British Troops Sweep for Al-Qaida along Pakistani Border

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, May 30, 2002

British Troops Sweep for Al-Qaida along Pakistani Border

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British troops have deployed near the Pakistani border to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from returning to Afghanistan, US and British officials said Wednesday. Meanwhile, authorities in the northwest city of Peshawar arrested a man they believe to be a top operative for Osama bin Laden.

The mission, named Operation Buzzard, will last for several weeks - longer than past sweeps - and comes at a time when Pakistan appears to be preparing to withdraw troops patrolling its side of the border because of its tensions with India.

Coalition officials have warned that al-Qaida and Taliban fighters sneaking across the border may attempt to launch insurgency attacks, including suicide bombings, to disrupt the June 10-15 meeting by the loya jirga, or grand council, to choose a transitional government for Afghanistan.

"That's what terrorists do. They do try to disrupt the process," US Maj. Bryan Hilferty said at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, the center for US operations in Afghanistan. They may use "typical terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, car bombings."

In Operation Buzzard, British forces will conduct patrols in populated and rural areas outside the city of Khost by helicopter, on foot and in vehicles, said British spokesman Lt. Col. Ben Curry.

HUNDREDS OF TROOPS

Some 300 British troops have been deployed over the past three days in the area, but a senior British official said the number could rise to 700.

"We are going in for a longer duration," Curry said. "The key point is being unpredictable. We'll be operating ... sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly, introducing doubt into the minds of al-Qaida and the Taliban."

Curry said the direct aim of the operation was not to protect the loya jirga, though that "is a consideration."

"Clearly, anything that we can do to prevent any form of disruption that al-Qaida or the Taliban may try to cause is a good thing," Curry said.

US and Afghan officials say they have no information about specific threats against the loya jirga, which convenes in two weeks to forge an 18-month government out of Afghanistan's often violently divided factions and tries.

Also Wednesday, Pakistani police aided by FBI agents nabbed a man believed to be an important member of the al-Qaida network. It was the latest arrest in a government crackdown on Islamic militants that has raised the ire of several Pakistan-based extremist groups.

Abu Abdullah, 35, an Algerian who was in charge of Islamic schools in eastern Afghanistan during the Taliban's tenure, was taken into custody along with another Algerian during a raid in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said.

In Tuesday's New York Times, Maj. Gen. Frank Hagenbeck said that virtually the entire senior leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaida have been driven out of Afghanistan and into the tribal border areas of western Pakistan. He said between 100 and 1,000 non-Afghan fighters may be in the rugged and deeply conservative tribal belt in Pakistan that borders Afghanistan. Pentagon spokesmen played down that report.

The British troops are operating in the plains south and east of Khost near the Pakistani border, in sharp contrast to the rough mountainous regions where past British sweeps have taken place. The area is a key region for border crossings.

The soldiers will interact closely with the local population and will seek to win over their support for the operation, the senior British official said on condition of anonymity.

AFGHAN RADIO ADDRESS

Brig. Gen. Roger Lane made an address on Afghan radio Wednesday explaining the mission. The broadcast was translated into the local languages Pashtun and Dari.

"We have no strategic self-interest in staying here in Afghanistan. We are here because al-Qaida harbored terrorists who killed 3,000 people in New York on Sept. 11," Lane said in the address. "We will search mountains and other areas to make sure that terrorists have no safe haven."

Hilferty said the "large-scale al-Qaida and Taliban" figures no longer are thought to be in Afghanistan but coalition forces were unsure how many are in Pakistan.

"It's no secret that they have been operating back and forth along the border," he said.

Two former high-ranking Taliban officials said last week that the Afghan-Pakistan border cannot be sealed to stop the movement of militants. They said the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, is overseeing a reorganization of the religious movement and has been in contact with Taliban warriors in their mountain hide-outs in Afghanistan.

ESSENTIAL PAKISTANI COOPERATION

The Pakistani military presence along the Afghan border has been a key element of the US strategy for hunting down and capturing or killing Taliban and al-Qaida fighters who slipped across the border. Without Pakistan's help, the United States has little short-term prospects of finishing off al-Qaida.

US officials fear that rising tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are distracting the Pakistani military from helping defend and search the border area near Afghanistan.

Islamabad may be diverting troops from the region to the Kashmir, in a face-off with Indian forces.

"Attention and troops that cannot be focused there, because they're focused elsewhere, that's a concern for us, because we need as much assistance as possible in guarding that very porous border," said Victoria Clarke, chief spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

American soldiers first moved into Bagram in late November, soon after the hard-line Taliban militia fell in Kabul. It was the staging ground for Operation Anaconda, a pitched battle in March between coalition forces and al-Qaida and Taliban fighters massed in a corner of eastern Afghanistan.

Since then, the hunt for al-Qaida and the Taliban has become more complicated. Fighters have split into small groups, lying low and crossing the porous border into Pakistan. US special forces and other coalition troops - based at Bagram and in the southern city of Kandahar - have focused their search in the region of Khost and Gardez, near the Pakistani border, and in the mountains of central Afghanistan.

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