Pakistan protesting airstrike

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader was invited to dinner marking an Islamic holiday at the Pakistani border village struck by a purported CIA airstrike, but he did not show up, intelligence officials said Sunday, as Islamic groups demonstrated across the country in protest of the 17 people killed in the missile strike.

The two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press that this could explain why Friday's predawn attack missed its apparent target, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Usama bin Laden's top lieutenant.

Al-Zawahiri sent some aides to the dinner instead and investigators were trying to determine whether they had been in any of the three houses that were destroyed in the missile strike that killed at least 17 people, one of the officials said.

The new details emerged as Islamic groups held nationwide protests and anger mounted over the attack that Pakistan says killed innocent civilians while al-Zawahiri was not even there.

The intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said al-Zawahiri, who has a wife from a local tribe, had been invited to a dinner in the village to mark the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha but changed his mind and sent some aides instead.

Pakistani officials have strongly condemned the strike on the ethnic Pashtun hamlet of Damadola, about four miles from the border with Afghanistan.
A senior army official told The Associated Press on Sunday that "foreigners" were reported in the area around Damadola, which is four miles from the Afghanistan border, but he said there was no information al-Zawahiri was among them.

Many in this nation of 150 million people oppose the government's participation in the U.S.-led war against international terrorist groups, and there is increasing frustration over a recent series of suspected U.S. attacks along the frontier aimed at militants.

Reflecting the anger, Islamic groups staged demonstrations across Pakistan on Sunday to denounce the attack in Damadola.

Some 10,000 people rallied in Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city, chanting "Death to America" and "Stop bombing against innocent people." Hundreds massed in the capital, Islamabad, and in Lahore, Multan and Peshawar burning U.S. flags and demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Counterterrorism officials in Washington have declined to comment on the airstrike, but a large number of Al Qaeda and Taliban combatants, including al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, are believed to have taken refuge in the rugged mountains along on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Pakistani officials insist they do not allow the 20,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan to cross the border in the hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

In a speech shown Sunday on state-run Pakistan Television, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf did not address the Damadola strike directly, but he warned his countrymen not to harbor militants, saying it would only increase violence inside Pakistan.

"If we keep sheltering foreign terrorists here ... our future will not be good. Remember what I say," Musharraf said in the speech, which was made Saturday in the northwestern town of Sawabi.

Survivors in Damadola denied militants were there, but some news reports quoted unidentified Pakistani officials as saying up to 11 extremists were believed among the dead.

A senior intelligence official said Sunday that 12 bodies, including seven foreigners, had been taken from the village.

He said the bodies were reclaimed by other militants, but another Pakistani official told AP on Saturday that some were taken away for DNA tests. A law enforcement official in Washington said the FBI expected to conduct the tests to determine victims' identities, although Pakistan had not yet formally requested them.

The claims by the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, could not be independently verified.

Meanwhile, the governor of the Afghan province across from Bajur region, where Damadola is, said Afghanistan's government had formed a 1,000-man tribal militia to watch the border.

"Al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and other militants have camps over the border," Kunar Gov. Assadullah Wafa said.

He said the new force made up of young men from villages in the area would "hopefully make it harder for the militants" to slip across the frontier.

"But the border is so long and so rugged that it's easy for them to come and go," he conceded.

(Borrowed from Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,181698,00.html)

http://inbrief.threatswatch.org/2006...s-almagrabi-a/


al-Qaeda Commanders al-Magrabi and Habib killed in Damadola

Pakistani and Afghani al-Qaeda commanders killed in airstike along with Masri, the WMD chief

By Bill Roggio

The final results of from the airstrike in the Pakistani border town of Damadola are now known. In addition to Abu Khabab al-Masri, who was al-Qaeda’s chief bomb maker, head of the WMD program, and former terror camp commander, two other al-Qaeda commanders were killed in the strike. ABC News confirms that Khalid Habib [or Khaled al-Harbi] and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi perished in the attack.
Khaled al-Harbi is al-Qaeda’s operational commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Harbi splits duty in Afghanistan with Abd al Hadi Al Iraqi, and both are considered “two of [al-Qaeda’s] most able commanders”.
Abdul Rehman al Magrabi, a Moroccan, is thought to be al-Qaeda’s commander in Pakistan, and is said to have replaced Abu Hamza Rabia, who was killed in Pakistan on December 1, 2005.
According to a trusted source, the DNA tests are complete and the two other other “foreigners” killed are said to be al-Qaeda bodyguards. Ayman al-Zawahiri appears to have slipped the net. ABC News provides further important details on the meeting that took place:

Authorities tell ABC News that the terror summit was called to funnel new money into attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan… “Pakistani intelligence says this was a very important planning session involving the very top levels of al Qaeda as they get ready for a new spring offensive,” explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry and now an ABC News consultant.

It is clear the reports from earlier in the week that al-Qaeda is refocusing efforts in Afghanistan are accurate. With the recent capture or killing of several high-level al-Qaeda leaders, including Abu Hamza Rabia and Abu Musab al-Suri before last week’s strike, it is clear U.S. and Pakistani intelligence is gaining a clearing picture of al-Qaeda’s network and operations in along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
As al-Qaeda amasses strength in the region and grows more confident in its abilities to operate more openly, they expose themselves to intelligence operations and military strikes. The nature of the intelligence on this meeting gives clues as to the nature of intelligence operations in the region: either the U.S. has sophisticate signals intelligence able to penetrate al-Qaeda’s communications; there are one or several high value human intelligence sources within al-Qaeda and the Taliban; or a combination of the two. Whatever the answer, al-Qaeda has lost five senior leaders over the span of five weeks.
The meeting in Damadola was a high value target of opportunity which could not be passed up. U.S. intelligence took the risk, pulled the trigger and bagged three senior al-Qaeda commanders. Masri, Habib, and al-Magrabi have been removed from the chain of command, and must be replaced by junior operatives who possess neither their stature, experience or connections. Al-Qaeda has been weakened.




January 18, 2006 09:24 PM | Permalink

Sounds good to me...

EM:cool:

Score!

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http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htt.../20060215.aspx

Predator Attack Did Get Al Qaeda Brass

February 15, 2006: DNA analysis of the bodies recovered from the attack on an al Qaeda meeting in Pakistan last month, have confirmed that the main target, al Qaeda number two leader Ayman al Zawahiri, was not there. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, it was apparent that al Zawahiri was late arriving at the dinner meeting. However, the DNA tests did show that at least five foreigners were present. One of them was a close relative of Ayman al Zawahri, while a second was bomb building expert Midhat Mursi, who, like al Zawahri (who has $25 million reward on him), had a $5 million reward on his head. Another of the dead foreigners was Abdul Rehman al-Misri al-Maghribi, a son-in-law of Zawahiri and in charge of the al Qaeda's Information War operations. Another of dead was Abu Obaidah al Misri, who was in charge of terrorist operations just across the border, in Afghanistan's Kunar province.

Initially, al Qaeda tried to spin the attack as a complete failure, saying that only civilians were in the building, that 18 were killed, and that this included women and children. Demonstrations were held and indignation was high. Islamic radicals also made much of the fact that the attack was apparently (no one admitted anything) by U.S. Predator UAVs firing Hellfire missiles. But the Pakistani police got to the scene, and conducted their investigation, and released the information on the foreigners killed during the attack. The Pakistani government wants the U.S. cooperation, because the Islamic terrorists are at war with the Pakistani government as well, including assassination attempts on the president of Pakistan.