LAHORE: Eight years after the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by US-Allied Forces, the echoing question that continues to haunt the world remains: where is Osama bin Laden, the prime accused in the terror episode, amidst repeated claims by top American intelligence officials that he was hiding somewhere in Pakistan.
Portrayed by the American intelligence agencies as one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world, Osama is a man on the run since a US-led attack in October 2001 drove out Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime led by Mullah Mohammad Omar who had refused the custody of the al-Qaeda chief to the United States. Eight years later, the hunt for the Most Wanted man on earth continues with the help of 25,000 US-led coalition soldiers in Afghanistan and over 80,000 soldiers in Pakistan. Although Pakistan President Asif Zardari has stated on September 10 that the fugitive al-Qaeda chief is dead, top officials of American intelligence agencies say Laden was alive and hiding somewhere on the Pak-Afghan border.
It was on November 10, 2001, almost a month after the 9/11 attacks, that Osama made his last public appearance and delivered his last public speech at the Jalalabad Islamic studies center, after the northern cities had begun to fall to the anti-Taliban alliance. Osama painted the battle lines black and white: “The Americans had a plan to invade, but if we are united and believe in Allah Almighty, we will teach them a lesson, the same one we taught to the Russian military forces. Your Arab brothers will lead the way and we will win the war against the US, Inshaallah. We have the weapons and the technology. What we need most is your moral support. And may God grant me the chance to see you again and meet you again on the front lines”. Osama then stepped away from the podium, only to disappear into the mountain fastness of Tora Bora, never to be seen again.
Eight years later, the nerve-racking fact for the American intelligence remains: despite conducting an intense, costly and equally complex manhunt in the US history, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation high ups have failed to capture Osama and can merely give guesstimates about his likely whereabouts. Investigations by top most American agencies indicate that Osama is hiding somewhere in a friendly area on the Pak-Afghan border; few people know his location; he has only a couple of bodyguards; he never uses any communication device be it a satellite or a mobile phone; he communicates only through handwritten notes carried by trusted couriers; and if at all he decides to travels, he travels at night, possibly in disguise.
Frequent claims as to the location of the fugitive al-Qaeda chief have been made by the Americans since December 2001, although none have been definitively proven and some have placed Osama in different locations during overlapping time periods. For the US intelligence sleuths, which are still groping in the dark, Osama’s friendship zone stretches nearly 2,000 miles along the Pakistani Pashtun belt — from Chitral in the Northern Areas near the Chinese border, South through the troubled tribal agencies including Waziristan, down to the Zhob district on the Balochistan border, then to the provincial capital Quetta and southwest to the Iranian border. The thinly populated region includes almost every landscape from desert to snow-capped mountains and thus provides an ideal refuge to Osama.
Keeping in view the rising intensity of the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas, those trying to hunt Osama down do not rule out the possibility of his having shifted his base from the Pak-Afghan tribal belt to some major city as had been the case with many of the key al-Qaeda leaders who were arrested from various urban areas of Pakistan – be it Ramzi Binalshibh (arrested from Karachi in Sept, 2002), Abu Zubaida (arrested from Faisalabad in March 2002), Khaled Sheikh Mohammad (arrested from Rawalpindi in March 2003), Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (arrested in Gujrat July 2004) or Abu Faraj Al Libbi (arrested from Mardan in May 2005. Pakistani intelligence circles believe it is almost impossible to track down one person in a big populated urban city compared with tracking down someone in the less populated tribal areas or the border areas of Pakistan.
amir.mir1969@gmail.com