We Start Where The Media
Stop
Friday, March 8, 2002
HEADLINES
Afghans Bring up Tanks to Cut
off Taliban Reinforcements
Delays in US Afghan Offensive
Could Hold up Iraqi Operation
Read DEBKAfile Military
Analysis below
Fighting Dies Down in Tulkarem
Camp After Scores of
Armed Palestinians Surrender
to Israeli Forces,
Lay Down Arms Friday – Most
from Arafat’s Fatah-Tanzim, Force-17 and Palestinian Security Organs
Staff Sgt. Edouard Korol, 20,
from Ashdod,
Is Killed Friday in Tulkarm
Action
Gunfire Exchanges Accompany
Israeli Tank-Infantry
Force’s Entry Early
Friday to Bethlehem’s
Al Aideh Camp, Beit Sahur, Daheisha,
el Khader, and
Rachel’s Tomb Area in
Bethlehem Center
Palestinians Report 14 Dead
Friday
Israeli Border Police Shoot
Dead Palestinian Suicide
Wearing Bomb Belt on Way to
Jerusalem from
Outlying Beit Hanina
He Was Fifth Palestinian Bomber
Stopped Since
Friday Morning – in Jerusalem
Alone
Total of 34 Israelis Die at
Terrorist Hands in Six Days
In Midnight Shooting-Grenade
Attack Thursday
Hamas Suicide Killed 5, Injured
23 – Most Very
Seriously - at Pre-Military
Academy in
Gaza Strip Settlement of Atzmona
Terrorist Killed by Army Officer
Four of the Dead Youths, all
aged 18, Are:
Asher Marcus, Ariel Zana, Eran
Picard – from Jerusalem
Tal Kurtzweil - from Bnei Berak
In Gaza Strip, Palestinian South
Gaza National Security Chief,
Maj.-Gen. Ahmed Mefrej, Killed
Vice President Cheney Leaves
for
12-Nation Mid East Tour
US Mid Envoy Anthony Returns
to Region Next Week
To Subscribe to DEBKAfile
Intelligence Newsletter,
Click HERE
Slow
Progress in Afghanistan May Delay US Iraq Offensive
DEBKAfileMilitary
Analysis
March: DEBKAfile’s military experts report
the intense fighting over the past week in the mountains of Afghanistan
south of Gardez, between the US 101st Airborne and 10th
Mountain divisions and al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, is beginning to impinge
on US preparations for its coming assault on Iraq.
A poor showing by the hundreds of Afghans fighting alongside
US troops has forced US military planners to pour into the battle zone
American reinforcements that were earmarked for other combat arenas.
DEBKAfile’s
military sources say general Tommy Franks, the US Central Command chief,
transferred to the Gardez battlefield US forces standing by on Oman’s
Masirah Island base for the US offensive against Iraq. Several thousand
more may have to follow, if fighting flares up in additional Taliban-al
Qaeda pockets around Afghanistan.
US forces in Gardez commanded by major general Frank
Hagenbeck faced a hard fact this week: the joint US-Afghan force was unable
to stem the influx of Taliban and al-Qaeda reinforcements from Pakistan,
only several dozen kilometers away, and from among additional enemy concentrations
in Afghanistan – particularly since Thursday, when the mountain region
was struck with blinding snow storms.
DEBKAfile’s
military sources say that, while the Americans were pouring additional
soldiers, 17 assault helicopters and tank-busting A-10 aircraft into the
area, the other side was moving in reinforcements too, equipped with large
quantities of anti-tank missiles and various shoulder-held surface-to-air
missiles, including US-made Stingers.
US spy satellites and drones spotted groups of Taliban
and al-Qaeda converging on the battle zone from as far away as the Hindu
Kush mountains, north of the city of Jalalabad, and the Zabul province
south of Gardez.
