PESHAWAR, 6 September 2003 — Pakistani military helicopters circled mountainous terrain bordering Afghanistan yesterday in an operation aimed at keeping out Taleban fugitives, a senior security source said. Residents saw about 15 helicopters flying in a 40-kilometer (25-mile) stretch between the northwestern city of Bannu, the Afghan border to the west of the city and the nearby Kohat airbase.
The army has also commandeered the disused Bannu airstrip, where about 10 military helicopters have appeared, and troops have set up a security cordon in a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) radius.
“No civilian is allowed near the airport,” a local resident, who did not want to be named, told AFP. Unusual military activity has continued in Bannu since late Wednesday, raising speculation that a major operation against Taleban or Al-Qaeda remnants is under way.
Security sources said the exercise was aimed at securing the area, which adjoins Pakistan’s semi-autonomous regions of North and South Waziristan, opposite the troubled Afghan provinces of Paktika and Khost.
“The exercise is aimed at pre-empting any intrusion of Taleban into the Pakistani territory,” a senior security source told AFP.
Pakistan’s military on Thursday described the troop movement as “routine”, but gave no details. “It is part of a routine military exercise and we do not share information about such exercises with the media,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told AFP.
“We can conduct such exercises anywhere, in deserts and mountains, in any part of the country.” A US-led coalition force is currently hunting remnants of the Taleban and its Al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan, mainly in the south and southeastern region along the Pakistan border.
The hunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden may have drawn a blank but through an unconventional network of clandestine whispers, shadowy informants and hi-tech phone taps, Pakistan has scored two of the biggest victories in the war on terror.
The arrests of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Ramzi ibn Al-Shaiba have proved Pakistan’s mettle as a key ally in the US campaign to track down those behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — and also helped erase memories of Islamabad’s former support for the Afghan Taleban regime that harbored Al-Qaeda.
But the story of how these operatives were tracked to unassuming buildings in Pakistani cities, reveals not so much a show of strength in the face of terror but a subtle game of intelligence, stealth and pure chance. The first unexpected breakthrough in the hunt came when Pakistan security agents seized two local Bin Laden agents in Karachi in August last year.
Acting on information gleaned from the two, on Sept. 10 a small group of army intelligence officers sneaked into a flat in Karachi’s posh Tariq Road neighborhood and unwittingly stumbled into one of Al-Qaeda’s key figures.
“Two men were sitting in the bedroom, we caught one but the other sprang up, fished out a knife and threatened ‘I will kill myself if you tried to seize me’,” a security official who took part in the raid told AFP.
“It was a big surprise when the Americans told us the man arrested from the flat was none other than Ramzi,” he said.
Six months later, the combined efforts of human and electronic intelligence scored an even more impressive success in the Al-Qaeda hunt. This time a predawn raid on a private house in the northern garrison city of Rawalpindi resulted in the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Al-Qaeda’s military and planning chief.
