April 2, 2004
1. Moroccan Cell links 9/11 to Casablanca, Madrid and Baghdad
Al Qaeda Strikes in Iraq
1. Lynch at Fallujah
The horror committed in Fallujah on the last day of March will not be forgotten. The Iraqi lynch mob that savaged and mutilated four members of the Blackwater Security Consulting company staff in the Sunni Triangle town 30 miles west of Baghdad will surely be punished — a pale-faced US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer vowed the next day.
Fallujah locals remained unmoved. “Yesterday’s attack is proof of how much we hate the Americans,” said Samir Sami and: “We wish that they would try to enter Fallujah so we’d let hell break loose,” said Ahmed Dulaimi.
Eleven years have elapsed since the day in October 1993 when a well-laid al Qaeda plot caused US Delta and Ranger troops to be drawn into a vicious trap in Mogadishu’s Black Hole souk. It ended in their bodies being dragged through the Somali capital by a howling mob.
The Clinton administration thereupon ordered the withdrawal of US peacekeepers from the war-torn Horn of Africa republic.
It might have been predicted that Osama bin Laden, having proved in Mogadishu that American troops can be put to flight by inhuman barbarity, would repeat the exercise in Iraq — especially since this sort of atrocity is contagious enough to spread. Already it has demonstrated how little control the US army has over the Sunni Triangle towns lying between Tikrit and Baghdad and how remote are the prospects of handing security over to local Iraqi forces.
These forces at best control the fortified and fenced police stations in the cities. Most of their officers have tacit arrangements with local guerrilla leaders and important Sunni Arab families to co-exist and stay out of each other’s affairs. Each side promises to warn the other of the approach of US forces or any sign of them disturbing the status quo.
That was why the men of the 82nd Division responsible for the region rarely ventured into Fallujah or performed security cleansing work inside the town. This was left mostly to Iraqi commanders. The upshot was a free hand for al Qaeda and Iraqi guerilla groups to develop the Islamic medressa network in the city, as first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly in August 2003.
The student body in each of these small Islamic schools includes Iraqi guerrilla leaders. Hundreds of these institutions turn out a Muslim mix of guerrillas and terrorists in their tens of thousands. The schools are also tremendously powerful logistical and communications stations which throw out lines that reach guerrilla units in every corner of Iraq.
Therefore, the unwritten deals between local US-appointed Iraqi forces and the insurgent community, rather than promoting the security sought by the Americans protect the anti-US legions and their safe functioning.
The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force may not have been aware of the semi-secret status quo it inherited in Fallujah when its units took over from the 82nd Division a week ago. The incoming commanders may have decided to go in and assert control — and paid the price. Five Marines died in a single bombing attack Wednesday outside the town, shortly before the four Americans were murdered on its streets. The US military death toll climbed to thirteen in three weeks.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports from its counter-terror sources that the fundamentalist terrorists are sufficiently confident of their resources to have informed their superiors in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran that they require no more combatant forces for their next assaults, which are described in the next article.
This is testimony to the conscription campaigns which are going forward undisturbed in Fallujah and other Sunni Triangle cities, as a result of the tacit arrangements reached by local Iraqi security and insurgent leaders.
Both are now on tenterhooks for the Bush administration’s response to Wednesday’s atrocity. Although no one imagines President George W. Bush will order US troops to cut and run from Iraq as did his predecessor in respect of Somalia, a too mild response from Washington will be interpreted as al Qaeda Œs second victory after Mogadishu — and not only in Iraq but the entire Middle East. The message of Fallujah’s streets empty of US troops when the monstrosity was committed may well encourage terrorists and all Iraqi haters of America to keep going.
2. Offensive to Cripple US Air Activity and Road Traffic
Al Qaeda is embarking on a fresh offensive to disrupt US military and civilian air activity and highway traffic in and around Baghdad and West Iraq.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence and counter-intelligence sources report that easily-procured shoulder-launched Strela anti-air missiles will be used to shoot down warplanes, cargo aircraft, surveillance drones and helicopters, while on the highways below speeding pickup trucks or live gunmen shoot machineguns and lob bombs at US and coalition road convoys.
Al Qaeda has adopted the new tactic of hurling explosive charges on the fly after discovering that roadside bombs fall short, ever since the Americans, learning from Israel’s experience in Lebanon, started fitting their armored personnel carriers, jeeps, helicopters and drones with electronic equipment that sends out a signal which detects or detonates roadside bombs before they do any harm.
The targeted areas are around Baghdad and Habaniya, the western bank of the Tigris and the al Anbar region of western Iraq up to the Jordanian border. Airbases used to launch air strikes against the Sunni Triangle, the Tigris bank, and western Iraq along the Jordanian and Syrian borders and at the point that the Iraqi, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian frontiers converge.
One high strategic objective is to paralyze the Amman-Baghdad highway 12 to 24 hours in order to choke off the main US military and supply route to Baghdad.
