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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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20 Al Qaeda Prisoners Escape
AP
Thursday, December 20, 2001
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan � Dozens of Al Qaeda prisoners who
were picked up after fleeing Tora Bora stormed their
Pakistani guards on a bus Wednesday, seizing their
weapons and opening fire in a mass escape that left
six guards and seven fighters dead.
Pakistani helicopter gunships pursued the fugitives
into the night through the rugged mountains near the
Afghanistan border. Twenty-one fighters were
recaptured but 20 others were still missing.
The bloody escape spilled onto a dusty road near the
town of Parachinar, where the band of militant
fighters, mostly Arabs, had been held overnight after
capture while crossing the border from the Tora Bora
region of eastern Afghanistan.
"One of the Arabs shouted 'Allahu Akbar!' and with
that slogan the others attacked," bus driver Rehman
Ali told The Associated Press. An Al Qaeda fighter
took the wheel of the bus, drove off the road and
rolled it over in the melee.
Tribal security officials said the area was sealed off
and "a hectic search is in progress."
The fighters were among 156 Al Qaeda members taken
prisoner by provincial officials since Sunday after
the warriors escaped into Pakistan along rugged
mountain trails. They were being transferred in a
convoy of three buses and two trucks to a larger jail.
Hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters were driven out of cave
hideouts and deep mountain valleys in the Tora Bora
region over the past few days after weeks of
unrelenting U.S. bombing and ground attacks by tribal
Afghan fighters backed by U.S. and British special
forces.
In Tora Bora, U.S. helicopters ran dangerous night
missions up the valleys looking for holdouts or
stragglers, while Afghan fighters brought out more
prisoners and documents from snow-bound hideouts. The
U.S. bombing had stopped. The whereabouts of Al Qaeda
leader Usama bin Laden remained a mystery.
"I don't know if he is still in the Tora Bora area, if
he's been injured or killed, or if he has left
Afghanistan," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.
AP
Dec. 18, 2001: A foreign special forces soldier
patrols the White Mountains near Tora Bora.
U.S. forces were keeping up the search for Al Qaeda
fighters and bin Laden, concerned that they could
escape Afghanistan to plan more terrorism, Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
"I think it would be a mistake to say Al Qaeda is
finished in Afghanistan at this stage," Rumsfeld said
at a Pentagon news conference.
In southern Afghanistan, a group of Taliban fighters
attacked the forces of Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha in an
effort to capture the town of Takhta-e-Pul, witnesses
said.
People coming by road from Kandahar to the Pakistani
border town of Quetta said the attack was repulsed and
that Gul Agha beefed up security at the village.
Journalists traveling in a convoy from Kandahar said
they saw no sign of fighting in the area. The
provincial intelligence chief, Haji Gulalai, denied an
earlier report that fighting had closed the road.
"Everything is under our control," he told the AP.
A vanguard of 200 British troops, meanwhile, prepared
to take positions in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as a
peacekeeping force. Their deployment was to coincide
with the Saturday inauguration of the six-month
interim government to be led by Prime Minister Hamid
Karzai.
Military advisers from 17 countries met in London to
nail down details of the expanded international
peacekeeping mission and the U.N. Security Council was
poised to approve the force, possibly by Thursday. As
many as 5,000 soldiers eventually may join the force.
Karzai said bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the
Islamic cleric who led the brutal five-year Taliban
regime, would not be welcome in the new Afghanistan.
AP
"There's no way we can allow them to stay. They've
killed our people, they have destroyed our land. We
will finish them to the end," Karzai said in Rome,
where he received the blessing of exiled King Mohammad
Zaher Shah, a fellow Pashtun tribesman.
Afta Gul, a commander of the eastern tribal forces,
said only a few of his men remained in the White
Mountains of the Tora Bora area where an estimated
1,000 Al Qaeda members had taken refuge.
Some captives "are telling us stories about Usama
giving a speech 14 days ago and then leaving, but
these men are not very credible," Gul said. "I have
heard that Usama has shaved his beard and gone to
Pakistan, but no one can say for sure."
Afghan fighters returned to their base with piles of
maps and Arabic-language documents from caves they had
searched, including a topographical map marking mortar
positions and their field of fire, and a training
manual on aiming tank fire.
Meanwhile, a top alliance official said the eastern
alliance's governing council, or shura, had met in
Jalalabad on Friday and rebuked two senior tribal
leaders who some shura members accused of helping Al
Qaeda fighters flee Tora Bora.
Hundreds of Al Qaeda family members escaped, and top
Al Qaeda commanders may have been among them, said the
official, who attended the meeting and spoke on
condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Pakistan dismissed allegations that its authorities
also protected Al Qaeda fugitives.
At a U.S. Marine base at Kandahar's airport, FBI
agents questioned 15 Al Qaeda and Taliban captives.
They wanted information about the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks and last year's suicide assault on the USS
Cole in Yemen which killed 17 sailors.
Five other captives, including an American and an
Australian who fought with the Taliban, were
interrogated aboard the USS Peleliu in the Arabian
Sea.
In other developments:
� Britain announced Wednesday it would reopen its
embassy in Afghanistan after a 12-year break. The
American embassy reopened Monday as a liaison office.
� The number of Afghan refugees camped along the
northern border with Tajikistan has dropped from as
many as 10,000 to about 3,000 since the United States
opened its campaign to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda,
the Russian border guard service said.
__________________________________________________
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