Arrests over Afghan civilian deaths

Afghan police have arrested three men alleged to have provided "wrong information"
which led to the deaths of scores of civilians in a US air raid.

More than 90 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the village of Azizabad in western Herat's Shindand district on August 22, according to the Afghan government.

Police began an investigation into the incident on September 4 after villagers said US-led forces in Afghanistan had been fed false information about the presence of Taliban members in Azizabad following a tribal dispute, the interior ministry said.

A statement said: "After examining all the police reports and direct claims made by people in the area, three suspects who are said to be key people in giving false information regarding the bombardment of Azizabad, have been arrested in a police operation."

The three were on a list of people provided to Hamid Karzai, the president, by the villagers. Karzai visited relatives of the victims earlier this month and pledged to punish those responsible.

Karzai has already sacked two senior army commanders over the incident.

Tribal dispute

Locals told Al Jazeera that the air raid hit a memorial service at a compound belonging to Reza Khan, a tribal leader who had been in dispute with Nader Tawakal, another local leader.

"We were holding a prayer ceremony when the bombs started to fall ... it was heavy bombardment. The whole village was on fire and about 90 were killed," Abdul Rasheed, the brother of one of the dead, said.

Villagers have denied that the gathering was a meeting of the Taliban, which has been fighting Afghan and international forces since being forced from power in 2001. They said that Khan, who died in the raid, was a businessman with security contracts at a nearby US base.

"Nader gave the US special forces wrong information," Gullah Ahmed, one villager, said.

"But instead of surrounding the village they just started bombing."

Nader was not among those arrested on Friday.

The US military maintains that between 30 and 35 Taliban fighters were killed, but has agreed to reopen the investigation after a mobile phone video emerged showing bodies of people said to have been killed in the attack.

It says the original investigation found that a senior Taliban commander was among the dead in the air raid, which was called in after Afghan army US-led ground forces came under intense fire.

Civilian casualties

One resident of Azizabad said that US forces raided his house after the bombing and demanded to be shown the bodies of the dead Taliban fighters.

"I said there were no Taliban here," he told Al Jazeera. "I saw their facial expressions when they realised that civilians had been killed."

More than 500 civilians have been killed during military operations by foreign and Afghan forces so far this year, according to the Afghan government and some aid groups.

Daoud Sultanzoy, an Afghan MP, said that such incidents were destroying people's faith in the Afghan government and international forces in the country.

"The weak Afghan government and weak leadership is trying to take advantage of this and trying to deflect attention from their own problems that are the root cause of these kind of things," he told Al Jazeera.

"Lack of co-ordination of our intelligence, lack of co-ordination of our security forces and lack of co-ordination of our leadership have led to these kind of problems ... if we are not careful we will cross a threshold and alienate the civilian population."

Via Al Jazeera.

Comment:

This is turning out to be quite the fiasco. I had initially not covered it because the differences between the numbers provided by the military and those provided by the locals had led me to believe that it was primarily, though not necessarily entirely, an attempt by Taliban sympathizers at propagandizing. It turns out, though, that the military's figures were based on an embedded FOX news reporter, who turned out to be, almost unbelievably, Oliver North.

Al Jazeera has suggested elsewhere that Bush is apparently ratcheting up efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan in hopes of capturing Osama bin Laden before his term expires. I hope to God that this is not true. Everything that Bush has ever tried to do has failed. If he attempts to, as an American commander put it, "kill [his] way to victory," we might as well just start paying bin Laden a pension right now.

Saudi crackdown on terror suspects

Saudi Arabia has over the past six months arrested 701 people suspected of plotting attacks, officials have said. Releasing the information, the country's interior ministry said in a statement the fighters had plotted attacks against oil installations in the kingdom. Among those arrested, 520 are still in detention. The interior ministry statement read out on Saudi television said those detained were of various nationalities and were part of a wider plot managed from abroad. The statement said: "Security forces managed to arrest one cell in the Eastern Province led by African residents ... their concern was to get close to people working in the oil sector in order to find work in oil installations. "They planned in fact to attack an oil installation and security target with rigged cars [car bombs]." Other cells were said to have been broken up which planned attacks on economic targets in the world's largest oil exporter.