The airbases listed for attack, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources are:
Baghdad:
Baghdad International Airport and the military airbase in Rasheed, east of the capital.
The US military command has provided special security measures for helicopter routes ferrying US and coalition VIPs in and out of Baghdad’s Green Zone headquarters.
West of Baghdad:
The sprawling Al Habaniyah air base, which is home to US air forces operating in central Iraq and, to the northwest, the large al-Muhammadi air base, where US aircraft provide cover for American troops operating in the Ramadi and Fallujah districts and along the northwestern banks of the Tigris.
North of Baghdad:
The giant Khan Al Baghdadi air base, situated midway on the route from Ramadi to Al Hadithah. Besides the long-range US reconnaissance planes, aircraft stationed at this base provide aerial support for US forces operating east of Lake Tharthar — once Saddam Hussein’s favorite fishing site — and in the Samarra and Tikrit regions.
Aircraft from Khan Al Baghdadi also keep an eye on the oil pipeline in western Iraq and operate in the Al Qaim region along the Syrian and Jordanian frontiers and in the southern expanses of the Al Jazirah desert -- home to the Arab tribes that cover the entry of Arab and al Qaeda fighters pouring in from Syria to the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad.
Jordanian border:
Al Qaeda also plans to cripple the airbases around the western city of Al Rutbah near the border with Jordan and put out of commission squadrons deployed at the H2 airbase and at the three airfields and landing pads at H3 along Iraq’s border with Syria and Jordan. The theater of operation includes the problematic Al Qaim region, where weapons that include surface-to-air missiles are still being smuggled in from Syria more than a year after the US-led invasion. It also covers the meeting-point of the Iraqi, Jordanian and Saudi frontiers.
Terrorist strike force swells in number
The latest intelligence update placed before President George W. Bush on al Qaeda’s plans was troubling. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report exclusively that US intelligence estimates that between 600 and 700 al Qaeda fighters are now present in Iraq. This figure does not count the 600 to 800 Ansar al Islam fighters and smaller groups of locals and foreigners linked to al Qaeda or identifying with its aims. All in all, Al Qaeda can field 1,800-2,000 fighters at the present time, although from mid-March, the Americans managed to capture or kill around 80 fundamentalist fighters.
Most of the al Qaeda operatives are coming in from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but there is also a South African contingent whose members transit Saudi Arabia or make their way to Iraq via Jordan, Syria and Iran. Since the second half of February, a new wave of recruits has joined the terrorist force in Iraq in response to a special drive, run mainly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards al Quds Brigade, to muster combatants from among the Iranian Sunni Muslims. The recruitment campaign is still underway.
The Iranians picked up fast on the rising frictions between Sunnis and Shiites in Osama bin Laden’s network (as reported in our last issue, DNW 151). Without wasting a moment, they began training Iranian Sunnis to fight for al Qaeda in a bid to preserve Tehran’s influence within the key Islamic terrorist group fighting Big Satan. Getting the Sunni fighters into Iraq poses no problem. At any given time, there are between 50,000 and 60,000 Iranians in Iraq, visiting family or on pilgrimages to the courts of Shiite religious leaders or the tombs of Shiite holy men.
The al Qaeda recruits simply tag along for the journey.
Joining the influx from another direction are black Muslim radicals from East Africa. According to the intelligence report, they began entering Iraq in mid-March via Egypt, Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf. Most hail from Zanzibar, an archipelago 7 miles (27 km) off the East African coast. A semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, Zanzibar is a popular deep-sea diving tourist destination also known as Clove Island for its primary crop. Al Qaeda’s fresh African intake gathers in the island capital for shipment to Iraq, indicating that the organization has relocated its East African recruitment center from the Comoro islands and Somalia to Tanzania.
A special section of the intelligence report highlights the state of morale in Qaeda’s Iraq command. Radiating confidence, they have told supreme headquarters not to bother to send any more fighting manpower as they have enough for their assignments.
Last month, the Yemeni contingent, some 100 to 150 men, returned home, replaced by the recruits streaming into the country. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources reveal that for the first time, US intelligence monitors witnessed an orderly rotation of units in Al Qaeda as a new group took over from the retiring Yemenis under the direction of the organization’s operational headquarters. The Yemeni combatants were shipped home to bolster terrorist ranks buffeted by Yemeni military strikes backed by US special forces officers.
Yet another challenge to US intelligence was diagnosed in the report: Many of the conscripts rallying to al Qaeda’s flag in Iraq are foot soldiers or low-ranking officers, or Afghan campaign veterans who were largely ignored by US and foreign intelligence agencies who kept tabs on al Qaeda’s top echelons. Now all the intelligence work in Iraq has to start from scratch.
