supplied the US with intelligence during the Afghan war and secretly agreed to offer help if downed US pilots or soldiers sought refuge in Iran.
However, Pentagon officials quoted in yesterday's New York Times claimed that fleeing al-Qaida fighters were being given safe haven in Iran with the intention of using them in the future to fight western influence in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
According to the newspaper, Washington also suspects Iranian agents of infiltrating western Afghanistan, threatening and bribing tribal leaders to undermine US-funded aid projects in the region.
Diplomatic observers in Washington expressed scepticism yesterday over the possibility that Tehran would forge an alliance with al-Qaida remnants. However, they said it was possible that the most anti-American elements in Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard could be exploring the option of joint action. Pakistani officials have in the past conceded that some of the more militant elements of the ISI could be helping Taliban members to escape from the US military campaign in Afghanistan. But yesterday, an Islamabad source cast doubt that such rogue elements could be involved in smuggling al-Qaida members out through the Pakistani capital.
"Nobody would risk it right now. The stakes are too high," the Pakistani official said. "Money is always a factor, but money is a factor everywhere."