Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) has been protecting the Egyptian-born al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon, since U.S. forces evicted Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan in late 2001, several authoritative sources tell Newsweek. His most likely location today, they say: Karachi, the teeming port city of 26 million people on the Arabian Sea. “Like everything about his location, there’s no positive proof,” says
Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who was the top adviser on South Asia and the Middle East for the past four U.S. presidents. “There are pretty good indications, including some of the material found in Abbottabad,” where bin Laden was slain, “that point in that direction,” he adds. “This would be a logical place to hide out, where he would feel pretty comfortable that the Americans can’t come and get him.”
Karachi would be a “very hard” place for the U.S. to conduct the kind of commando raid that got bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Riedel says. The heavily policed city, the site of a major nuclear complex, also hosts Pakistani naval and air bases, where forces could quickly be scrambled to intercept American raiders. Plus, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri’s late protégé, remains a popular figure among Karachi’s millions of poor, devout Muslims, who could well emerge from their homes and shops to pin down the Americans.
“If he was in someplace along the border with Afghanistan, I think the temptation would be enormous to go after him,” says Riedel, who now heads the Brooking Institution’s
Intelligence Project in Washington, D.C. “But in Karachi, that would be stunning and very difficult.”
In the first week of January 2016, the Obama administration went after al-Zawahiri with a drone strike in Pakistan’s remote
Shawal Valley, which abuts the Afghan border in a Federally Administered Tribal Area, multiple sources tell
Newsweek. But he survived, says a senior militant leader in the region, who, like all Pakistani sources, demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing politically sensitive issues. "The drone hit next to the room where Dr. Zawahiri was staying,” the man told
Newsweek. “The shared wall collapsed, and debris from the explosion showered on him and broke his glasses, but luckily he was safe.”
The man added that “four of Zawahiri's security guards were killed on the spot and one was injured but died later.” He said al-Zawahiri had “left the targeted room to sleep just 10 minutes ahead of the missile that hit that room.” (The CIA declines to comment on drone strikes.)
The Al-Qaeda leader had been moving about the Federally Administered Tribal Areas since at least 2005, according to a forthcoming book,
The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight, by longtime British investigative reporters Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy. “Married to a local Pashtun girl, [al-Zawahiri] had been given a new home, a large mud-brick compound up in the hills” in Damadola, they write.
Closed out of the tribal areas, al-Zawahiri was “moved to Karachi under direction of ‘the black leg,’” the Afghan Taliban’s code name for the ISI, according to the group leader who spoke with
Newsweek. And he may well have taken al-Adel, indicted in the U.S. in connection with the
1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, with him.
A former top Pakistani official who maintains close ties with the Islamabad government would confirm only that al-Zawahiri is “in a large Pakistani city.” Karachi “makes sense” as a sanctuary, he tells
Newsweek, given its widespread sympathies for militant Islam, congested 19th-century streets and large Pakistani military presence.
But he says he was “100 percent” sure that bin Laden’s 26-year-old son, Hamza, a rising power in Al-Qaeda, is also in the country under ISI protection. (Abid Saeed, a spokesman for Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, D.C., called the allegations “part of a vicious media campaign” and said “the achievements of Pakistan against Al-Qaeda are unparalleled and proven.”)
http://www.newsweek.com/ayman-al-za...-drone-strike-osama-bin-laden-pakistan-587732
top to bottom at least one Internal thing happening in India.
Emojis are just for fun
Let's not crash their dreams.
You are seem extremely bitter and pained when truth is spoken? Go on, continue to deny the facts. But that's the cow urine drinking zionist hindu mentality - completely awash with ignorance, shallow mindedeness and running away from the truth as always.