Uzbekistan in Flames
Al Qaeda’s IMU Proxy Lit Match, President’s Daughter Fanned it
It was not until Thursday, April 1, that an Uzbek government official, Ilya Pyagay from the Interior Ministry in Tashkent, finally linked to al Qaeda the wave of terrorist attacks that killed at least 43 people in the capital and Bukhara and threatened to destabilize the key US ally in Central Asia. He blamed “Wahhabis who belong to one of the branches of the international al Qaeda group.”
Before that, President Islam Karimov pointed the finger at Hizbat ut Tahrir.
Other fingers pointed at Karimov himself, suggesting he fabricated a pretext for purging local dissidents.
April 1 marked the sixth day of the first real festival of terror to rock Uzbekistan since this Central Asian nation joined the war against international terrorism in 2002 and permitted hundreds of US forces to use a military base near the Afghan frontier.
It began on Sunday with attacks on police patrols and a grab for their weapons.
Monday morning, suicide bombers almost simultaneously struck Tashkent's largest bazaar and a spot near a children's store. Similar coordinated blasts were reported in the second-largest city, Bukhara.
Next came four days of bloody shoot-outs between police and the alleged terrorists, every one of them ending in mass suicides by explosion. The official death toll approaches 50 but could be much higher.
IMU staged attacks — helped by an ambitious daughter
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Central Asian and counter-terror sources, the primary culprit is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), recently renamed the Islamic Party of Turkestan. This view is shared by Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Central Asia at the Moscow office of Carnegie Endowment. Some Pakistani sources say IMU's leader, Tahir Yuldashev, the 10th most senior member of al-Qaeda, may be the "high-value" target they pursued unsuccessfully in South Waziristan and that he is now making his way home in stages, possibly wounded.
Our sources expect the IMU, which flourished in Afghanistan under the Taliban, to escalate its attacks in the coming days and weeks as part of a broad offensive launched by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to forcibly fragment the American global anti-terrorist front into well-dispersed segments, so diluting military pressure on the organization in Iraq and along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Central Asian sources add that other elements appear to be playing supporting roles in the IMU-al Qaeda offensive.
Gulnara Karimova-Maqsudi may be one. The president’s ambitious daughter maintains her own court, militias and intelligence apparatus. Recently divorced with two children, Islam, 11, and Iman, 6, she is busy maneuvering herself into position to succeed her father. On the assumption that a spot of destabilization might help foreshorten his tenure in the presidential palace, she seems to have permitted some of her agents to fan the outbreaks and provided certain army and police units with incentives not to be in too much of a hurry to extinguish the violence or to nab the fleeing terrorists — although they knew in advance about the coming unrest.
A few adherents of Hizbat ut Tahrir, generally believed to be a non-terrorist fundamentalist group, may also have taken a hand in the violence, as well individual members of dissident groups suffering from the regime’s repressive methods who are incapable of active collective opposition.
A diversion to save the IMU leader
Yuldashev is thought to have good reason for ordering his followers to drench his home ground in terrorist violence this week. The 12-day US-Pakistani Hammer and Anvil operation on the Pakistani-Afghan border province of S. Waziristan was aimed at rooting out al Qaeda mountain nests, thwarting its spring offensive and netting high profile terrorists. Wednesday, March 31, after 7,000 of his troops suffered major setbacks in battles with 500 besieged terrorists, (See separate <#4>article in this issue on the arts of government disinformation), Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf announced the operation at an end.
According to our sources, dozens of al Qaeda and IMU fighters who escaped the battle zone have been trying for the past several days to cross mountainous eastern Afghanistan and return to Uzbekistan via the key Afghan city of Mazar e-Sharif, near the Uzbek border.
This town serves al Qaeda as an important operational and logistical center by virtue of a substantial Iranian presence and strong infrastructure built there after the Taliban’s overthrow in Kabul.
The IMU’s paramount leader, Yuldashev, is among the retreating Uzbek fighters. He is believed now making his way through the mountains toward Mazar e-Sharif, where he plans to cross into Uzbekistan as quickly as possible to evade capture or death. In a bid to cover his escape, Yuldashev ordered his supporters to launch a series of sabotage and terrorist attacks that would keep security forces in Uzbekistan’s major cities occupied while he searches for a safe route home. As part of the diversionary tactics, he instructed his followers to mount a suicide assault to take over the presidential palace on the outskirts of Tashkent in order to draw government forces away from his own route into the country.
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been committed to violence since it was founded in 1989 for the declared aim of creating a united Islamic state through Central Asia starting with Uzbekistan. Its exact membership is unknown but is believed to be smaller than Hizb ut Tahrir’s, between 4,000 and 7,000 adherents.
Intelligence officials believe that Yuldashev was long one of Osama bin Laden’s closest lieutenants and therefore one of al Qaeda’s most dangerous and wanted operatives.
