Is the ISI-Haqqani alliance cracking up?

The mystery murder of commander Naseeruddin Haqqani in Islamabad has given rise to the buzz that the decades-old controversial alliance between the Pakistani security establishment and the North Waziristan-based Haqqani militant network is cracking up.

This is happening mainly because of the network’s involvement in several acts of terrorism in Pakistan while working in tandem with the TTP. The group is considered by many as one of the ISI’s strategic assets.

The investigators are still clueless about Naseeruddin’s assassins, with speculation that he might have been killed by his friends-turned-foes in the Pakistani establishment.The TTP spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, has blamed the murder on the ISI and vowed to take revenge. “Naseeruddin Haqqani has been martyred by none other than theISI. He was killed because he had bravely supported the TTP Ameer Hakimullah Mehsud,” Shahidullah told AFP on Monday night when asked about the possible killer.

However, while no one has claimed responsibility for the murder, the ISI circles suspect the hand of either the TTP or Afghan National Directorate of Security. Some say his killing is related to a family dispute he had with a cousin, Ishaq, whom Naseeruddin suspected of working with the Afghan intelligence.

Some think that the Central Intelligence Agency, which runs the drone programme, is behind it. But whoever killed Naseeruddin, the fact remains that he resided relatively openly in the federal capital (despite being wanted by the US) which was simply impossible without the consent of the Pakistani establishment.

His death came a week after a drone strike killed Hakimullah Mehsud. Both the TTP and Haqqani militant network are based side by side in the Miranshah area. Naseeruddin and Hakimullah have been laid to rest at Danday Darpakhel village in North Waziristan’s headquarters Miranshah, where some family members of Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani have been living since 1980. Hakimullah was also droned in the same village, which is largely administered by the al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani militant network.

Despite the known presence of Haqqani network, al-Qaeda and other foreign militants groups in North Waziristan, and repeated requests by the United States that action be taken against them, the Pakistani military authorities are reluctant to proceed against them.

This is despite the fact that the Haqqani network is involved in some of the biggest terror attacks in Kabul, including the January 2008 suicide assault on the Serena Hotel, the February 2009 assault on Afghan ministries, and the July 2008 and October 2009 suicide attacks against the Indian Embassy. American intelligence agencies had confronted the Pakistani government with evidence, including communication intercepts, which hinted at ISI’s direct involvement in the 2008 Indian Embassy suicide bombing.

Following Pakistan’s refusal to act against the Haqqanis, Admiral Mike Mullen, the then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had singled out the network (in 2011) as “a veritable arm” of ISI — a characterisation Islamabad has disputed.

But almost two years later, the situation seems to have changed quite rapidly, with many in the Pakistani establishment considering the Haqqani militant network as a liability rather than an asset (which the Khakis wanted to use to their strategic advantage after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan).

In fact, the establishment is lately perturbed over increasing number of intelligence reports of ever-growing cooperation between the TTP and Haqqanis, especially while carrying out terrorist activities which are directed against the Pakistani security forces in the tribal belt.

Naseeruddin was using his Shahpur area residence-cum-office in the federal capital not only to run his huge transport business but also as the media office of the Haqqani network. Known in the media as Zabihullah Mujahid, Naseeruddin was a spokesperson for his militant group. He was also the chief finance controller of the Haqqani network and would regularly visit the Middle Eastern countries to raise funds. He was also the leader of the Miranshah Regional Military Shura, one of the four regional commands of the Afghan Taliban.

The US Treasury Department added Naseeruddin to its list of specially-designated global terrorists in July 2010. According to the Treasury, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates between 2004-2009 to carry out fundraising for the Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda, and Taliban.

Due to his friendly ties with Hakimullah Mehsud, Naseeruddin had been mediating between the Pakistani authorities and TTP leadership for a peace deal. However, he became annoyed with the Pakistani authorities over Hakimullah’s killing in a village that is being controlled by the Haqqani network. Therefore, while accusing Islamabad of having provided intelligence to the Americans about Hakimullah’s precise location in Danday Darpakhel, Naseeruddin simply refused to cooperate with the Pakistani authorities, thus inviting their wrath.

But there are those in the security establishment who believe that Naseeruddin might have been killed by the TTP to avenge the killing of Hakimullah who was guaranteed by the Haqqanis that he would not be harmed if he travelled to Danday Darpakhel.

On the other hand, a spokesman for the Haqqani network, Najeebullah, has blamed the ISI for Naseeruddin’s murder, saying he had been mediating between a powerful agency and the Pakistani Taliban for peace talks. “But he had refused to mediate further following Hakimullah’s death and the subsequent announcement of TTP not to hold any further talks. Naseeruddin’s reluctance to mediate after Hakimullah’s killing must have annoyed the powerful agency to an extent that it decided to eliminate him,” the spokesman of the Haqqani network has been quoted by the media as saying.

In fact, Naseeruddin’s killing is curious in many ways, especially being the manner in which he was shot dead in a busy bazaar of Islamabad.

