al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2016 part 19-138-caliphate-the state of...

CdW Intelligence to Rent -2016- In Confidence [email protected]

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-57-Comeback-9

They never left.

ISIS in serious decline but Al Qaeda and Taliban are BACK - and planning more attacks; "the intelligence community has been unable to stay ahead of the curve, constantly reacting, moving from crisis to crisis"ISIS numbers are at their lowest levels since 2014 after a wave of military action in Iraq and Syria - but Al Qaeda and the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, its defence minister has warned.

The territory held by ISIS extremists has been reduced by 40 per cent in Iraq and 10 per cent in Syria in the last year, according to the US deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

But as international and local military action works to wipe out the terror group, it was confirmed that rival terror faction Al Qaeda is still 'very active' and a 'big threat' in Afghanistan.

The 5,500 troops earmarked to remain in Afghanistan next year will mainly focus on counter-terrorism operations, but Afghan troops, who already conduct the bulk of missions, will take an increasing share, Nicholson said. "We possess the capabilities here if it were necessary to do a unilateral operation," he said, but added: "that would be less frequent".

The worrying claim was made by Afghanistan's defence minister Masoom Stanikzai, who revealed that the two terror groups were on the rise in the country after years of decline. Mr Stanikzai also made a chilling prediction that the resurgent jihadis were planning "bigger attacks" - awakening bitter memories of Al Qaeda's September 11 killings in America and the countless massacres of innocent Afghan people by Taliban soldiers during their

Since 2010, the US military and intelligence services have maintained that al Qaeda had a minimal presence of 50 to 100 operatives in Afghanistan. Now a senior general in Afghanistan admits the estimate needs to be revised. The Long War Journal has warned from the beginning that the conventional estimate was wrong.This week, acting Afghan Defense Minister Masoom Stanekzai told CNN that al-Qaeda was resurgent.

“They are really very active. They are working in quiet and reorganizing themselves and preparing themselves for bigger attacks…They are working behind other networks, giving them support and the experience they had in different places. And double their resources and recruitment and other things,” Stanekzai said. ”[T]hey are not talking too much. They are not making press statements. It is a big threat.”

Is al-Qaeda Back in Afghanistan? They never left.

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

CdW Intelligence to Rent of 12 02/05/2023

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By Catherine PutzApril 15, 2016 Al-Qaeda is ostensibly the reason the United States got involved militarily in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. But as the war in Afghanistan progressed, al-Qaeda receded as a target and seemingly as an active player. When Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 in neighboring Pakistan, the group seemed to be at a nadir. But this week, acting Afghan Defense Minister Masoom Stanekzai told CNN that al-Qaeda was resurgent.“They are really very active. They are working in quiet and reorganizing themselves and preparing themselves for bigger attacks…They are working behind other networks, giving them support and the experience they had in different places. And double their resources and recruitment and other things,” Stanekzai said. ”[T]hey are not talking too much. They are not making press statements. It is a big threat.”TOLOnews reported earlier this month on a recent NATO assessment that militant groups were active in 20 provinces. The map included showed dots indicating Taliban activity in 15 provinces, al-Qaeda activity in five, and ISIS (Daesh on the map) in two (obviously, some provinces have multiple groups active within them). The concentration of al-Qaeda activity is along the eastern border–Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Nuristan, and Kunar–where “militants who are apparently associated with al-Qaeda are looking to establish military camps.”Major General Jeff Buchanan, the deputy chief of staff for operations in Afghanistan, agreed with Stanekzai. He told CNN that intel assessments from as recently as last year pegged al-Qaeda numbers at 50-100, “but in this one camp we found more than 150.”“There’s not thousands of them,” he said, “but clearly in remote parts of Afghanistan there are al Qaeda leaders we’re concerned about and what they’re capable of doing.”Last October, the United States raided and destroyed a pair of al-Qaeda training camps in Kandahar. General John F. Campbell, who led the NATO’s Resolute Support mission until early March, told the Washington Post after the raid, “This was really AQIS, and probably the largest training camp-type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.”Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn commented in the Long War Journal at the time: “The U.S. military has not answered an obvious question: How did al-Qaeda establish two training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border in a province that is supposedly secure from the Taliban?”Afghanistan has no shortage of militant groups, but some get more media-time than others–which warps general perceptions. There’s also history to complicate matters. The Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda as it planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, but when the United States invaded it not only crushed al-Qaeda but swept the Taliban from power. While the old guard still lived, the assumption was that the two groups were no longer close. CNN put it like this, “The Afghan militant group was thought to have regretted its decision to harbor Osama bin Laden before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, because it led the U.S. to launch a war to remove them from power.”But following the death of bin Laden in 2011 and the revelation last year that Mullah Omar had died in 2013, ties improved. In August, it was reported that Mullah Mansour, the new Taliban leader, had accepted an oath of allegiance from bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, who had assumed control of the network after his death.Comments made by Campbell last October ring true, still: “What I think you have to do is challenge your assumptions here… Things change, and what was good here in 2010 or 2011 may not necessarily be good today as far as the enemy.”