Just two days before terror hit Tashkent and Bukhara, the State Department added the IMU to its list of terrorist organizations.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, dozens and perhaps hundreds of eager Uzbek fundamentalists crossed south for intensive guerrilla training and Islamic religious indoctrination. Since the Taliban were ousted, IMU has declared war on the American troops based in their own country. In two years, they have killed two US soldiers and wounded several others. They even tried to kidnap Americans from a secret base to ransom their jailed comrades. US and Uzbek authorities have kept a lid on these incidents to avoid giving the impression that a Central Asian front has opened against the United States.
The movement also maintains operations bases in the Ferghana region of southeastern Uzbekistan and in neighboring Tajikistan, where the Iranian embassy provides its agents with money and logistical support, as well as in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
The IMU thus lends al Qaeda a broad and willing strategic network across Central Asia.
At home, the group which frequently participates in border skirmishes as well as kidnappings and acts of terror, was accused of the failed 1999 assassination attempt against President Karimov that took 16 lives. Two Chechen-trained IMU members were condemned to death for that blast and the government claimed it had defeated IMU. In fact, the group was busy fighting alongside the Taliban against the Tadjik-dominated Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. According to reports, Yuldashev, who fought with al Qaeda leaders at Tora Bora, also led the resistance to the America’s Operation Anaconda in the spring of 2002.
IMU's military leader, Juma Namangani, is believed to have been killed when the Northern Alliance rooted the Uzbeks from their Konduz base in northern Afghanistan in late 2001.
Hizb ut Tahrir — out of a different stable
Hizb ut Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, a radical group that is banned across Central Asia, was quick to deny president Kamirov’s charge of responsibility for this week’s wave of terror.
Its leader, Vahid Omran, stressed that Hizb ut Tahrir had never regarded terrorist attacks or violence as a means to achieve its goals which are to spread the word of Islam not death.
Founded in the Middle East in 1953 and numbering an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 members, Hizb ut Tahrir is older, larger and less virulent than Yuldashev’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Its declared goal is the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate across Central Asia, centered in the conservative Ferghana Valley. The group dispenses the usual Islamist fare of nostalgia for past Islamic glories, homophobia, anti-Semitism and more recently, anti-Americanism, but is not linked to al Qaeda.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Islamic experts allow that while the movement does not explicitly espouse terrorism in the same way as al Qaeda and is not linked to any terrorist organization, there is a point at which Hizb ut-Tahrir is enjoined to act violently: if one sharp blow is all that is required to push over the secular regime of a country and install Islamic rule.
Therefore, our Central Asian experts do not rule out the possibility of Omran switching tactics should he lose hope of Karimov and his cronies stepping down one day, or if it feels it is strong enough to launch a guerrilla war.
Hizb ut Tahrir supporters live mainly in Samarkand and Bukhara, two important religious centers in the golden age of Islam that were situated along the traditional Silk Road.
Like many other parties and organizations in Central Asia, Hizb ut Tahrir maintains bases of operation in the southeastern Farghana region near the border with Tajikistan. There, young Uzbeks are indoctrinated in Islamic fundamentalism and recruited into a “Muslim Education Corps”. Their proximity to al Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamic facilities gives rise to the charge in Tashkent that the party is not just dispensing education but building terrorist cells.
Central Asian sources assert that by labeling Hizb ut Tahrir a terrorist organization, Karimov hopes to camouflage his own corruption.
His autocratic regime views the movement as a smoldering coal, as dangerous in its way as the IMU though for the moment more as a political rival. Karimov also treats the Hizb as a political scapegoat. At least 500 of its members are in jail where human rights groups say they are being tortured and held in sub-human conditions. Some its leaders live in exile in London, whence this week they accused the government of orchestrating the terrorist attacks and clashes as a pretext for more crackdowns.
Official brutality whips up support for Islamic terror
In Karimov’s Uzbekistan, 25 million people know that torture and arbitrary killings are common. The government has jailed 6,500 Muslim opponents, including, for a time, a 62-year-old mother protesting the death of her imprisoned son, who was immersed in a boiling cauldron.
Western rights groups, from the OSCE to the International Crisis Group, have roundly criticized the regime. In January the US administration gave the country's human rights record a failing grade, the first ever for any former Soviet republic. President George W. Bush, however, immediately waived the human rights stipulation for aid on the grounds that continuing engagement is in America’s national interests. The US air base in Khanabad, Uzbekistan, is home to 1,000 servicemen and rear base for US forays into Afghanistan. In April, the Bush administration is due to allocate a further $50 million in economic aid and military assistance.
Secretary of state Colin Powell voiced support on Wednesday for Karimov and a willingness to help him battle fundamentalist groups.
Being seen as a frontline in the war on terror does no harm, but DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s terror experts find little credence in the charge that Karimov faked the latest terrorist outbreaks. The gunmen facing long hours of siege appear to have been the genuine article. The targets were not primarily civilians as would have been the case if the object had been to arouse popular ire but the much despised Uzbek police which was widely acclaimed by a people who hate the regime.
"I think this was aimed against the police, not ordinary people," Guzal, a 20-year old student said. "Every time I get on a bus, I hear people saying they support this (violence)."