Most of the Haqqani network leaders of Naseeruddin’s stature have been killed in US drone strikes in the Waziristan tribal belt as had been the case with his brother Burhanuddin Haqqani. But Naseeruddin has been killed far from North Waziristan which is the Haqqani’s base of operations in the Fata and where he was feeling quite safe.

His killing in the federal capital must be hugely embarrassing for the Pakistan government as well as the security establishment, which had fended off American accusations for years that it sheltered the Haqqani militant network.

It was only last year that a leaked ISAF report in Afghanistan claimed that the ISI was directly supporting the Haqqani network’s terrorist campaign inside Afghanistan. “Senior Taliban representatives, such as Naseeruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of the ISI headquarters in Islamabad,” the ISAF report had stated.

Naseeruddin’s killing on the Pakistani territory also mirrors the May 2011 American raid that killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, highlighting how openly the most wanted al-Qaeda leaders live in Pakistan.

More: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-13-26627-Is-the-ISI-Haqqani-alliance-cracking-up

Al Qaeda claims killing of French journalists in Mali - report

The Mauritanian news website Sahara Medias said on Wednesday it had received a claim of responsibility from al Qaeda's regional wing for the killing of two French journalists in northern Mali.

A Sahara Medias reporter said a spokesman for Abdelkrim al-Targui, a senior regional commander for al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), had called by satellite phone to read a communiqué in Arabic. The caller had started by speaking in Tamashek, the language spoken by Tuaregs in northern Mali.

The communiqué said the killing was only a small part of the price French President Francois Hollande and his people would have to pay for this year's military intervention, which drove out Islamist militants who had seized half the country.

Sahara Medias is often sent statements by Islamist militants in Mali.

According to the communiqué published on Sahara Medias' website, AQIM said the killing of the two journalists for Radio France International on Saturday was a response to "crimes perpetrated by France and its U.N., Malian and African allies".

France now shares security duties in Mali with African and U.N. peacekeepers and local troops, which generally keep a low profile.

On Tuesday, France announced it had bolstered its military presence by 150 troops in Kidal - a northern stronghold of Tuareg separatist rebels where instability has grown in recent months, and where the journalists were abducted.

Malian Justice Minister Mohamed Ali Bathily told the French channel BFM TV that analysis of mobile phone data "indicates that some of the arrested people were in contact with AQIM".

The French daily Le Monde reported on Tuesday that three of the four abductors had been identified by French intelligence and the military as Islamists from a Tuareg clan, after a document was found in a car abandoned at the scene.

A French government spokeswoman declined to comment and an official at the French presidency said Paris was supporting the Malian government so that the murders did not go unpunished.

In March, AQIM announced it had killed another French hostage, Philippe Verdon, in response to France's intervention in Mali. His body was found by French troops in July.

Last week, four other French hostages kidnapped by Islamists in neighbouring Niger were released.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said after the killings that Paris would not delay a planned reduction of its troop presence from 3,200 to 1,000 scheduled for February.

It aims to hand control of security to a U.N. mission that will number 12,600 when it reaches full strength.

Mali is due to hold a parliamentary election on November 24 to follow a presidential vote held in August.

More: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/06/uk-mali-france-kidnap-idUKBRE9A514A20131106

U.S. Said to Hold Qaeda Suspect on Navy Ship

An accused operative for Al Qaeda seized by United States commandos in Libya over the weekend is being interrogated while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said on Sunday. He is expected eventually to be sent to New York for criminal prosecution.


The fugitive, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, is seen as a potential intelligence gold mine, possessing perhaps two decades of information about Al Qaeda, from its early days under Osama bin Laden in Sudan to its more scattered elements today.

The decision to hold Abu Anas and question him for intelligence purposes without a lawyer present follows a pattern used successfully by the Obama administration with other terrorist suspects, most prominently in the case of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a former military commander with the Somali terrorist group Shabab.

Mr. Warsame was captured in 2011 by the American military in the Gulf of Aden and interrogated aboard a Navy ship for about two months without being advised of his rights or provided a lawyer.

After a break of several days, Mr. Warsame was advised of his rights, waived them, was questioned for about a week by law enforcement agents and was then sent to Manhattan for prosecution.

“Warsame is the model for this guy,” one American security official said.

Mr. Warsame later pleaded guilty and has been cooperatingwith the government, providing intelligence information about his co-conspirators, who included “high-level international terrorist operatives,” federal prosecutors have said in court papers.

Abu Anas is being held aboard the U.S.S. San Antonio, a vessel brought in specifically for this mission, officials said.

Abu Anas, 49, who was born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, was indicted in Manhattan in 2000 on charges of conspiring with Bin Laden in plots to attack United States forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, as well as in the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

He has been described as a Qaeda computer expert and helped to conduct surveillance of the embassy in Nairobi, according to evidence in trials stemming from the bombings. In investigating the attacks, the authorities recovered a Qaeda terrorism manual in Abu Anas’s residence in Manchester, England.