LWJ. A senior US general in Afghanistan recently admitted the US military and intelligence services’ long-held belief that al Qaeda has only 50 to 100 operatives based in





the country is incorrect, stating that number must be revised upward. Since 2010, US officials have claimed that al Qaeda has been “decimated” in Afghanistan and has maintained a consistent minimal presence of 50 to 100 operatives.For more than six years, The Long War Journal has warned that official estimate of al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is erroneous, and the jihadist group remains a significant threat to this day. The US military began walking back its low estimate of al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan at the start of April. Last week, Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, the top spokesman for Resolute Support, the NATO mission in Afghanistan, told The Washington Post that al Qaeda has forged close ties to the Taliban and is resurgent in the country. Major General Jeff Buchanan, Resolute Support’s Deputy Chief of Staff, directly discussed al Qaeda’s footprint in the country publicly today, and warned that previous US estimates on al Qaeda’s strength were wrong. “If you go back to last year, there were a lot of intel estimates that said within Afghanistan al Qaeda probably has 50 to 100 members, but in this one camp we found more than 150,” Buchanan told CNN. Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of The Long War Journal. Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for The Long War Journal.

Al Qaeda re-emerges as challenge for US, NATO in AfghanistanBy REUTERS PUBLISHED: 13:01 GMT, 15 April 2016 | By James Mackenzie and Paul TaitKABUL, April 15 (Reuters) - Leadership turmoil within the Taliban since the death of the militant group's founder has fuelled closer links with foreign groups like al Qaeda, the new commander of international forces in Afghanistan said, complicating counter-terrorism efforts. In an interview with Reuters, General John Nicholson pointed to what U.S. officials saw as a shift in the Taliban's relationship with groups that Washington considers terrorist organisations. That could influence his assessment of plans to cut U.S. troop numbers next year, because if al Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, can operate in Afghanistan with increasing freedom, it may pose a greater security threat inside the country and beyond.That was the very reason NATO forces went into Afghanistan in the first place: to prevent al Qaeda functioning freely while the Taliban, which ruled the country until its ouster at the end of 2001, looked on. "You see a more overt cooperation between the Taliban and these designated terrorist organisations," Nicholson said. "Our concern is that if the Taliban were to return, that because of their close relationships with these groups, that they would offer sanctuary to these groups."Nicholson is about half way though a review of plans that would see U.S. troop numbers nearly halved to 5,500 by 2017 and an end to much of the training and advice the NATO-led coalition currently provides Afghan forces fighting the Taliban.Some U.S. politicians and Afghan commanders are urging Washington to reconsider its drawdown plans, worried that the Islamist Taliban movement poses a growing threat to security. Public appetite for an even more prolonged deployment of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is low, partly because the conflict is seen as limited to the country itself with little risk of international spillover. Nicholson declined to comment on the review, which will be presented in Washington by June. But he highlighted a "greater linkage" between the Taliban and U.S.-designated terrorist group al Qaeda since the death of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and his replacement by current leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour.Prompted by the need to win support in a leadership battle that broke out after Omar's