US commanders had hoped to win the battle before the
enemy reinforcements arrived. But military experts watching the fighting
judged this hope illusory. They estimate the engagement will continue past
the weekend and into its second week, reaching a climax at mid-week.
DEBKAfile’s
military experts report that the Taliban and al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan
appear to be bucked up enough by their success in standing up to the American-led
assault to revise their planning. Previously, Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist
attacks had been plotted for US forces, UN peacekeepers and other targets
linked to the interim government of Hamid Karzai, in major Afghan cities,
such as Kabul, Kandahar and Mazer e-Sharif. The bulk of their forces were
to have been reserved in enclaves for a summer counter-offensive to be
launched around the country in mid-June or early July.
But now, Taliban and al-Qaeda chiefs have decided to
delay no longer. Instead of waiting for the United States to move against
their enclaves, they are going on the offensive to try and “draw†US
forces to the strongholds.
Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders see the balance of war
tilting to their side, noting that Afghan fighters in the Gardez front
do not share US troops’ enthusiasm and dedication to their missions.
Back in December, during the assault on the Tora Bora cave complex, Afghans
were clearly reluctant – even for good pay – to carry on fighting
the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The same manifestation recurred in this week’s
battles.
The escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict too further
complicates America’s military situation. Should the violence spill over
and the Lebanese Hizballh – buttressed by al Qaeda militants - join the
fray to ease Israel’s military pressure on the Palestinians, Washington’s
plans and timetable for its Iraq campaign would be set back once again.
________________________________________
New
US-Afghan Offensive is an Eye Opener
DEBKAfile
Military Analysis
March: The largest joint air-ground, US-Afghan offensive of the
Afghanistan war on terror is now in its third day in the snow-clad, inaccessible
mountains of Arma in the eastern Afghanistan province of Paktia. It was
launched to pre-empt the regrouping of the al Qaeda and Taliban remnants
sheltering there – estimated by DEBKAfile’s military
sources as possibly 8,000 - for a counter-offensive when the spring thaw
sets in.
On November 13, 2001, just before Kabul fell to the Northern
Alliance, DEBKAfile reported:
As for the current turbulence inside Afghanistan,
DEBKAfile
’s military experts note that only a fraction of the Taliban’s estimated
60,000 strong army was struck down in the latest round of fighting. Most
fell back with their weapons - almost without firing a shot. Before abandoning
Kabul, they emptied the banks. Even the 55th Brigade, the main
military force commanded by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zuwehiri, remains
pretty much unscathed. Intelligence reports describe the brigade as “melting
away†from the battlefront, presumably to prepared hideouts in the mountains.
Taliban tactics are plain: Pulverized by US bombardment
and disarrayed by the Northern Alliance’s momentum, Taliban and al Qaeda
forces decided to husband their resources and take advantage of the heavy
snows already blocking the mountain passes, in order to dig on for a long
winter of guerrilla combat.
On Saturday, March 2, one American and three US-allied
Afghans were killed when a US-led ground force of 1,500 Afghans, US Special
Forces and 101st Airborne assault troops closed in on Taliban-al
Qaeda hideouts in Arma.
Sunday’s assault consisted mostly of heavy air strikes.
US Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers, F-15E fighters and
AC-130 gunships blasted the caves around Gardez with laser- and satellite-guided
bombs, as well as 2,000-pound suffocating “thermobaric†bombs.
The Russian Army used this type of bomb against Chechen
insurgents in the nineties, to little effect. Moscow’s failure to put
down the rebellion in seven years of fighting is partly responsible for
the arrival of US Special Forces in neighboring Georgia in the last two
weeks.
US and Afghan intelligence estimate that if thousands
of enemy troops are allowed to return to the fray in early April, they
will be capable of tipping the scales in Kabul, the capital, and the key
city of Kandahar. Already, the Taliban and al Qaeda are reported sending
advance parties out to extend their areas of control in the Zabol Province
in the east and Ghazni in the south, bribing local tribesmen with money
and weapons.