Foreign co-ordination

Some of the plots were said to have been hatched in co-ordination with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda second-in-command. The statement said that those organising people to come from abroad had taken "advantage of the facilities granted to the Muslim faithful to come to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage or to do the omra," or minor pilgrimage". One cell member was said to have been found with a taped message from al-Zawahiri. The kingdom has suffered several attacks blamed on al-Qaeda and mainly targeting westerners since 2003, but a crackdown has quelled attacks over the past two years.

Via Al Jazeera.

Hundreds held in Mosul crackdown

About 1,100 people have been arrested during the first four days of an Iraqi military operation in the country's main northern city of Mosul, the defence ministry says.

Major-General Mohammed al-Askari, the ministry spokesman, said on Saturday there had been no clashes or killings during the mission, which is ongoing.

The military said al-Qaeda operatives who had regrouped in the region were the target of the arrests. Al-Askari said 530 of those being held, three of them senior al-Qaeda members, were wanted by the authorities.

He said security forces had recovered 1,400kg of explosives, 45 missiles, 263 mortar bombs and 175 assorted weapons.

Fighters disperse

Iraqi leaders said many of the fighters had fled to nearby areas, where troops were hunting for them. However, the operation is being described as successful in depriving the fighters of their urban stronghold. But the flight of al-Qaeda fighters to nearby areas raises the concern they can regroup elsewhere, as has happened in the past. Yassin Majid, an adviser to Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said most of the group's leaders had fled to the outskirts of Mosul or to a neighbouring country. He did not name the country, but Mosul is about 96km from the Syrian and Turkish borders. Major-General Mark Hertling, the senior US commander in northern Iraq, whose forces are working with the Iraqi troops in the operation, said he did not believe significant numbers of fighters had escaped. He said Iraqi forces had surrounded the city with barriers and checkpoints controlling entry and exits. "It's been very successful," he told the Associated Press. "I think the combination of the arrests plus the uncovering of a number of weapons caches will reduce the number of attacks in Mosul."

Arms amnesty

On Friday, al-Maliki had announced a 10-day amnesty for those surrendering weaponry, but officials said there had been no response to an offer of cash in exchange for heavy and medium weapons. "Any house in Mosul has the right to have only one small weapon - a pistol or rifle," al-Askari said on Friday.In February, al-Maliki unveiled plans for a campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq and in March was involved in an assault on Shia militias in the southern city of Basra. This crackdown prompted fighting in other urban areas between the Iraqi army and members of the al-Mahdi Army militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist Shia leader. Hundreds of people have been killed in seven weeks of battles, which saw the US military stepping in to support the Iraqi army. Despite a truce being agreed last Saturday one woman was killed and two children were wounded in overnight violence, medics in the Baghdad district of Sadr City said on Friday.

Via Al Jazeera.

Mosul operation enters fourth day

An operation against what Iraqi and US military officials call "al-Qaeda forces" in Mosul has entered its fourth day, amid claims that "indiscriminate arrests" are being conducted in the area.

According to the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), at least 120 former Iraqi army officers have been arrested, as well as students and academics.

The statement released on Wednesday by the AMS comes as Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, arrived in Mosul to "supervise the military operation". The AMS also claims that a number of university professors and students from various areas in Mosul have been detained.

"This ... [operation] clearly indicates that the military campaign has further dimensions than those announced, and that its goal is to crack down on the sons of this governorate [of Mosul] who reject the occupation and its allies, a statement said. "The AMS denounces this brutal operation which aims to liquidate all the city's people who reject the occupiers and their destructive plans."