death was announced last year, Nicholson said Mansour had been forced closer to groups like al Qaeda and the Haqqani network, blamed for a series of high-profile suicide attacks in Kabul. "When Mullah Omar was alive, he maintained a public distance from al Qaeda that his successor Mullah Mansour has not," he said. "I think this is in part because Mansour lacks the legitimacy of Omar."U.S.-ONLY OPERATIONS "LESS FREQUENT" Al Qaeda, which U.S. officials have estimated has between 100-300 fighters in Afghanistan, has returned as one of the main focuses of the U.S. counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan. Some independent assessments say that estimate is too low.The group has been less prominent in recent years as the Taliban, numbering thousands of fighters, seized territory in a series of intense battles including, briefly, the northern city of Kunduz and, more recently, swaths of Helmand in the south.The emergence of an offshoot of Islamic State based in eastern Afghanistan, which U.S. officials believe is mainly composed of disaffected Taliban fighters and some foreign militants, has provided a further unwanted distraction.However, the discovery last year in the south of what U.S. officials describe as a well-established training camp featuring Taliban and al Qaeda facilities together, refocused attention on the latter, as well as the broader problem of groups using Afghanistan as a base for cross-border operations. Six organisations are now on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organisations active in Afghanistan, although the Taliban are not. That means U.S. forces are more limited in the authority they have to attack the group."The Taliban are a medium within which these transnational groups operate," Nicholson said, pointing to other organisations such as Laskhar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group that normally targets India. Whatever the outcome of Nicholson's review, the separate U.S. counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan will continue next year, with conventional and drone aircraft, as well as special forces troops on the ground.U.S. officials say operations in Afghanistan have picked up in intensity following the U.S. State Department's formal designation of Islamic State in Khorasan as a foreign terrorist organisation in January. In the first three months of the year, U.S. forces conducted nearly 100 strikes against the group, which is based mainly in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, and operations have continued at roughly the same pace since, U.S. army spokesman Brigadier General Charles Cleveland said.Unlike al Qaeda, Islamic State is fiercely opposed to the Taliban and has directed most of its attacks against them rather than Afghan forces.

The 5,500 troops earmarked to remain in Afghanistan next year will mainly focus on counter-terrorism operations, but Afghan troops, who already conduct the bulk of missions, will take an increasing share, Nicholson said. "We possess the capabilities here if it were necessary to do a unilateral operation," he said, but added: "that would be less frequent".

**The cessation of hostilities in Syria never included Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) or al-Qaeda

(the Nusra Front or Support Front), but it did include some of the de facto allies of al-Qaeda. The Syrian Arab Army and its Shiite militia allies, with Russian air support, have taken advantage of the relative quiet in much of the country to roll back Daesh from Palmyra and some other towns.But even as Daesh has been set back, al-Qaeda has recovered some of the territory lost to the SAA earlier this year southwest of Aleppo.Al-Qaeda is allied with the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham) and the Jerusalem Army





among other hard line Salafi Jihadis. These groups are in turn allied with remnants of the old Free Syrian Army (mostly Muslim Brotherhood) that are supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. That is, the US-backed groups are battlefield allies of the allies of al-Qaeda. US and Gulf-supplied weaponry routinely makes its way to al-Qaeda. As the Syrian Arab Army and its Iranian and Iraqi militia allies have been busy to the east at Palmyra, al-Qaeda has spearheaded the reconquest from the regime of al-Eis, al-Khalidiya, Birna and Zitan, small towns along the strategic M5 highway linking Aleppo to Idlib Province (a province dominated by al-Qaeda and its allies). These advances are mainly al-Qaeda’s, or al-Qaeda’s in conjunction with allies. A Shiite site observed, “The attack on Zitan and Birneh is to be led exclusively by Jabhat al-Nusra fighters. Nevertheless, yesterday’s capture of al-Khalidyah was carried about by joint troops of Jund Al-Aqsa, Ahrar ash-Sham, Ajnad Al-Sham, Jabhat Al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army’s 13th division.”The 13th Division of the FSA is a “vetted” group that receives CIA-supplied weaponry such as anti-tank t.o.W. munitions, which is to say that the United States is in bed with al-Qaeda in taking al-Khalidiya from the al-Assad regime.Al-Qaeda also fired mortar shells at the Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo, a Kurdish stronghold that the YPG militia could use to cut East Aleppo off from arms and ammunition from Turkey. The attack killed 18 and wounded more than 50.In contrast, in the south of Damascus, in the Yarmouk Camp district, al-Qaeda and Daesh have been battling each other, and Daesh has taken some neighborhoods away from al-Qaeda.