DEBKAfile’s military
sources report that the US-Afghan force appears to be facing a mainly Taliban
force with a small – no more than 300-500-man - al Qaeda element, mostly
Pakistanis, Yemenis and Chechens, who made it out of Kandahar and Tora
Bora in earlier stages of the fighting.
The current offensive, which needs another week at least,
has already been an eye-opener. The American-Afghan setback on Saturday
demonstrated that the Taliban and its al Qaeda partners had studied the
five-month battlefront – especially the Tora Bora campaign of mid-December
– and drawn some lessons. They are in far better shape now than in the
days of the Mazar- e-Sharif, Konduz and Tora Bora battles.
The Tora Bora engagement was for the Taliban and al Qaeda
no more than a delaying maneuver to cover a rapid tactical withdrawal in
the face of superior strength. Today, their objectives and style of combat
are quite different. They have replaced their small, undisciplined bands
and free-ranging chiefs with an organized central command at the head of
a hierarchy, arming the revamped units with communications equipment and
decent clothes. Their arsenal is substantial, containing such heavy weaponry
as missiles, mortars and heavy machine guns, which they have learned to
use economically. Seen against Afghan battlefield traditions, their food
and ammunition supply systems are much enhanced, as are their facilities
for caring for the wounded, including evacuation to hospital.
There are signs that they have developed a competent,
real-time field intelligence capability; their units are also far more
mobile and flexible, they time counter-attacks for the hours of dark, have
learned to evade US bombing strikes by day and fortify their positions.
The Taliban also command a reserve force – not large
but adequate - part of which is standing by across the border in West Pakistan.
Faced with enhanced and expanded Taliban-al Qaeda combat
capabilities, US strategists will need to retool their assault plans accordingly.
It must be scheduled for no later than March 15-20, before the receding
winter snows open up the mountain passes to Taliban movement.
One other problem confronting US military planners is
psychological: After declaring the Taliban and al Qaeda routed in Afghanistan
and having installed a new democratic regime in Kabul, they must deal with
the prospect of a lengthy American military presence to finish a job believed
done. The Taliban were thrown out of Afghanistan’s cities, but withdrew
to remote and mountainous country - and over the border to Pakistan - with
their military strength unimpaired.
Al Qaeda too may have lost the use of its Afghan base,
but this extremist group has likewise retained its strength, having sent
its followers to safety in Pakistan, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia,
Chechnya, Syria and Lebanon.
The Taliban fighters, after resting up for the winter
among friendly Pashtun tribal clans, are now reported by DEBKAfile’s
military sources to be making their way back towards centers in Kandahar
province, the Hindu Kush range north of Jalalabad, the Pamir panhandle
wedged between Tajikistan, China and India, and Oruzgan. They intend to
use those centers as springboards for a comeback in Kabul – but are quite
capable of playing a waiting game until the American military has given
up and gone home.
________________________________________
Israel
Begins Sealing off Refugee Camps –
Like
Jordan, Lebanon and Syria
DEBKAfile
Military Analysis 
March: Friday night, March 1, on the third day of their first
large-scale counter-terror operations in the refugee camps of Nablus and
Jenin, Israeli armed forces, led by troops of the Golani infantry brigade,
pulled back from the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin to its outskirts.
A few hours later, a Palestinian bomber struck the heart
of the ultra-orthodox Jerusalem district of Beit Israel, near Mea Shearim.
The narrow streets were crowded with families coming out of synagogue at
Sabbath’s end. Most of the nine killed and the 51 injured were children.
The attack came on the heels of intelligence information
reaching the prime minister’s office on Friday March 1, quoting Yasser
Arafat as pledging to his immediate circle that the Israeli military offensive
in the camps would not deter him from turning Israeli cities into a “second
Lebanonâ€.
