Al-Qaeda's New Hideouts

TARIQ MAHMOOD/AFP
A Pakistani man sits near a house where al-Qaeda soldiers had been hiding

As a Pakistani undercover intelligence officer, Abdul Rauf Niazi was trained to keep his nerve. But as he sat in the backseat of a minivan last month, tearing through the badlands along the Afghan border with four heavily armed al-Qaeda members beside him, Niazi may have sensed he was riding to his death. Niazi had spent weeks befriending Uzbek al-Qaeda fighters, posing as a smuggler who could take them safely into the frontier city of Peshawar. Now he had lured the Uzbeks into the trap. He would drive them into an ambush in which Pakistani police would capture al-Qaeda fighters alive. From there they would be flown away from the nearby Kohat army base to be interrogated by American spooks.

Things went wrong from the start. Al-Qaeda men showed up for the ride with AK-47s and grenades bulging under their tribal robes. They refused to allow Niazi to ride shotgun up front, where he had a chance to escape, and wedged him between two Uzbeks in the back. As the van neared the checkpoint where the ambush awaited, Niazi started to sweat. The police roadblock was hidden by a rocky hill, and when the driver took the curve, he had to slam hard on the brakes. About 70 cops were hidden behind large boulders on one side of the road and among the tombstones of a shady cemetery on the other. When a Pakistani officer approached the van and ordered the driver to get out, the Qaeda man in the front seat stuck a gun in his ribs. As the driver tried to leap out of the van, the Qaeda fighter shot him. In response, all 70 cops opened fire. Two of the Uzbeks hurled grenades and tried to make a run for the boulders, but were cut down by police bullets. Pinned in the cross fire, Niazi never made it out of the backseat.

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His story had a posthumous twist. Through Niazi's good intelligence work, authorities were able to find a fifth al-Qaeda man, also an Uzbek, who is now in U.S. custody. But the scene of the roadside shoot-out resembles a makeshift shrine to fallen al-Qaeda fighters. Graffiti glorifying Osama bin Laden have been painted on the rocks, and pilgrims flock to the spot in busloads. Some say they can smell the fragrance of martyrs' paradise wafting from the bloodstains in the dirt. And Niazi's father considers his son a traitor to Muslims. He refused to say the customary funeral rites. "Let Bush come and pray for my son," the father said. "I won't do it."

The deadly highway shoot-out was just one of many troubling signs that al-Qaeda has found a new home in Pakistan. While the U.S. and coalition forces continue to squeeze al-Qaeda inside Afghanistan, thousands of militants have slipped across the border since last winter. Officials estimate that, altogether, more than 3,500 al-Qaeda operatives and their Pakistani comrades are hunkered down in the tribal belt along the Afghan border and in the sprawling cities of Karachi and Peshawar, sheltered by homegrown extremists. Since December, Pakistani authorities working with U.S. intelligence agents have caught more than 380 suspected al-Qaeda members. In Peshawar last week, U.S. and Pakistani officials detained seven suspected terrorists but failed to snatch two senior al-Qaeda aides who were the main targets of the raids.

For months U.S. and Afghan officials have speculated that bin Laden has sought refuge over the border, though Pakistani intelligence officials tell Time that the Qaeda boss was last definitely seen on Nov. 17 in a 25-vehicle convoy, heading from Jalalabad into Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains. Since then, the Pakistanis say, there have been no credible sightings. But thousands of al-Qaeda fighters did cross into Pakistan in two waves. According to Pakistani intelligence officials, the first exodus came in November, when al-Qaeda fled into the remote Tirah Valley to escape the U.S. bombardment of Tora Bora. The second wave entered last March, during the allied forces' Operation Anaconda against al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan's eastern Shah-i-Kot mountains.

Some were just passing through, en route to Indonesia, Yemen and the Arabian Gulf. According to diplomats, a few al-Qaeda fugitives may have been given money and transport to get out of Pakistan by sympathetic staff at an Arab consulate in Karachi. Bangladeshi intelligence sources say that in the same month, a Saudi-owned vessel smuggled 150 al-Qaeda and Taliban members out of Karachi to the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong.

But most of the terrorists stayed in Pakistan. Many of them, especially the non-Arab Uzbeks, Chechens and Sudanese, operate like bandits in the tribal areas, where they raid U.S. outposts across the border. The militants have fiercely resisted Pakistani efforts to arrest them. On June 25, several hundred Pakistani paramilitaries raided a mud-walled fortress in the mountains of south Waziristan, a rifle shot away from the Afghan border. According to a Pakistani intelligence source, they had help from several CIA operatives, who picked out the Qaeda refuge with satellite photos and electronic eavesdropping. The Uzbek fugitives had heavy machine guns and an arsenal of rocket-propelled grenades piled up on the ramparts, but they held their fire for close to an hour, until a group of Pakistani soldiers smashed the gate and walked into the courtyard. Snipers promptly raked the soldiers with machine-gun fire. About three hours later, a militant inside the fort yelled out that the group was ready to surrender. It was a ruse: as soon as al-Qaeda fighters, dressed in commando gear, began filing out, they opened fire on the soldiers and scattered across the orchards into the darkness. Two al-Qaeda men were killed, but an additional 35 escaped and are thought to be still roaming the tribal area. "When cornered, these people fight to the death," says a Pakistani intelligence official. "They don't want to end up in Guantanamo."