Ham-fisted handling by the authorities of the terrorist threat will only add to this support. Already, border closures have shut off the little trade that small-time Uzbek merchants manage to scrape together. When they besieged an apartment building in Tashkent that was commandeered by a group of terrorists, government forces turned off the water, gas and electricity supplies for an entire district of the capital. What more do the fundamentalists need to ride in on a white horse?
Most Uzbeks — who lived for decades under the communist-atheist Soviet regime — are not particularly religious. But historically, their country was one of Islam’s most important religious centers and Islamic fundamentalism has been making slow but steady progress in the country for years. Karimov himself, his cronies and relatives are making Uzbekistan into fertile ground for the fundamentalists, continuing in their corrupt ways and padding their foreign bank accounts.
Weakened by American anti-terror operations in Afghanistan, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan may now be eying greener pastures at home. In a primarily agricultural economy with severe restrictions on foreign trade, they will find a fertile ground for recruitment.
"There are all the usual ingredients of an Islamic revolution here ˜ demographic explosion, ethnic conflicts and unemployed and disenfranchised youth," said Andrei Piontkovsky, a leading Russian political scientist, in an interview with DEBKA-Net-Weekly in Moscow.
Saddam's Missing Arsenal — 2
His Conventional Arms Have Vanished Too
Charles Duelfer, who has succeeded David Kay, as head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the US Senate's Armed Services Committee this week he would take a new tack in efforts to uncover Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. He said the ISG would now look for "a comprehensive picture" of Iraq's arms program -- instead of simply trying to find whether Saddam Hussein had banned weapons.
It will be a far different approach than the one taken by Duelfer’s predecessor Kay -- who resigned last month saying he had concluded Iraq had no stockpiles of banned weapons when US forces invaded a year ago — or since the visits of inspection teams following the 1991 Gulf War. Duelfer did not say how his new strategy would help the ISG find weapons of mass destruction. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources believe the fresh approach is not as simplistic as it sounds, but stems from new conclusions that were reached after Duelfer ordered a review of all the information amassed so far.
Several ISG analysts recently adopted a new line of thinking after taking another look at the missile attacks which Iraqi forces launched against Kuwait between the start of the US invasion on March 19, 2003 and until American forces entered Baghdad on April 10.
In all, 60 missiles — the Al-Samoud 2 and Ababil — were fired. Some hit their targets; others fell in open areas or in the sea, or were intercepted by Patriot anti-missile missiles. Most were launched from the Faw peninsula or the desert area between Iraq and Kuwait.
The ISG dispatched teams to those locations to retrieve the missile launchers. But, according to our sources report, not a single launcher has been found almost a year after the war ended. At first, the teams thought the launching sites had not been correctly located. However, in all the other areas, the searchers came up empty. Former Iraqi officers who had launched the missiles themselves were brought along for the search. They too were stumped.
The mystery was compounded in former Iraqi air bases.
Three months before the war began, 16 Iraqi Tupolev bombers and 24 Sukhoi fighter-bombers were up in the air practicing long-range bombing missions. From radio intercepts, US intelligence analysts understood that the Iraqis were making contingency plans to bomb targets in Israel, Saudi Arabia or both. Shortly before the US-led invasion, the Iraqi aircraft returned to their hiding places. They still have not been found.
A senior intelligence officer familiar with the search had this to say:
“Two things are clear: the missile launchers did not have wings and could not fly off anywhere. And we know from monitoring the warplanes’ movements that after being put back in their hangars, they were not moved again for the duration of the war,” he said. “In any case, when the Americans opened up the hangars, they were empty. So did the earth swallow up the aircraft?” Duelfer is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources as having determined to focus an intense investigation on the whereabouts of the missing missile launchers and warplanes. Perhaps solving that puzzle will provide a pointer to where Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have disappeared.
Inept Spinmeisters
Three Government Leaders in a Leaky Disinformation Tub
Putin and Misfired Missiles
On February 17, Russian president Vladimir Putin watched as a Russian submarine reportedly failed to properly launch two ballistic missiles in a naval exercise - although some Russian officials later contended the launches were only simulations. A third ballistic missile launch from another submarine went awry the next day. This did not stop Putin from announcing on the same day the successful launch of a strategic ballistic missile carrying what he described as a “new weapons system”.
In an English language transcript supplied by the Russian Foreign Ministry, Putin added: Russia possesses “combat-ready armed forces and this includes the nuclear forces.” He emphasized that the recent exercises cleared the way for adding to the Russian arsenal “new hyper-sound-speed, high-precision∑weapons systems that can hit targets at intercontinental ranges and adjust their altitude and course as they travel.”
The Russian leader implied that such weapons would be ideal for beating potential missile defense systems.
On March 29, the two main Russian news agencies, Interfax and Itar-Tass, quoted an unidentified Russian defense official as saying “Russia has developed a revolutionary weapon that will make the prospective US missile defense useless”. While Putin spoke about a development program, the official referred to a weapon already in existence — one that would give Russia its first substantial strategic advantage over the United States.