DEBKAfile’s sources,
surveying the concatenation of events, find that while the Israeli assault
on the camps is the start of a long-running program to beard the most militant
terrorist groups in their bases and choke off their access to Israeli centers,
Arafat is working fast with immediate effect. Therefore, the military thrusts
against Palestinian terrorist hotbeds on the West Bank cannot be expected
in the short term to reduce atrocities like the one in Jerusalem.
Unlike Jenin, the paratroop unit that drove into the
Nablus camp of Balata on Thursday, February 28, is still there. The paratroop
brigade commander, Col. Aviv Cochavi said: “This most impenetrable place
showed aggressive resistance, but finally surrendered. The tiger curled
up like a cat…â€
According to DEBKAfile ’s military sources,
the ultimate purpose of the military thrusts into both camps, the most
extensive since the onset of the Palestinian confrontation in September
2000, is to cut the Palestinian refugee camps off from outside access
- just as they are in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. But first, they are being
purged and their terror infrastructure dismantled.
Jenin and Balata were chosen as the first to be cleansed
and secluded. According to intelligence evaluations, they housed the largest
concentrations of Fatah al Aqsa Brigades militants, as well as the largest
West Bank manufacturing units for Qasam rockets and launchers, and workshops
for fabricating bomb belts and explosive devices. Next are the Nur Shams
camp of Tulkarm and Aweida near Bethlehem, both on the West Bank.
In Jenin and Balata, the local terror militias showed
poor fighting ability and low motivation, in striking contrast to their
leader’s belligerent rhetoric. They tried to halt the Israeli incursion
by hurling at the tanks, APCs and troops, 130 explosive charges and bomb
belts, made up ready for their next suicide and terror strikes against
Israeli civilian targets.
When this counter-assault failed, the Palestinian al
Aqsa militiamen surprised everyone by falling back, appearing to lack any
more weapons of resistance, barring occasional snipers. When the Israeli
force approached their bases, the Aqsa gunmen fled and made for the town
centers of Jenin and Nablus in order to lose themselves among civilians.
In Nablus, they plunged into the Casbah, some disguising themselves as
women or feigning injuries in order to be rescued by Red Crescent ambulances.
Israeli troops shot at the fleeing fugitives.
The Palestinian casualty toll was accordingly high: 30
dead and 220 injured, some critically, in three days of combat. Israeli
forces suffered 2 soldiers killed and 3 injured.
Israel’s military planners took into account that the
al Aqsa terrorists surviving the Israeli raid would head for the town centers,
a development intended as the third stage in the load of the pressure building
up on Arafat in Ramallah, isolate him further and expose his hand in the
terrorism
bedeviling the region.
In the first stage, executed on December 3, 2001, his
aircraft and air strip in the Gaza Strip were demolished and he was confined
to Ramallah; the second, a month later, was the capture of the Palestinian
arms smuggling vessel on the Red Sea, exposing his links with Middle East
and international terrorists The third is the campaign to eradicate the
terrorist infestations controlling the refugee camps, which were hitherto
immune as too dangerous to tackle without heavy collateral damage to civilians.
This last stage pours salt on the serious divisions in
the Palestinian leadership.
The fleeing al Aqsa militiamen, after reaching relative
safety in the Nablus and Jenin town centers, are waiting for Arafat’s
Ramallah headquarters to send logistic and other aid to enable them to
regroup.
Al Aqsa Brigades’ political and military backing consists
of Arafat and his closest cronies, most of whom were with him in exile
in Tunis and beside him through the Oslo 1993 process that led to Palestinian
autonomy in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Contd. in opp. col.
·
US-led
Afghan Offensive Pushes on
March: General Tommy Franks, head of the American Central Command,
claims the United States has applied the lessons drawn from previous battle
of the Afghan War, especially the Tora Bora engagement, in the current
push against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds south of Gardez in East Afghanistan.
He promises that in this offensive, dubbed Operation Anaconda, the two
forces will not get away across the border into Pakistan. They will have
to surrender or be killed.
