Monday, October 02, 2006
Clue to al-Qaeda leadership structure
Insurgency
Information recovered from safe houses when al Qaeda's leader in Iraq was killed six months ago placed the group's leadership in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, The Washington Post reported on Monday. A member of Osama bin Laden's high command said in a Dec. 11 letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that he was writing from al Qaeda headquarters in the semiautonomous tribal region where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters have been active, the report said. Zarqawi was killed in June when U.S. warplanes bombed his hide-out in a village north of Baghdad.
The letter to Zarqawi was signed by "Atiyah," a person counterterrorism officials believe is Atiyah Abd al Rahman, a 37-year-old Libyan who joined bin Laden during the 1980s, The Washington Post said. "I am with them," Atiyah writes Zarqawi of the high command, "and they have some comments about some of your circumstances," the article said.
If accurate, the letter would confirm their location at the time it was written, the newspaper said. Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere along the porous Afghan-Pakistan border. In the letter, Atiyah spoke of the difficulty of direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq and suggested it was easier for Zarqawi to send a representative to Pakistan than the other way around, the newspaper said.
According to the report, Atiyah's letter also shed new light on the depth of al Qaeda's concern over Zarqawi and the limits of its control over him. An English translation of the letter was released last week by the U.S. military's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the report said. It was the first document to emerge from what the military described as a "treasure trove" of information when Zarqawi was killed, the newspaper reported.
The letter to Zarqawi was signed by "Atiyah," a person counterterrorism officials believe is Atiyah Abd al Rahman, a 37-year-old Libyan who joined bin Laden during the 1980s, The Washington Post said. "I am with them," Atiyah writes Zarqawi of the high command, "and they have some comments about some of your circumstances," the article said.
If accurate, the letter would confirm their location at the time it was written, the newspaper said. Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere along the porous Afghan-Pakistan border. In the letter, Atiyah spoke of the difficulty of direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq and suggested it was easier for Zarqawi to send a representative to Pakistan than the other way around, the newspaper said.
According to the report, Atiyah's letter also shed new light on the depth of al Qaeda's concern over Zarqawi and the limits of its control over him. An English translation of the letter was released last week by the U.S. military's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the report said. It was the first document to emerge from what the military described as a "treasure trove" of information when Zarqawi was killed, the newspaper reported.