**

Security expert Dr. Kwesi Aning has identified markets and hotels as possible terror targets as the nation is put on alert of a possible terror attack.Analysing the trend of target locations of terrorists, Dr. Kwesi Aning pointed out that ISIL prefers markets and bus stops while Al Qaeda prefers hotels and high-end places.Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in March 2015 accepted the allegiance of Nigerian-based terror group Boko Haram, which may be seeking to extend its terror beyond Nigeria.Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility for the attack on Ouagadougou's four-star Splendid Hotel that killed 29 people in Burkina Faso in January 2016. AQIM is based in the Sahara Desert between Mali, Niger and Algeria and has attacked West African countries. The menace of terrorism once considered to be a distant threat, appears to be closer than it was first believed. Terror attacks on Ghana’s neighbors, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast have drummed home the need for national preparedness. In a document cited by Joy News, a Malian national suspected of the terror attack in Ivory Coast has reportedly disclosed that Ghana and Togo are likely targets.

**Since French and Malian forces drove al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other

militant groups out of Timbuktu more than three years ago following a nine-month occupation, the fighters established a safe haven in the vast arid region north of the city toward the salt mines of Taoudeni and the borders of Mauritania and Algeria. AQIM is the group that claimed responsibility for attacks since November on hotels popular with foreigners in Burkina Faso, Mali and Ivory Coast that killed more than 70 people. Timbuktu, a centuries-old center of Islamic learning on the southern edge of the Sahara





desert about 706 kilometers (438 miles) north of the capital, Bamako, is protected by Malian troops and a United Nations peacekeeping contingent, known as Minusma, aided by French forces. Yet they don’t have the manpower to control the countryside, which the UN describes as a no man’s land where Islamist militants and international drug traffickers operate.“It’s difficult terrain with a lot of ungoverned spaces where these groups can operate without too much interference,” Bjorn Dahlin van Wees, Africa analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said by phone from London. The French military success against the militants in West Africa has brought unwelcome results. France’s presence in former colonies from Mali to Burkina Faso to Ivory Coast is now being used by al-Qaeda as a rallying cry to justify its high-profile attacks on West African cities.“The French have been instrumental in retaking the north and seizing back control of transport routes and so on, but the unintended consequence of that is their presence has allowed these groups to portray France as a foreign intruder,” Van Wees said.

‘Armed Gangsters’As his patrol moved through the Abaradjou neighborhood in Timbuktu, Bagayoko pointed to a padlocked sheet-metal door. “This is Beatrice’s house,” he said in reference to Beatrice Stockly, a Swiss national who was kidnapped in January by an offshoot of AQIM.Local residents were shocked by the abduction of Stockly, a missionary who’d also been kidnapped in 2012 before the militants were driven out of Timbuktu, said Oumar Hama Harbi, a 24-year-old English student. “When something like that happens, everyone locks himself inside,” he said. “Those people are armed gangsters. They are everywhere, they walk among us. It’s frightening.” The most active militants are part of a local unit of AQIM that cooperates with another group known as Ansar Dine, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Serge Zoungrana, Minusma’s head of intelligence. Besides Stockly, they’re believed to be holding two other foreign hostages, a Swede and a South African, he said.French InterventionThree years after the French intervention, northern Mali remains an “extremely difficult” environment to operate in, the UN said in a report. Militants are using rockets, mortars and roadside explosives to target soldiers, resulting in the deaths of seven UN and 17 Malian troops since the start of the year.Three French soldiers were killed Tuesday when their armored vehicle hit a land mine in northern Mali, President Francois Hollande’s office said in a statement. The blast occurred near the village of Tessalit, close to the Algerian border, the French Ministry of Defense said. “The situation is quite critical,” UN police captain Abidi Lofti said while on patrol in an armored car. “There are at least two or three incidents every week, either here in Timbuktu or around the city.”The government in Bamako is trying to sway local residents by creating two new regions, Taoudeni in the west and Menaka in the east, to foster economic development and provide decentralized local administrations. The project has received the backing of ethnic Tuareg militias and armed separatist groups in the area that signed peace accords with the authorities last year because it gives them more influence.Government Action“The only ones who would give them medicine, who would fix their water pumps, were these so-called terrorists,” Moulaye Ahmed Ould Moulaye Rigani, the head of a group of armed movements known as Platform that negotiated with the government, said in an interview. “If we can make these people feel the government is dealing with things,





backed by the international community, it will dissuade them from getting indoctrinated and creating problems here and in the whole world.”Whether the plan will work won’t be known for years, said Van Wees of the Economist Intelligence Unit.“To push out home-grown groups you really need to improve basic services like health care and education,” he said. “Creating economic opportunities for young people is a long-term issue, even with a lot of help from donors.

