September 04, 2010

Inside Al Qaeda

Interesting piece over atNewsweek that takes you inside Al Qaeda thru the eyes of a young jihadi recruit in the tribal area..... its quite long ....stick with it....interesting inside jihad stuff for those of us who track this stuff.

The incident didn’t get much international attention at the time: just another Predator strike on suspected jihadis in the mountains of North Waziristan. This one took place on March 16 at a compound near the town of Datta Khel. Several news services ran items, although they differed on almost every important detail.

Hafiz Hanif saw it happen. The young Afghan and other members of his Al Qaeda unit were passing through the area in two cars when they made a stop outside a big walled compound, and Hanif was sent to fetch some supplies that had been left there a few days earlier. He knocked at the front door and then politely turned away, toward the cars. In Pashtun country it’s considered rude to wait facing someone’s door, in case it happens to be answered by a woman. But as Hanif’s gaze passed over the cars, one of them exploded. Moments later the other blew up. The roaring blasts from the American Hellfire missiles knocked him down. When the dust cleared, there was only a tangled mess of smoking metal where the cars had been. Seven Al Qaeda Arabs, including a ranking Syrian and an Egyptian, had been killed instantly. But Hanif found a badly injured fighter and tried to help him. “He had serious head and chest injuries,” Hanif tells NEWSWEEK. “He died in my lap.”

Hanif (the name he asks us to use) is staying with his parents at their home near Karachi for now, and they’re doing their best to keep him there. He’s only 16, and they never approved of his running off to join the jihad. He’s a bright student, good at math and fluent in English and Arabic as well as Urdu and Pashto. Yet he also spent much of the past 18 months training and working with Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas and across the border in Afghanistan. We have checked out his account as far as it could be confirmed, and his uncle, a senior Taliban official who backs up the boy’s story, has been a reliable source to Newsweek in the past. After Hanif disappeared in February 2009, the uncle and the boy’s father traveled twice to Waziristan in search of him. The father finally found him on the second trip, after two months of looking, but the boy would not leave his Arab friends until months later, when his mother’s desperate pleading finally prevailed.

Hanif freely admits he knows nothing of Al Qaeda’s overall strategy, and says he has no idea how many other Qaeda operatives may operate in the orbit of senior leaders like bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In his 18 months with Al Qaeda, Hanif says, no one he met had any clue to the whereabouts of either one—and yet all fought eagerly in their names. He speaks as breathlessly as any starstruck teenager about prominent jihadis he has encountered. His list includes Baitullah Mehsud and his successor as head of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud; Al Qaeda’s reputed No. 3 leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi; and Adam Gadahn, a.k.a. Azzam al-Amriki, the “American Taliban.” In the past six months, though, high-ranking Qaeda figures have largely disappeared as a result of the worsening Predator threat. “They have all gone underground,” Hanif says. “I used to see Azzam al-Amriki, but he also has disappeared.”

The sound of the drones in the sky is so incessant you stop noticing it, like the buzzing of insects, Hanif says. “You don’t see or hear anything before the missile’s impact.” He says the aftermath of a drone attack can be particularly hard. He recalls spending hours searching the rubble alongside other fighters after an attack that killed a Qaeda commander known as Abu Suleiman. They eventually found his head. After another drone attack, they dug for eight to nine hours in the debris of a collapsed house to try to find a Qaeda fighter, his wife, and his kids who had been killed. “We finally found parts of them,” Hanif recalls, “but not all of them.”