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Osama hunt heats up again
20/01/2006 14:01 - (SA)
Islamabad - A new audiotape from Osama bin Laden and a recent air strike targeting his deputy have dramatically swung the spotlight back on the impossibly remote region, where they are thought to be hiding.
Since the early days of the "war on terror", officials had regarded the barren, ochre mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan as the most likely refuge for the al-Qaeda chief and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
With the world's attention focused on Iraq for much of the last three years, the wild region was somewhat forgotten along with the ongoing troubles in Afghanistan - until now.
Four al-Qaeda militants were said to have been killed in a raid by a CIA predator drone on the remote Pakistani tribal agency of Bajur, reportedly including Zawahiri's son-in-law and a bomber on the United States' most wanted list.
Officials said Zawahiri stayed away, but the likelihood that such a cabal was in the same area four years after the September 11 attacks suggested that Washington was still on the right track.
Rahimullah Yousafzai, a Pakistan-based expert on Afghan affairs, said the release of Bin Laden's first recording in over a year might be an attempt by al-Qaeda to demonstrate that it had not been weakened by the attack.
Yousafzai said: "The timing of the tape seems to be linked with the Bajur incident. They were waiting for a proper time. Bin Laden wanted to tell Americans that not only Zawahiri, but he was also alive."
Support from tribesmen
Many officials believed Bin Laden was trapped late in 2001 by the ferocious US bombing of the Tora Bora cave complex in eastern Afghanistan after the fall of his backers, Afghanistan's extremist Islamic Taliban regime.
But he was thought to have slipped out of the region, most likely across the porous border with Pakistan just a few miles away.
Since then, Bin Laden and his acolytes had relied on support from the tribesmen in Pakistan's semi-autonomous border regions - who so far had not been tempted by the $25m US reward on the Saudi's head.
Intelligence agencies scrutinised the handful of video and audiotapes he released during that time for clues to his whereabouts, until they dried up last year and were replaced by recordings by Zawahiri.
Pakistan deployed about 70 000 troops in the tribal areas on its side of the border, while the 20 000-strong US-led military in Afghanistan pursued the hunt across the border.
In 2004 Pakistan launched an offensive in the border region of South Waziristan, killing hundreds of foreign militants and their local backers and losing about 250 troops. Last year it targeted North Waziristan.
President Pervez Musharraf said last September that Pakistani authorities in 2003 "had some identification of a rough area, where Bin Laden was, through technical means. But then we lost him".
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