Deteriorating conditions

Nizar Fahmy, a journalist working in Mosul, told Al Jazeera that the situation on the ground has deteriorated during the operation, to a degree where residents are struggling to obtain basic necessities. The city is under curfew, with only pedestrians allowed out onto the streets during the day. He said: "People have resorted to getting vegetables and fruit from the outskirts of the city - where the first checkpoint leading to Mosul is. "Merchants have been forced to resort to peddling their wares on carts, as they travel to different neighbourhoods." Fahmy also said that security forces have constructed a list of names of so-called "suspects" that are wanted and are conducting house-to house searches based on this list. Al-Qaeda fighters are said to have regrouped in Mosul and the surrounding province of Nineveh after being pushed out of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and western Anbar province by US and Iraqi forces. It is unclear how long al-Maliki will stay in Mosul, but his visit is similar to his trip to the southern city of Basra in late March when he oversaw a military operation against fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist Shia leader.

'New phase'

Iraqi security forces backed by the US military launched a "new phase" of operations on Saturday in Nineveh province, which borders Syria and Turkey, the US military said. In February, al-Maliki had announced plans for an operation against al-Qaeda and called on the population to support the security forces to get rid of "terrorists". On Monday, he told parliament his troops had only begun preparatory operations and that a major operation was yet to come. He said: "When this phase of preparation is completed, we will announce the start of the military offensive". Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, 370km north of Baghdad, has been described by the US military as the centre of the fight against al-Qaeda. The city, one of the most dangerous places in the country, has been the scene of many bombings and attacks. On January 23, an explosion at an ammunition dump killed more than 60 people and destroyed dozens of homes. Nineveh's police chief was killed in a suicide bombing when he visited the site of the explosion on the following day.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

The Association of Muslim Scholars is an influential Sunni group that opposes the occupation and the government through non-violent means. Although it does not object to armed resistance in principle, it does believe that attacks against civilians and sectarian violence are against Islamic law, and is thus no great friend of al-Qaeda.

False Alarm

It wasn't al-Masri after all.

Al Jazeera has more info, if you're interested.

Al Qaeda in Iraq leader reportedly arrested

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was arrested in the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

CNN is working to confirm the information.

Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said the arrest of al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, was confirmed to him by the Iraqi commander of the province.

"The commander of Ninevah military operations informed me that Iraqi troops captured Abu Hamza al-Muhajir the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq," al-Askari told The Associated Press by telephone.

Al-Masri, an Egyptian militant, took over al Qaeda in Iraq after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed June 7, 2006 in a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad.

The U.S. military in Baghdad said "we are currently checking with Iraqi authorities to confirm the accuracy of this information."

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said that Mosul police "arrested one of al Qaeda's leaders at midnight and during the primary investigations he admitted that he is Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir."

News of the arrest was also reported by Iraqi state television.

The state channel, Iraqiya, said that Minister of Interior Jawad al-Bolani would reward Mosul police for the capture.

Interior Ministry spokesman Khalaf told the station by phone that a source close to the al Qaeda leader informed Mosul police that al-Masri would be at a house in the city's Wadi Hajar area at midnight Wednesday.

"The police raided this house and arrested him. During the primary investigation, he confessed that he is Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Now a broader investigation of him is being conducted," he said to Iraqiya.

If confirmed, the arrest would represent a major blow to al Qaeda in Iraq, which has been on the run for the past year following an influx of thousands of U.S. troops and a shift in alliances by Sunni tribesmen in western Anbar province, and elsewhere.

The U.S. military considers the organization its number one enemy in Iraq.

He did not have any further details nor did he say when the al Qaeda leader was arrested. According to unconfirmed reports he was caught Thursday evening in the Tayran area in central Mosul, 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

Mosul is currently a major battleground for U.S. forces and al Qaeda.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, last year announced an "Islamic Cabinet" for Iraq and named al-Masri as "minister of war."

U.S. officials said al-Masri joined an extremist group led by al Qaeda's No.2 official in 1982. He joined al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in 1999 and trained as a car bombing expert before traveling to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

According to associates in Afghanistan, al-Masri has been involved in Islamic extremist movements since 1982, when he joined Islamic Jihad, a terror group led by Ayman al-Zawahri, who became bin Laden's chief deputy.

