Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Saturday, March 20, 2004 · Last updated 2:54 p.m. PT
Terror group unlikely harboring al-Zawahri
By BURT HERMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MOSCOW -- The hunt for terrorists on Pakistan's frontier appears to be
narrowing on an Uzbek terror group that once trained in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani army said Saturday that amid an offensive in South
Waziristan, they have intercepted radio conversations mostly in Uzbek
and Chechen.
The region is the last believed refuge of the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, or IMU, which seeks to overthrow the secular government of
the former Soviet republic.
IMU militants have become a part of the community in South Waziristan
and married local women, said Ahmed Rashid, author of "Jihad: The Rise
of Militant Islam in Central Asia." They have also used the province
as a base for assaults across the border on U.S. forces in
Afghanistan, he said.
Rashid said Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, do not
use non-Arabs to protect them - making it unlikely that al-Zawahri is
in the area, as Pakistani officials had earlier claimed.
Instead, Rashid said it was more likely that the "high-value" target
Pakistanis said they are pursuing is Tahir Yuldash, the 30-something
political leader of the IMU.
Pakistani Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, commander of the operation, said
authorities were concentrating on a radio intercept in either Chechen
or Uzbek that said a wounded man in a vehicle who tried unsuccessfully
to flee the area would need "four men to carry him and 10 or 11 people
to protect him."
The presence of the IMU could also explain the ferocity of the
fighting, Rashid said, because the group simply has nowhere else to
go: U.S. forces are waiting on the border to scoop up fleeing
terrorists, Central Asia is too far away and the IMU's links to
Pakistani fundamentalist groups who might help them are weak.
The IMU has kept a low profile since late 2001, when the U.S.-backed
northern alliance routed it from a base in the northern Afghan city of
Kunduz. The U.S. military has said the IMU's military leader, Juma
Namangani, was also killed, although Uzbek officials and others have
cast doubt on the reports.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the IMU has only been implicated in
two bombings in Kyrgyzstan that killed eight people. Last month, three
IMU members were sentenced to death in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan for
their involvement in the attacks.
The IMU allegedly orchestrated a failed 1999 bombing attack on Uzbek
President Islam Karimov that killed at least 16. It was declared a
terrorist group by the United States in September 2000 after the
kidnapping of four American mountain climbers in Kyrgyzstan.
The group was once believed to have 1,000 to 1,500 members, but
experts and diplomats in the region say they now number only a few
hundred at most.
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