[lbo-talk] AP: Cornered Fighters are IMU rather than al-Qaeda?

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Mar 20 15:07:15 PST 2004


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.

AP HEADLINES



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