Al-Masri fought with Muslim rebels against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later ran al Qaeda training camps there.

Via CNN.

Profile: Key 9/11 suspects

Six prisoners being held by the US in Guantanamo Bay are to face charges over their alleged involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.

The following profiles and what is known of the allegations against the suspects are compiled from BBC and news agency reports and information released by the Pentagon and US intelligence officials.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Ramzi Binalshibh
Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi
Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali
Walid Bin Attash
Mohammed al-Qahtani

Via BBC.


Comment:

It will be interesting to see how they'll plan their respective defenses (and they will defend themselves; to waste our time if for no other reason). KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh are both dead men; all the prosecution needs to do is play the jury the Al Jazeera documentary they appeared in.

As for al-Hawsawi, the his defense thus far seems to be, yes, he did know virtually everyone involved, and yes, Ramzi bin al-Shibh did tell him on September 10 to flee to Pakistan because a huge attack was about to occur, and yes he did receive large sums of money from the hijackers right before the attack, but that doesn't mean that he was involved in any way. I mean, who hasn't received $17,860 from a group of known terrorists? I'm not sure what he has to say about all the al-Qaeda expense accounts and payroll lists he was captured with. He was probably "holding" them for a "friend."

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, on the other hand, may well be innocent. Going by the evidence raised at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, it appears that he may have just been used by his uncle, KSM, and had no knowledge of the plot itself. This is strongly supported by the fact that when he left the country right before 9/11 due to his work visa being revoked, he was caught off-guard and didn't even have time to pack. Also, much of the government's evidence is either classified or ridiculous (e.g. he was in frequent contact with his uncle). It also seems kind of peculiar that the plot would have two head financiers. This will be an interesting trial to follow.

Walid bin Attash appears to have been a mid-level administrator involved in the Embassy Bombings and the U.S.S. Cole attack. He has already confessed, so his trial should be fairly short.

Muhammad al-Qahtani's case is also tricky. He was tortured pretty extensively once his identity became known, causing the DoD to call him "unprosecutable." On the other hand, he was definitely a member of al-Qaeda, and tried to enter the States shortly before 9/11 with a one-way ticket, and he probably wasn't sight-seeing. Also, if I recall, he is named as the 20th hijacker in KSM's confession.

We will have to see.

Taliban commander 'captured'

Pakistani security forces have captured Mansour Dadullah, a senior Afghan Taliban commander, in the country's southwest, according to officials. Dadullah was seized on Monday near the village of Gawal Ismail Zai in Baluchistan province, close to the Afghan border, along with four other fighters.

Ahmed Zeidan, Al Jazeera's Islamabad bureau chief, reported Dadullah was seriously injured in the battle. One military official claimed that Dadullah had died of his wounds while being flown to a hospital with the other injured men.

A military statement said Dadullah and his men were "trying to enter Pakistan" across the border.

Mansour Dadullah had succeeded his elder brother, Mullah Dadullah, a senior military commander who was killed in an Afghan and Nato operation in southern Afghanistan in May 2007. The Taliban said in a statement last December that they had sacked the commander "because he disobeyed orders of the Islamic Emirate" of the Taliban. But a spokesman for the commander denied that he was fired, leading to speculation of infighting among the movement.

[More]


Comment:

It's been a busy day in the War on Terror. I'm not sure how it escaped me, but I hadn't realized that the Taliban had allegedly fired Dadullah, and I'm not entirely certain why they would have done so. It could perhaps explain why Mustafa Abu al-Yazid has been becoming more visible recently, but it's also quite possible that it was just disinformation.

Six men face 9/11 charges

The US government has announced charges against six Guantanamo Bay detainees over the September 11 attacks, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The charges are the first from the court at Guantanamo alleging direct involvement in the 2001 attacks and the first in which the US has sought the death penalty.

"These charges allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organised plan by al-Qaeda to attack the US," said Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann. In a transcript released by the Pentagon last year, Mohammed was quoted as saying he planned the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 and others.