Military and intelligence experts around the world have been puzzling over the precise type of weapon the unnamed defense official was alluding to.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military experts offer some possibilities:
1. A maneuverable ballistic missile whose trajectory could be adjusted not only as it climbs into outer space but also as it descends toward its target. It would mark the first time a missile could be “steered” as it streaks downward, making interception by an anti-ballistic missile impossible.
2. A hypersonic cruise missile — another revolutionary concept. Conventional cruise missiles fly at subsonic speed, staying low to avoid radar, and can be intercepted by aircraft flying twice as fast. Nothing, however, could stop a supersonic cruise missile.
3. But several intelligence services, including some in the United States, had a third theory. No such weapons have been developed. Putin, personally embarrassed by the missile firing goofs, decided to shoot some sci-fi make-believe to blot out the pictures of misfired missiles flashing across world television screens. The president chose the fiction carefully, linking it to weapons programs genuinely under development.
Anonymous defense ministry bureaucrats, however, went a bridge too far. Anxious to “punish” Putin for publicly reprimanding his military chiefs over the launch mishaps and disclosing the type of advanced weapons Russia was working on, they brought the future into the present. In doing so, they placed the president’s credibility in doubt.
Musharraf and non-existent “high value targets”
Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf similarly found himself in an awkward corner during an interview with CNN correspondent Aaron Brown on Thursday, March 18.
The interviewer found him in a mellow mood. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, he had just had a satisfying conversation with US secretary of state Colin Powell, who had flown to Islamabad especially to thank him on behalf of the Bush administration for throwing Pakistani troops into the Hammer and Anvil campaign in progress against al Qaeda and Taliban forces on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan frontier of mountainous Waziristan, south of the city of Khost.
While US forces pushed from the east, Pakistanis troops went on the offensive from the west. The campaign was aimed at spiking the prospective Taliban-al Qaeda Spring Offensive in Afghanistan that was timed to coincide with a parallel drive against US forces in Iraq.
American commanders in Iraq had already dubbed the coming assault as the Iraqi Tet Offensive, a reference to the 1968 Viet Cong-North Vietnamese campaign that shattered a lunar New Year’s truce.
Powell went beyond a thank you. He also delivered a White House promise of funding for the Pakistani military input in the campaign as well as new weapons and intelligence systems for Pakistan’s armed forces, however much India complains. US special forces, intelligence officers and surveillance drones would be sent over to support the Pakistani offensive. President George W. Bush was also willing to throw in some economic breaks.
Musharraf told Powell for the umpteenth time that neither he nor his SIS military intelligence had the slightest clue to the whereabouts of al Qaeda’s top leaders Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zuwahiri.
But he wove a quite different tale for the benefit of the CNN interviewer. Following their conversation, Brown reported: “Pakistani forces believe that al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zuwahiri, is among the group of al Qaeda fighters they are now surrounding in western Pakistan. They believe he is among some 200 well-trained and equipped extremist fighters, and they are digging in for a tough battle.”
Listening in, Musharraf added for good measure: “The net has been cast. They (Zuwahiri and other top al-Qaeda operatives) are there. We can see them digging in at their fortified positions. The houses there are almost fortresses — reinforced mud huts. They hold all of these fortresses. They have dug in and are conducting a determined fight. Therefore, I am reasonably sure there is a high value target among them.”
A media whirlwind followed. Some outlets not only reported hat Zuwahiri was in the area but also quoted US intelligence sources as saying there were recordings of his voice from the field along with reports he had been wounded.
The bubble burst two days later, when Pakistani military spokesman major general Shukat Sultan was forced to concede that Pakistani forces had pulled back from the battle zone and that only low-ranking al Qaeda fighters had been found.
But while Putin’s embroidery of the facts caused him little real damage, Musharref ended his spin journey around the world media with a painful crash. The failure of the Pakistani offensive brought the US Hammer and Anvil campaign to a grinding halt. Both participants were left clutching air.
Bin Laden and Zuwahiri remain free, al Qaeda and Taliban forces eluded both the hammer and the anvil and the fate of the fundamentalists’ spring offensive is unclear.
Six months of preparations by the US military command in Afghanistan, including the transfer of special forces from Iraq to tighten the noose around al Qaeda leaders, went down the drain.
Sharon and his mythical disengagement plan
The tangled case of the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan vis a vis the White House is harder to explain. It started with his announcement of new proposals to separate Israel from the Palestinians by unilaterally drawing a security line in the West Bank and removing Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. He promised he would only act on these proposals with the assent of President George W. Bush. On the Palestinian side, there was no negotiating partner — only terrorist leaders.
So far; so good.
