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Sources Say Members in Hiding, Waiting for Right Time
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
(15:26 ET)
By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press Writer

Other Taliban and al-Qaida figures fled to Iran, Afghan sources say, despite Iranian denials that it is harboring any fugitives.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- AP
Protected by sympathetic clerics, up to 1,000 Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are hiding in Pakistan and planning a Taliban comeback in Afghanistan, according to Taliban members and others familiar with the Islamic movement.

Most of the exiles -- including some of the best-known figures in the Islamic militia -- live quietly in Pakistan’s lawless frontier region, protected by tribal leaders of their own Pashtun ethnic group in an area where the central government’s authority is limited.

Many of the Taliban fugitives remain convinced that interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai’s hold on power depends on U.S. support and once the Americans are gone, they will have little trouble dealing with Afghans who are now allied with Washington.

“I am waiting for the big war,” said Mullah Towha, former chief of security for the Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Nangharhar province. “America and Britain will have to leave one day, and then we will have a jihad against those Afghans who fought with them against other Muslims.”

The mullah, who has trimmed his beard and abandoned his distinctive Taliban turban for a white skullcap, spoke to The Associated Press in a car as it weaved through the Khyber Pass in the middle of Pakistan’s tribal belt. He lives in an Islamic shrine protected by a “pir,” or holy man.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied knowingly harboring al-Qaida and Taliban renegades and has insisted that intelligence service links to extremists were severed after President Pervez Musharraf threw his support to the U.S.-led war on terrorism last year.

“There is absolutely no truth in these reports,” chief government spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Quereshi told AP on Tuesday. He called the idea that Pakistani intelligence was still supporting Taliban fugitives “nonsense” and “part of a malicious campaign against Pakistan.”
(More: MDJ Online News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

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