Regards Cees***

In August 2012, before ISIS came across to Syria from Iraq, US intelligence (DIA) reported that ‘The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq, later ISI and then ISIS] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria … there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality [an ‘Islamic State’] in eastern Syria … and this is exactly what the supporting powers [the US, other western countries, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey] to the [Syrian] opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.’ Whatever else people may or may not understand about the Syrian conflict, they should be clear that the US ‘war on terrorism’ in Syria and Iraq is a fraud. Directly or indirectly, Washington remains the key supporter of ISIS, al Nusra and the rest.- The original source of this article is Global Research

Thanks to UK and US intervention, al-Qaeda now has a mini-state in Yemen. It's Iraq and Isis all over again

The real winners in this war are al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which has taken advantage of the collapse of central government to create its own mini-state.

Unnoticed by the outside world, AQAP has been swiftly expanding its own statelet in Yemen in 2015/16, just as Isis did in western Iraq and eastern in Syria in 2013/14.

A point seldom given sufficient weight is that AQAP is expanding so fast, not because of its own strength, but because its opponents are so weak.

whole strategy depends on wishful thinking about the strength and popularity of their local ally who usually, on the contrary, is feared and hated

Yet when one UN official stated publicly that the foreign powers fighting the Taliban, supposedly in support of the government, had “no local partner”, he was promptly fired

As has happened repeatedly since 9/11, the US and countries like Britain fail to combat terrorism because they give priority to retaining their alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies. They have done it again. The US, Britain and regional allies led by Saudi Arabia have come together to intervene in another country with calamitous results. Instead of achieving their aims, they have produced chaos, ruining the lives of millions of people and creating ideal conditions for salafi-jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.The latest self-inflicted failure in the “war on terror” is in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Sunni states intervened on one side in a civil war in March 2015. Their aim was to defeat the Houthis - labelled somewhat inaccurately as Shia and pro-Iranian - who had seized most of the country in alliance with the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who retained the loyalty of much of the Yemeni army. Yemeni politics is exceptionally complicated and often violent, but violence has traditionally been followed by compromise between warring parties.





Isis may have lost the battle of Palmyra, but it's not lost the warThe Saudi intervention, supported in practice by the US and Britain, has made a bad situation far worse. A year-long campaign of air strikes was supposed to re-impose the rule of former president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whose dysfunctional and unelected government had fled to Saudi Arabia. Relentless bombing had some success and the forces fighting in President Hadi’s name advanced north, but were unable to retake the capital Sanaa. Over the last week there has been a shaky truce.The real winners in this war are al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which has taken advantage of the collapse of central government to create its own mini-state. This now stretches for 340 miles – longer than the distance from London to Edinburgh – along the south coast of Yemen. AQAP, which the CIA once described as the most dangerous protagonist of “global jihad” in the world, today has an organised administration with its own tax revenues. Unnoticed by the outside world, AQAP has been swiftly expanding its own statelet in Yemen in 2015/16, just as Isis did in western Iraq and eastern in Syria in 2013/14. Early last year, President Obama contemptuously described Isis as being like a junior basketball team that would never play in the big leagues. Likewise in Yemen, the American and British governments misjudged the degree to which AQAP would benefit from Operation Decisive Storm, the ill-chosen Saudi name for its military intervention that has proved predictably indecisive.

The Saudi intervention turned a crisis into a catastrophe. Some 6,427 people are known to have been killed in the fighting, but these are only the figures for casualties known to the health authorities. Since the UN says that 14.1 million Yemenis, 54 per cent of the population, have no access to health care, this is likely to be an underestimate. Even before the war, Yemen was the poorest Arab nation and its people are now starving or malnourished. OXFAM estimates that 82 per cent of Yemen’s 21 million population are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The disaster is not only humanitarian, but political, and does not only affect Yemen. As in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, foreign intervention energises and internationalises local difference as factions become the proxies of outside powers.Yemen has always had Shia and Sunni, but it is only recently that sectarian hatred has begun to get anywhere near the level of Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia portrays the Houthis as pawns of Iran, though there is little evidence for this, so Yemen is drawn into the regional confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