But then, US officials insisted that the Sharon proposals did not add up to a plan and they were waiting for details before publicly offering support. Next, the White House rejected the “contradictory and confused” reports presented by Israeli emissaries to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Finally, in late March, the White House sent a caustic message to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem: We give up. If you want to implement the plan, go right ahead — but don’t bother asking for our advice or consent. We are against it.
Yet Sharon and his spokesmen insist on keeping up the fiction that the White House is behind his disengagement scheme and only waiting for the right moment to say so. They expect his April 14 talks with Bush to produce an American commitment to Israel’s security and cooperation in the war on terror. However, there is nothing new there — that’s been the situation for the past 56 years.
The state of US-Israeli relations is deteriorating as Sharon tacks and weaves between pious hopes and ebbing credibility. Finally, this week, he threw a bone to the critics at home who resent his go-it-alone tactics — not so much in relation to the Palestinians as towards his own party, government and parliament. He announced that he would put his disengagement plan to the vote of the 200,000 registered members of his own Likud party and accept the outcome.
That move has put Sharon even deeper in the mire. He has no business putting a matter of high national importance, whether or not to disengage from the Palestinians and evacuate thousands of Jewish settlers, in the hands of a single political party, says the opposition. It ought to be decided by Israel’s five million eligible voters or their representatives.
Like Putin and Musharraf, Sharon has sailed up the disinformation creek without an oar. Putin at least can always contend Russia’s new ballistic and cruise missiles are still on the drawing board. Musharraf can say he was misinformed about Zuwahiri. But what can Sharon argue — that he misunderstood the White House, or the White House misunderstood him? No matter how he tries to get out of the mess, his political star is fading fast.
HOT POINTS
27 March: No sooner had the tens of thousands of mourners dispersed after the ceremonies and demonstrations of strength marking the death of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin last Tuesday, March 22, in an Israeli missile attack, when a thousand Hamas top and middle-ranking activists dived underground. This is reported by DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources. This situation presented the Hamas command center in Damascus with the problem of communicating urgent instructions to the men on the ground in the Gaza Strip.
Friday, March 26, therefore, the Hamas liaison man in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, who managed the Mishaal-Rantisi compromise, was interviewed on Hizballah Radio Nur. Hamdan addressed the Hamas “military” wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qasseem Brigades as follows:
“The lone suicide martyr method has scored great achievements, but now, as we stand at the threshold of a decisive stage, we must resort to a tactic that brings us the desired results. Ideally, we would round up 70,000 to 80,000 martyrs and have them blow themselves up simultaneously in the enemy’s urban centers and so finally vanquish him. But that is not realistic. One tenth or even one hundredth part of that number should suffice to inflict a shock on a strategic scale. I therefore tell you not to hurry to exact revenge. We have to be sure our assault is concerted and perfectly orchestrated. Don’t waste resources and manpower on small operations. No one is pushing you. Take all the time you need and then pick a date and hour that are most advantageous to our project.”
Hamdan’s words freely translated are a directive from Damascus HQ to Muhammed Deif, commander of the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam, to muster an army of several hundred suicide killers to reach the hubs of Israeli cities and blow themselves up at the same moment. The Damascus Hamas command reckons that, even if not all the massacres come off, Israel will not be able to withstand a shock and casualties of the magnitude projected
This escalation fits in well with the intelligence gathered by Americans and Israelis on the spreading base of anti-Israeli terror from the double suicide attack carried out in Ashdod shortly before the assassination of Sheikh Yassin which caused the deaths of 10 Israeli port workers. Their experts conclude the attack was the work of Hizballah aided and abetted by al Qaeda.
A senior US intelligence official is quoted as saying: “The soldiers were members of Hamas. But the overall planning, the way the ship’s container was prepared, the weapons used and the level of advance intelligence invested in the attack all bear the marks of the two Islamic terrorist groups. We can expect many more combined terrorist assaults of this kind in the future.”
Many Israelis, including some at decision-making levels, prefer not to see the international terrorist coalition functioning in Palestinian-controlled territory. But, unlike the Israelis, who bury their heads in the sand, the British have heeded al Qaeda involvement in these assaults as a danger signal warning them that al Qaeda had planted cells in Briton’s large Muslim population.
28 March: The usual reason for setting up independent inquiry commissions on the functioning or malfunctioning of national intelligence services in times of crisis is to close the books on troublesome dossiers that won’t fade out of the public limelight.
But there is a second rule: such panels are of very limited usefulness, for two reasons:
1. Their conclusions and recommendations, directed primarily at calming the public, have little bearing on real intelligence work.
2. No one seriously imagines that a counterintelligence agent or intelligence officer, whether retired or active, will ever level with any outside panel on all the secret information in his possession.
It is not surprising that Israel’s Mossad and military intelligence service — Aman — are furious. They have never faced open criticism before. But they also rebut some of the points as being made more for the sake of settling personal accounts than to seriously scrutinize where Israel’s secret services got it wrong in the Iraq War.