The manual is a detailed treatise on how to carry out terrorist missions. It focuses on forged documents, safe houses, surveillance, assassinations, codes and interrogation techniques. It also cites “blasting and destroying the embassies and attacking vital economic centers,” and it endorses the use of explosives, saying they “strike the enemy with sheer terror and fright.”

It is not known if Abu Anas wrote the manual, but federal prosecutors introduced it as evidence in the 2001 trial of four operatives convicted in the bombings conspiracy, and in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be tried in the federal system.

The manual was also used in a 2006 trial in Virginia over whether to impose the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. (He received a life sentence.)

The Defense Department, in a statement on Sunday, said Abu Anas was “currently lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya.”

“Wherever possible,” the statement said, “our first priority is and always has been to apprehend terrorist suspects, and to preserve the opportunity to elicit valuable intelligence that can help us protect the American people.”

Officials declined on Sunday to confirm that New York was Abu Anas’s destination, but two officials suggested it was likely.

The seizure of Abu Anas was carried out by American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Navy SEALs, meanwhile, carried out a raid on the Somali coast, trying without success to capture a senior leader of the Shabab, the group that carried out the massacre at the Nairobi shopping mall two weeks ago.

Another American official emphasized that the commando raids in Libya and Somalia were designed to capture the intended targets, not to kill them with Predator drone missiles, the signature counterterrorism weapon of the Obama administration.

“If we can, capturing terrorists provides valuable intelligence that we can’t get if we kill them,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing interrogation.

Abu Anas is one of about two dozen defendants charged in federal court in Manhattan in a series of indictments that began in 1998, when Bin Laden was charged, and which expanded over the years to add other operatives.

With Abu Anas’s capture, only a handful of those operatives are believed to remain alive and at large, most prominently Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Bin Laden who succeeded the Qaeda leader after he was killed in a 2011 American operation.

One of Bin Laden’s former close aides, a Sudanese named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl who defected from the group in the mid-1990s and became a cooperating witness for the American government, testified in 2001 that Abu Anas was a computer engineer who ran the group’s computers.

Abu Anas was also part of a small team of Qaeda operatives that in the early 1990s traveled to Nairobi and carried out surveillance of the American Embassy and other potential bomb targets, according to the indictment and other evidence.

The photographs, diagrams and surveillance report from the Nairobi mission were ultimately reviewed by Bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, the government has said.

“Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” another member of the surveillance team, Ali A. Mohamed, said in federal court when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2000.

News of Abu Anas’s capture was welcomed by family members of victims.

“Of course, our hearts are still very much tied to that day,” said Edith Bartley, whose father, Julian L. Bartley Sr., the consul general, and brother, Julian L. Bartley Jr., a college student working as an intern, were both killed in the attack in Nairobi.

Ms. Bartley said her mother, Sue, traveled regularly to New York from the Washington area for the Ghailani trial in 2010, and she said they would both attend any trial involving Abu Anas.

“It’s a reminder to the courts and to others involved that the person who’s on trial impacted real people, people who were serving their country abroad,” she said.

Credits: nytimes

Twitter's most celebrated tweets include Osama raid and Obama victory

Twitter filed for its IPO on Thursday and reportedly included some of the coolest tweets ever in its documents. The tweets included were heavy on ads and light on spams, and Twitter might be the only company to include Osama bin Laden in its IPO filing as the latter's terrorist group al Qaeda recently launched its official account on the site, before being suspended.

According to the Huffington Post, some of the coolest tweets on the site include the historic win of Barack Obama in the US presidential elections and Abbottabad resident Sohaib Athar's live tweet about the Osama bin Laden raid.

Other tweets which make it to the best of tweets include those sent during the Hurricane Sandy event with the American Red Cross constantly updating about the rescue measures.

An Everest climb live-tweeted, Oreo's controversial Super Bowl tweet, Royal Baby birth tweet and obviously Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet that read as 'Just setting up my twttr', made to the microblogging site's most memorable and coolest tweets since its inception in 2006.

Credits: hindustantimes

Russian embassy in Libya attacked, no injuries among diplomats

Russia's embassy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli came under attack on Wednesday and gunmen tried to enter the compound, a spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry said. He said that according to preliminary reports no Russian diplomats were injured, but gave no further details. "In Tripoli ...a shooting occurred and there was an attempt to enter the territory of the Russian embassy in Libya," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich, speaking on Russian state television.

"According to the most preliminary information there were no injuries among members of the Russian diplomatic mission." Since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi two years ago, clan and tribal rivalries have flourished and security services, themselves factionalised, have struggled to maintain order. There have been a number of attacks on Western diplomatic missions, the worst being directed against the US consulate in Benghazi. Militants linked to al Qaeda affiliates attacked the US consulate and killed Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans on September 11, 2012.

Western powers, using air power, led the military campaign that ultimately toppled Gaddafi. Russia, however, did not take part in the action and condemned what it called the West's abuse of a United Nations Security Council to intervene.