Taliban claims Pakistan attack

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibilty for an assasination attempt on Yousuf Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister.

Shots were fired at the pime minister's motorcade on Wednesday near Islamabad's international airport, but officials and police said Gilani was not in the car at the time.

The Taliban said it was behyind the attack and said it was targeting Gilani because he was responsible for offensives against their fighters in the country's northwest.

"We will continue such attacks on government officials and installations," Muslim Khan, a spokesman for the group, said.

The prime minister's office said multiple sniper shots had been fired at the prime minister's car and television pictures showed two bullet marks a couple of inches apart on the cracked bullet-proof window.

Some reports suggested Gilani's son, Moosa, and Qamar Zaman Kaira, the federal minister for Kashmir and Northern affairs, were in the motorcade at the time, travelling to the airport to pick up the prime minister.

Officials said a formal investigation into the incident had been launched.

In the past, suspected al-Qaeda fighters have launched attacks on Pervez Musharraf - who stepped down as Pakistan's president last month - attacks the former president only narrowly survived.

Via Al Jazeera.

Comment:

It looks like the Taliban has opted for the John McCain approach of victory through force and force alone rather than the Barack Obama approach of victory pursued on all fronts. Had the Taliban just sat back and let Pakistani politics do its thing it would be in pretty good shape, as Khalid Aziz notes:

when the government is near success the old game of using parliament as a prop to defeat the will of the state is brought into play. Any revision of policy at this stage will be a great blow to the government. At the same time Pakistan is in the midst of a severe political crisis. This has occurred due to a breakdown of the coalition at the time of a Presidential election. The tribal areas have 20 electoral votes in this contest. The tribal MNAs and Senators have said that they would like the military activity stopped in Bajaur as a precondition for casting their votes for the PPP candidate. In short the Presidential contest has become a negotiable item in the path of security operations. The JUI (F) which has more than 30 Electoral College votes has categorically asked for a halt to all military operations.

This foolish strike on the Prime Minister's convoy will have the dual effect of hardening him against any compromise and of shoring up public sympathy for him and his party.

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.

Giving face to the faceless

This is a foiled suicide bomber. He tried to blow up an army bus in Kabul yesterday, but spooked the soldiers and was stopped.

It's amazing to actually see the face of a suicide bomber. In our minds, terror is abstract. "The terrorist" is a masked, faceless concept, studied and discussed but not personalized, little more than a number in a set of data. Now here we have the real thing, in the flesh, armed and ready to detonate. It is somewhat startling to look at this meek, passionless, unassuming man and realize that he actively desires the violent death of everyone around him, and would kill them all if not restrained. He offers none of the expected outward signs of a mass murderer — no struggling to break free, no shouting epithets at his captors, no venomous gazes. He just stands there, observing disinterestedly, almost as though bored. He doesn't even appear nervous. He's a prop. There is nothing in his demeanor, nothing in his expression, to indicate that he feels strongly enough in a cause to not only give his own life, but to take those of others as well. There is no sign of unholy ideology, no hint at outrage at his country's occupation, no inkling of desire for independence, or repression, or anything at all. There is nothing.

And I'm not sure what to make of that.

(h/t to Konservo)

Afghan suicide bomber kills own family

A mother who tried to stop her son from carrying out a suicide bomb attack triggered an explosion in the family's home in southern Afghanistan that killed the would-be bomber, his mother and three siblings, police said Monday.

The would-be bomber had been studying at a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan, and when he returned to his home in Uruzgan province over the weekend announced that he planned to carry out a suicide attack, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said.

Surviving family members told police that the suicide vest exploded during a struggle between the mother and her son, said Juma Gul Himat, Uruzgan's police chief. The man's brother and two sisters were also killed.

Family members said the would-be bomber gave his family $3,600 before telling them he intended to carry out the attack, Himat said.

Bashary said the explosion happened on Sunday, but Himat said it occurred on Monday morning. It was not clear why the two accounts differed.

[More]


Comment:

Sorry about the post hiatus, there was an unexpected development in my life that kept me somewhat preoccupied.

I posted this story as a reminder of the personal toll of the conflict. It is easy to get caught up in the grand machinations of state and system, and to forget that this war is being fought by real, individual human beings, each with their own story. Moreover, the battlefield itself is alive, filled with an elaborate tapestry of individual civilians; each one trying to life their life as normal, though chaos descends around them. On the broader analytical level, this story is of no importance. It was just another suicide bombing, and not even a particularly deadly one. On the incident maps I've been working on, it would just be another little red dot. But how much more is it to those whose lives it touched or ended! It is the single most momentous instant of their entire lives, the climax of their stories, and sometimes their end. What would not merit so much as a footnote in a history book would rival Shakespeare and Sophocles if fiction. But it is not fiction. No, this is all too very real.

This is the soul of war.

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.