A conflict of orientation and objectives stands out in some of the assertions appearing in the published section of the sub committee’s report, such as: “The military and political echelons are responsible for an intelligence foul-up regarding Iraq and Libya.” On Libya, the panel found Israeli intelligence wanting in failing to pick up on Muammar Qaddafi’s race for a nuclear weapon.
That criticism, at least, is simply refuted. DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources assert:
A. Israeli intelligence knew about Libya’s nuclear program in fine detail. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon twice — in 2002 and 2003 — warned of the danger of Libya beating Iran to a nuclear bomb. B. Israeli intelligence, according to information received in the past from DEBKAfile’s sources, knew quite a bit about the flow of Pakistani centrifuges for enriching uranium to Libya and Iran, and the transfer of Chinese and North Korean nuclear technology and scientific, engineering and technical manpower to Libya, including Iraqi nuclear scientists who were attached to the secret Libyan program.
Where Israel’s secret services fell down was in not tumbling to the secret negotiations between Tripoli, Washington and London for dismantling Qaddafi’s WMD. It was a double slip-up because a number of Palestinians were involved in the transaction and their movements at least should have attracted notice. This failure had a disastrous effect on Israeli policy-making. DEBKAfile’s sources reveal that Sharon learned too late that the Bush administration, which had used Israeli assistance for the Iraqi war, pushed Jerusalem aside when it came to Libya. Instead, Washington used British good offices to take certain Palestinian individuals aboard the secret Libyan project. Sharon’s moves might have been different had he known about this in time.
29 March: Brushing aside all the international obstacles placed in its path, Tehran is clearly advancing full steam ahead in the race for a nuclear device. Sunday, March 28, the International Atomic Energy Agency learned that Iran’s freeze on its uranium enrichment was at an end when the head of Iran’s nuclear commission, Golmazeh Aghazadeh, announced production had started at the Isfahan facility and the process would be completed at the Natanz centrifuge plant.
On the state of the Isfahan plant, the Iranian official reported vaguely that the contractors had announced it was up and the facility functioning. He added: “In three weeks’ time the Iranian people will hold a grand celebration to mark full operation at the Natanz plant.”
DEBKAfile’s sources interpret this as indicating that Iran’s centrifuge industry is working at full capacity and in three weeks it will have attained for the first time the volume of enriched uranium output requisite for building a nuclear bomb.
Yet the next day, Monday, the same Aghazadeh announced piously that Iran had stopped building centrifuges “to win the world’s trust over its nuclear program.” DEBKAfile cites another Iranian official as flatly denying on March 13 Iran was engaged in uranium enrichment.
All these conflicting statements are transparent attempts by Iran to bewilder and throw off pressure as the Islamic republic advances on its objective.
Aghazadeh’s first announcement, aired by state television as in interview Sunday, was timed for the one-day visit UN nuclear watchdog inspectors paid at Natanz. The second statement was delivered on Monday, March 29, when the inspectors moved on to Isfahan. UN inspectors were thus confronted with the accomplished fact that Iranian was producing enriched uranium in defiance of international censure.
US officials working on the Iranian nuclear issue fear that the UN inspectors will hold back on condemning Iran’s nuclear breaches until chief inspector Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei visits Tehran next week. It will be left to him to find the words for a statement affirming that Iran has reached the point of no return in its production of the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb.
DEBKAfile sources add Iran is impervious to the anger of the European Union which has broken off all contacts with its officials on the issue. Contacts have also been interrupted with Moscow. President Vladimir Putin has honored his pledge to President George W. Bush to halt its assistance in the construction of Iran’s Bushehr atomic center and withheld the fuel rods for powering its reactor.
In Tehran, the hard-line rulers of the Islamic republic evidently trust that the storm clouds gathering over the White House in the wake of the 9/11 inquiry will tie Washington’s hands for long enough to allow them to extort de facto acceptance of their continuing uranium enrichment without risk of harsh reprisals.
31 March: Nine Americans died in and around Fallujah 30 miles west of Baghdad in a particularly horrendous spasm of blood-letting Wednesday, March 31. Exactly one week after assuming responsibility for the most intractable town in Iraq in a troop rotation, the California-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force suffered the loss of five men in a single attack: a bomb exploded under their vehicle in a village near Fallujah. Inside the city, gunmen attacked two civilian cars carrying four US civilian contractors. The cars were torched by a dancing lynch mob which screaming Islamic slogans dragged the bodies through the city, dismembered and decapitated them and hanged them by their feet.
Fallujah is the most extreme Sunni Muslim city in Iraq. Some of the medressas closed down in Afghanistan and Pakistan ended up in Fallujah and Damascus.
It is the obvious launching pad for the threatened al Qaeda spring offensive against the US presence in Iraq. Since the Marines landed, insurgents have been testing their mettle in running attacks, killing 8 US servicemen in two weeks. The four-day blockade on the city for house to house raids was finally lifted Wednesday, March 31 with dreadful results.
http://www.debka.com