He is probably right. Operation Anaconda is the largest
US-led air and ground offensive of the Afghan War. Some 2000 coalition
troops are ringing al Qaeda-Taliban hideouts in the east Afghan Paktia
Mountains. Coalition bombers are relentlessly blasting their mountain strongholds.
Some 100 to 200 rebels have been killed in the operation since it began
five days ago, and a small number taken prisoner - Taliban fighters, as
well Chechens and Uzbeks.
But the rebels are fighting back. Monday, March 4, al
Qaeda and Taliban fighters fired machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades
at two US helicopters, killing seven American soldiers. Tuesday, fresh
US coalition troops were moved into the front lines.
DEBKAfile’s military
analysts contend that even if the US-led operation achieves its objectives
in full, its success will be short-lived. After the Gardez rebel concentration
is broken up, making the highways to Kabul and Kandahar safe, it will be
restocked gradually as of late spring from the other pockets of resistance
around the country and across the border in Pakistan, Kashmir and the Ferangha
Valley of Central Asia – in all of which thousands of Chechen, Uzbek,
Chinese, Tadjik and Kazakh extremist Muslim militants are waiting their
chance to creep back into Afghanistan. The US-Afghan force can dissolve
pockets of resistance, but it cannot block off the constant passage of
itinerant Taliban and al Qaeda militants up and down thousands of miles
of routes, crisscrossing half a dozen countries.
Military strength, even assisted by technological surveillance,
is unequal to this task, without efficient intelligence to pinpoint and
hit those routes. This capability the Americans lack for the moment in
Afghanistan and outside the country. Nor do they appear to be expending
effort on repairing this deficiency. The US command seems to have set itself
the task of striking at one stationary Taliban al-Qaeda pocket after another.
It has little chance of catching rebels on the move now – any more than
it had in the battles of Konduz and Tora Bora.
________________________________________
Arafat
Races… Bush
DEBKAfile
Special Analysis
March: Tuesday, between 02:15 and 09:00 hours Israel time, Palestinian
terrorists slew 5 Israelis and injured 63 in attacks in Tel Aviv, Afula
and the Tunnel Road leading out of Jerusalem. Each time the level of bloodshed
hits a new and intolerable high – as it did last Saturday and Sunday
– it gets worse.
By upping the pace of terror attacks and killing more
Israelis, Arafat is throwing a gauntlet at the feet of US president George
W. Bush - namely, he will prove he can topple Ariel Sharon before the Americans
even get started on overturning Saddam Hussein.
DEBKAfile’s military,
intelligence and Palestinian sources report Arafat is determined to turn
his confrontation against Israel into Saddam Hussein’s front line against
the United States. Certain the Americans will fail, he is standing solidly
behind the side he expects to win, Iraq – and challenging the losers,
the United States and Israel.
This is a repeat of Arafat’s 1991Gulf War performance.
Then too, he advised Saddam to tie his strategy to the Palestinian problem,
whereupon the Iraqi ruler defined his 1990 invasion of Kuwait as the first
round in the war of liberation for Palestine.
To help Saddam, therefore, two weeks ago, Arafat unleashed
two of his private militias, the 30,000-strong Tanzim and the al Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades – who are in close communication with Iraqi military intelligence
- for the current terror offensive against Israeli targets, scaling the
level of violence up every three days.
In the small hours of Tuesday March 5, a Palestinian
armed with an M-16 assault rifle, a long knife, hand grenades and a bomb-belt,
climbed onto the MaarivBridge in south Tel Aviv and opened fire on the
traffic passing below and two of the many restaurants nearby. When hand
grenades began flying, a Tel Aviv police officer, Salim Barakat, 33, from
the Druse village of Yarka, Galilee, performed an outstanding act of bravery
that stopped the rampage of terror: he gave chase and
Current Events » in reply to They have always been around
Re: They have always been around