A point seldom given sufficient weight is that AQAP is expanding so fast, not because of its own strength, but because its opponents are so weak. The Saudi and Gulf financed media often refer to pro-President Hadi forces as taking territory, but in reality the government-in-exile remains in Saudi Arabia. It recaptured the port city of Aden last summer, but its few officials who are there dare not leave their heavily-defended compound except by helicopter. Even where Saudi-backed fighters advance, they leave anarchy behind them, conditions in which the arrival of disciplined AQAP forces may be welcomed by local people.I have been struck, ever since the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the extent to which their whole strategy depends on wishful thinking about the strength and popularity of their local ally who usually, on the contrary, is feared and hated. I seldom spoke to Afghans who truly supported the Taliban, but I was always impressed by the number who detested the Afghan government. Yet when one UN official stated publicly that the foreign powers fighting the Taliban, supposedly in support of the government, had “no local partner”, he was promptly fired. Patrick Cockburn





WASHINGTON: Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Even as it bilked billions of dollars in aid from the United States, Pakistan is now revealed to have funded the 2009 attack on a CIA camp on its border with Afghanistan that killed seven American agents and contractors and three others (From Times of India)Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Even as it bilked billions of dollars in aid from the United States, Pakistan is now revealed to have funded the 2009 attack on a CIA camp on its border with Afghanistan that killed seven American agents and contractors and three others.The explosive disclosure comes in a declassified 2010 cable published by the national security archive, that, despite being redacted in parts, asserts unequivocally that “some funding for Haqqani attacks are still provided by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, including $200,000 for the December 30, 2009, attack on the CIA facility at Camp Chapman.”The Camp Chapman attack was carried out by Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor and double agent, whom the CIA was trying to use to infiltrate al-Qaida in Pakistan in its hunt for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. Instead, he was turned around by the Haqqani group, a terrorist proxy for Pakistan’s intelligence agency. The explosive disclosure comes in a declassified 2010 cable published by the national security archive, that, despite being redacted in parts, asserts unequivocally that "some funding for Haqqani attacks are still provided by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, including $200,000 for the December 30, 2009, attack on the CIA facility at Camp Chapman."The Camp Chapman attack was carried out by Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor and double agent, whom the CIA was trying to use to infiltrate al-Qaida in Pakistan in its hunt for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. Instead, he was turned around the Haqqani group, a terrorist proxy for Pakistan's intelligence agency.Al-Balawi's suicide attack on December 30, 2009 at the Camp Chapman forward post, which the CIA used to gather intelligence for drone attacks in Pakistan, killed ten people, including two female American CIA agents: Jennifer Lynne Matthews, 45, and a mother of three, who commanded the base, and Elizabeth Hanson, 30, a targeting analyst. The attack was memorialized in a movie titled Zero Dark Thirty. While it has long been known that Pakistan's terrorism sponsorship has claimed the lives of Indian and American civilians and military personnel, the revelations about bankrolling the Camp Chapman attack, kept secret from the public so far, is certain to inflame tensions between the two sides, particularly their military-intelligence outfits. Successive US administrations — particularly the state department led by John Kerry — have long ladled out pabulum that Pakistan is a front-line ally in the war on terror while funneling billions of dollars of aid, despite multiple terrorist attacks across the world originating from Pakistan, including in San Bernardino, New York, and London. The timing of the attack and the sequence of cables detailing the ISI's role in organizing the attack suggests that the US administration lied to the American public about Pakistan being a frontline ally in the way on terror even as it funneled $ 7.5 billion in US taxpayer money to a country's whose military-intelligence establishment was killing American soldiers and spooks. Then senator John Kerry, who later became secretary of state, took the lead in presenting Pakistan as a worthy ally as he engineering with senator Lugar the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, which put $ 1.5 billion in US aid into the Pakistani coffers. The Act, stemming from what is known as the Kerry-Lugar Bill was introduced to Congress on September 24, 2009, and passed into law on October 15, 2010. The ISI-sponsored attack on Camp Chapman occurred on December 30, 2009. By February 6, 2010, the date on the





