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Taliban: al-Qaida Recovering
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press Writer

The al-Qaida terrorist network is trying to establish a safe haven in Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s second-in-command Gen. John M. Keane told the troops in Kandahar on Saturday. ‘‘They are trying to establish another safe haven now in Pakistan, and we will deal with that. When the time is right, we will deal with that one as well.’’

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- AP
Two former high-ranking Taliban talk of reorganizing their militant religious movement and describe a recovering al-Qaida -- all while they sit secretly inside Pakistan, Washington’s front-line ally in the war on international terrorism.

In an interview with The Associated Press, they said the Afghan-Pakistan border can’t be sealed to stop the movement of militants. Even more advantageous, they said, is the split within Pakistan’s powerful spy agency between those who share the Taliban’s ideology and those who support Pakistan’s alliance with America.

One of the two, Fazul Rabi Said-Rahman, was the Taliban army corps commander for eastern Afghanistan. During the last six months of Taliban rule he was chief of police in Paktika province, an area still considered by the U.S.-led anti-terrorist coalition to be harboring fugitive Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

The other man, Obeidullah, was an assistant to the Taliban’s intelligence chief Qari Ahmadullah, who was killed by a U.S. bomb in January in eastern Afghanistan.

Speaking in Pashtu through an interpreter, they said the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and al-Qaida’s leader, Osama bin Laden, are both alive, but offered no specifics on the Saudi dissident who leads al-Qaida. They said that they had met with Omar within the last two months ‘‘in the mountains in Afghanistan.’’

They did not claim to have seen bin Laden or explain how they knew he was alive. ‘‘He is waiting for the next big attack and then he will show his body,’’ Obeidullah said.
(More: Starbanner.com News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

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