Last week the US admitted it had used the controversial waterboarding interrogation method to extract Mohammed's confession. The procedure is widely considered to be torture and human rights groups have strongly condemned it. The military judge hearing the cases would decide on the admissability of evidence obtained under duress, Hartmann said. The full charges against the six are conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property, terrorism, and material support for terrorism.

Military tribunals

Apart from Mohammed, the other men include Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. The rest are Mohammed al-Qahtani, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi and a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Baluchi's assistant Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, from Saudi Arabia, and Waleed bin Attash, reportedly from Yemen. The tribunals at the US military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are the first US war tribunals since World War Two. They were established after the attacks to try non-US captives whom the Bush administration considers "enemy combatants" not entitled to the legal protections granted to soldiers and civilians. However, if convicted and sentenced to death, any execution could take years to carry out as the sentence would have to be examined by civilian appeals courts, the New York Times reported. Hartmann said the trials would be "as completely open as possible" and that the defendants and their legal teams would even see the classified evidence against them. "There will be no secret trials. Every piece of evidence, every stitch of evidence, every whiff of evidence that goes to the finder of fact, to the jury, to the military tribunal, will be reviewed by the accused," he said. About 275 detainees remain at the facility, about 80 of whom the US hopes to try. Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has represented Guantanamo detainees, told Al Jazeera that neither military tribunals nor the death penalty should be considered in these cases. "Mohammed has announced he wants to be a martyr and to execute him merely makes him a martyr and fulfills his wishes," he said. "I think the United States is going to loose an awful lot of support from its allies in the West who are very strongly opposed to the death penalty."

'Confession'

Mohammed, a Pakistani national of Kuwaiti descent, was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 and handed over to the United States. He is alleged to have been the "Number Three" in the al-Qaeda network after Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.

Mohammed is reported to have also confessed to the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Centre, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, and an attempt to down two American aeroplanes using shoe bombs. The alleged al-Qaeda operations chief is also said to have confessed to the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in February 2002. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," he was quoted in the Pentagon transcript as saying. However, Mohammed's reported confessions remain controversial after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that he, along with two other al-Qaeda suspects, had been waterboarded, an interrogation "technique" which simulates drowning. The other two suspects were were Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Almost 3,000 people died in the September 11 attacks, in which 19 hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trader Center in New York City, the Pentagon building in Washington DC and a field in the state of Pennsylvania.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

Finally. The timing of this probably has something to do with the coming election, but I don't care. It's high time justice is done.

The list of defendants is interesting. I would expect Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as well as the other "twentieth hijacker", Muhammad al-Qahtani, but I was not familiar with the other three. And where is Abu Zubaydah? I somehow suspect he's being saved for later on in the campaign, but it could be they just don't want to give him up yet.

In the coming days I plan on posting profiles on each of these men.

Also, my replacement laptop should be arriving sometime today.

Germany says bomb plot foiled

German security services arrested three Muslim activists on Tuesday and foiled a plan to carry out "massive bomb attacks" against US installations in Germany, officials say. Monika Harms, federal prosecutor, said on Wednesday in Karlsruhe that the men, two German nationals and one Turk, had been on the verge of launching their attacks after acquiring enough material to make a bomb with explosive power equal to 550kg of TNT. [More]

Comments:

The three belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union (also referred to as the Islamic Jihad Group), which is a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and has been responsible for several high profile bombings in that nation. The IMU, while a separate organization, has very close ties with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, from whom it has received substantial sums of money. The IJU's al-Qaeda ties appear to be even closer, due to the extreme sophistication of their attacks. The IJU's apparent branching out into Europe is disturbing, to say the least, as is the temporal proximity of these events to the anniversary of 9/11. Al-Qaeda had originally planned to launch a follow-up attack on US soil on September 11, 2002; it looks like they may have taken that idea back out of cold storage. When considered in conjunction with the recent arrest of eight terror suspects in Denmark, an ominous trend begins to emerge.