explosive cable detailing the Pakistani role, Washington knew ISI had engineered the attack on the CIA forward post. "During discussions at an unknown date between Haqqani, Salar, and an unidentified ISID officer or officers, Haqqani and Salar were provided $200,000 to enable the attack on Chapman," the cable relates in an unredacted portion. "Haqqani then provided the money to Salar who then communicated the planning details to Mullawi (Sakh). Sakh then contacted Arghawan Afghan border commander of the Khost Provincial Force. The cable then goes on to say that Arghawan was promised $100,000 for facilitating the attack by the then unnamed Jordanian national (whose identity came to be known only later), but since Arghawan himself was killed in the attack, Salar kept the $100,000. Which means, despite knowing Pakistan bankrolled the killing of its personnel, including two female agents who put their lives on line in a remote forward post, Washington still went ahead and rewarded Islamabad with billions of dollars in aid — and has continued to do so to this day with finance and armaments.The Camp Chapman attack is counted as the second largest single-day loss in the CIA's history, after the 1983 United States Embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed eight CIA officers. While the cable relating to the Camp Chapman attack does not identify by name the ISI officer who supplied the $200,000, other cables in the collection shows, with names, how deeply the ISI is enmeshed in terrorism. "As of late December 2009, at the end of every month, senior Haqqani network leadership met with ISID in Islamabad," a January 2010 cable states. Identifying Colonel Nasib and Major Daoud as the handlers. "An unknown amount of funding was provided to the Haqqanis for use in unspecified operations during these meetings," it continues. In a subsequent meeting, the cable says, the ISI directorate asked the Haqqanis "to expedite attack preparations and lethality in Afghanistan."

**

BEIRUT - Al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria is a menacing force, overpowering moderate rebels even as it battles government troops. But in recent weeks, Jabhat al-Nusra has provoked a backlash that appears to be undermining its formidable power. Residents of opposition-held Idlib province in northwestern Syria have protested the group's heavy-handed tactics. Its fighters have been forced to withdraw from a town in the area because of mounting anger over their attack on a popular U.S.-supported rebel group and attempts to disrupt anti-government rallies.

Syria's messy civil war has empowered Jabhat al-Nusra and other radicals, but analysts say the unusual outburst of frustration against the Islamist group signals that moderate voices have not been silenced. Moreover, the analysts note, a string of battlefield defeats suffered by the Islamic State - Jabhat al-Nusra's rival - further demonstrates that the religious hard-liners are hardly invincible.

"We are seeing the beginning of unprecedented public expressions of protest, anger and resistance to Nusra, and this could easily climax into a popular revolt," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics and an expert on Islamist movements.

In its quest to replace the Syrian government with an Islamist regime, Jabhat al-Nusra has overcome grave setbacks in the past. A number of its members defected to the Islamic State, which eventually overshadowed its al-Qaida-linked predecessor by declaring a caliphate in 2014 in territory it captured in Iraq and Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra militants have faced intense airstrikes from a U.S.-led military coalition and from Russia, which intervened in the conflict on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.





And yet, Jabhat al-Nusra has grown in power, winning grudging respect among many Syrians as effective fighters against Assad's forces. Careful not to anger people, the group's Syrian and foreign-born militants have avoided the brutality meted out by the Islamic State. They have a reputation for honesty. And with ample arms and cash, the group has smashed opposition rivals seen as corrupt and weak, including rebels who have received U.S. antitank weapons.Few rebels would dare provoke clashes with Jabhat al-Nusra, analysts say. Groups battling the Assad government regularly find themselves fighting on the same side as the al-Qaida franchise, and they probably want to avoid confrontation with its militants because that "would likely prove very costly to the wider rebellion," said Aymenn al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum who studies Syria's extremist groups.

But now, Jabhat al-Nusra is losing support in Idlib, where its fighters and allied Islamist militants hold considerable influence. Residents accuse the group of applying increasingly rigid interpretations of Islam, such as strict gender segregation in public places, executions of adulterers and seizures of the property of non-Muslims.Last summer, the militants reportedly shot dead more than a dozen members of Syria's Druze religious minority. That incident drew rebukes even from other Islamist rebel fighters allied with the group.

"We're all feeling like we're suffocating now because of Nusra, which is acting like ISIS," said a prominent activist based in Idlib, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. ISIS is another name for the Islamic State.A catalyst for the recent rallies against the group appears to be rooted in the shaky cease-fire agreement brokered by Russia and the United States to foster peace talks in Geneva. A second round of those talks began Wednesday.The cease-fire agreement excludes Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, an attempt to drive a wedge between the extremists and other Syrians. And it may be working, said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies."The moderate opposition and Nusra have common goals in that they want to fight Assad, but with this cessation of hostilities coming in effect, the differences between them are showing," he said.Since the cease-fire began, attacks by government warplanes have declined. Residents in several opposition-held areas across the country have taken advantage of the lull to stage anti-government demonstrations. On March 11, scores of people in Maarat al-Numan held a nationalist rally, with people waving the flags of Syria's opposition and chanting the revolutionary slogans of the country's initially nonviolent uprising of 2011.Jabhat al-Nusra Islamists responded by storming the protest on motorcycles, attempting to break up the rally, which espoused nationalist principles at odds with the group's rigid Islamist beliefs. The following day, the militants targeted a popular rebel faction involved in the demonstration, a Free Syrian Army group known as Division 13, arresting its members and seizing weapons.

Then the situation escalated dramatically. Division 13 rebels fought back but lost, with a number of them arrested or killed by Jabhat al-Nusra militants. Then hundreds of residents from the village, including children, came to Division 13's defense. They held large rallies, stormed buildings used by Jabhat al-Nusra and defaced the group's symbols.The protesters, who were shown in footage posted on social media setting fire to the militants' facilities, eventually forced the group to leave town. In a snub to Jabhat al-Nusra, even allied Islamist rebels took part in the demonstrations. Its all-powerful image shaken, Jabhat al-Nusra agreed to arbitration from an Islamic court to resolve the dispute with Division 13.





"Under pressure from Nusra, the people have become angry. It intervenes in their lives, forcing their own agenda on people. So when the problems with Division 13 happened, all the people exploded in anger against Nusra and in support of us," said Zakaria Quitaz, a spokesman for Division 13. Jabhat al-Nusra has since released the detained Division 13 fighters, the rebel force has confirmed. But more public outbursts against the al-Qaida wing seem possible, if not probable, especially if Syria's partial truce manages to hold. "Nusra is pretending not to be like ISIS, which it is. This makes them hypocrites," said a lawyer in Maarat al-Numan who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. "At least with ISIS, they're honest about what they do."

**Dubai: Yemen government forces trained by the UAE military officers on Friday morning regained control of a major city in the southern province of Lahj after brief clashes with Al Qaida militants who have been overrunning the area since late last year, residents and officials said.The government loyalists, mainly former resistance fighters who fought off Al Houthis in the south, marched towards the province of Lahj from the neighbouring strategic city of Aden. The troops first captured the province’s capital, Huta, and then combed small areas in the suburb, according to Adeeb Al Sayed, a media aide to the governor of Lahj.Al Sayed told Gulf News that all the soldiers had been trained for months by the UAE army in Anad military base and another camp in Aden. “Days before the assault, the UAE helicopters strafed the city of Huta destroying Al Qaida ammunition depots, armed vehicles and their gatherings,”Since the Arab coaltion backed forces pushed Al Houthis out of south Yemen last year, the province of Lahj has become a stronghold for Al Qaida and Daesh-linked operatives who sneak into Aden to kill security officers. The government official said that some of the soldiers who stormed Lahj on Friday are part of an elite counterterrorism unit that were trained by the UAE officers in Aden. “The forces captured dozens of Al Qaida operatives and many others who might have links to them.” Warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition have targeted Al Qaida positions in Abyan and Lahj provinces for the last couple of weeks. Residents said that the airstrikes have killed many militants and prompted many others to withdraw from targeted areas. Military analysts in Yemen think the recent improvement in security in the once lawless Aden and Friday’s assault on Lahj signal that security bodies in south Yemen that crumbled last year when thousands of soldiers deserted their camps and backed Al Houthis, are gathering momentum.

After liberating Lahj from Al Qaida and other militant groups, army officials say that similar military assaults on the cards to boot militants out of their strongholds in Abyan and Shabwa. Al Qaida has controlled the city of Al Mukalla, the capital of Hadramout province for a year. In Aden, a car bomb exploded outside the office foreign affairs ministry immediately after worshippers were leaving mosques after prayer in the city’s Mansoura district. Local officials say that a pedestrian was injured in the explosion that damaged the building’s wall. On Thursday, a security officer told Gulf News that security forces in Aden captured members of a death squad responsible for targeting scores of security officers, judges, and government officials including the governor of Aden.




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