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NATO Moves To Tighten Grip In Afghanistan By Michael R. Gordon, New York Times
NATO defense ministers meeting here on Thursday reaffirmed their plans to expand the alliance’s control of southern Afghanistan in the face of increased resistance by Taliban fighters and drug traffickers. NATO has been progressively increasing the number of its troops and its reach in Afghanistan. That operation has emerged as a major test of the alliance’s ability to respond to new security challenges far from Europe.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak of Afghanistan said Taliban fighters had stepped up their attacks to “take advantage of this time of transition.” The NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said that allied troops would be tested and that they would “react robustly.”
The plans for Afghanistan were a main subject at the meeting, which also dealt with plans to establish a NATO Response Force to deal with new crises, among other initiatives that are to be formally ratified when allied leaders hold a summit meeting in November in Riga, Latvia. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began the session by telling the ministers of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “The minister thought, and I think, that this is positive news for the Iraqi people,” said Henk Kemp, the Dutch defense minister.
NATO has deployed a 9,700-troop force in Afghanistan that experts expect to grow to 16,000, with 6,000 deployed in southern Afghanistan, one of the most restive regions.
The troops in Afghanistan are officially part of the International Security Assistance Force and are under a British commander, Lt. Gen. David Richards. General Richards recently said the arrival of NATO troops would make it possible to better control southern Afghanistan.
NATO is deploying double the number of the American troops they are replacing in the south. “They have been relatively short of troops, of boots on the ground,” General Richards recently said about the Americans.
Experts had been concerned that the rules of engagement might vary significantly among the allies. Some countries have restricted where or how their troops can be used. An American military officer who was not identified because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly, said there would be no such restrictions on operations in the south, which will involve Australian, British, Canadian and Dutch troops. The deployment in the south is scheduled to be completed by August.
While NATO is deploying troops, the United States will keep 20,000 in the country under a separate American chain of command. The Americans are retaining responsibility for the volatile eastern region that abuts some of the most lawless areas in Pakistan. Those are widely believed to be a sanctuary for Taliban forces and leaders of Al Qaeda.
Afghan Attacks Won’t Deter NATO By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times
The alliance’s defense ministers renew pledge to send nearly 7,000 troops to the nation’s southern region despite escalating violence.
NATO’s defense ministers on Thursday reaffirmed their commitment to sending nearly 7,000 troops to southern Afghanistan by the fall despite an increase in violence in the region that has sparked fears of a Taliban resurgence in the country.
Gathered at the alliance’s headquarters for their annual meeting, the ministers said they would go ahead with the deployment and would not be deterred by attacks that have killed eight Canadian and two British soldiers since the move into the south began this spring. “No one should doubt NATO’s commitment to this mission, nor our ability to carry it out,” said Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the alliance’s secretary-general. “Afghanistan is a long-term commitment, and allies are resolved to provide our mission with the military tools to do the job.”
Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, here for his first meeting with the alliance defense ministers since assuming his post in late 2004, said he believed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would be able to put down the uprising in the south in “one or two months.” He said the offensive appeared timed to destabilize the region as NATO troops were arriving. “There has been an effort by Taliban and their allies to take advantage of this time of transition,” Wardak said after a 90-minute discussion with his counterparts, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “They want to influence public opinion in European capitals.”
NATO military officials have questioned whether the upsurge in violence is solely due to a return of Taliban- and Al Qaeda-linked forces in the south. Some of the most high-profile violence has occurred in Helmand province, one of Afghanistan’s prime poppy-growing regions, and commanders have said some of the attacks may be related to drug trafficking.
But officers also acknowledge that the introduction of NATO forces for the first time in the south, which will double the number of coalition soldiers in the region, and Afghanistan’s annual spring fighting season are primary factors in stirring anti-coalition activity. Military officials estimate that about 600 fighters are in Helmand, nearly double the figure of six months ago.
“This is now the season that the Taliban get more active, and then it will die down again,” Rumsfeld said.
U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the alliance’s supreme military commander, said in a recent interview that Taliban-linked forces also might be trying to influence NATO’s European members. The British-led deployment to the south, which is largely made up of British, Canadian and Dutch forces, has been controversial in Europe. “There have been some countries in NATO, in the political decision-making process over whether to join the mission expansion or not, that have had pretty public debate, particularly in Holland,” Jones said. “If I were a member of opposing military forces, I probably would have said: ‘Hey, I’m kind of encouraged by this. Maybe if we get in there and we raise all kinds of difficulties we might be able to seed some dissension within the alliance, and some nervousness in capitals.’ “
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Surveillance and Betrayal Ended Hunt
DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., NYT
[I]n Baghdad, American military commanders believed that they had at last cornered their most coveted prey: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist whose murderous onslaught against Iraqi civilians and American troops had made him the most wanted man in all Iraq. For the first time, the Americans believed, they had a source deep inside his terrorist group. Mr. Zarqawi, the source told them, was in the little house in the palm grove.
In recent weeks, American officials say, they had begun following a man who they believed could lead them directly to Mr. Zarqawi: his “spiritual adviser,” Sheik Abd al-Rahman. A member of Mr. Zarqawi’s network, captured by the Americans, had told them the sheik was Mr. Zarqawi’s most trusted adviser.
Some weeks ago, American officials said, they began tracking Mr. Rahman with a remotely piloted aircraft, hoping he would lead them to their quarry. “This gentlemen was key to our success in finding Zarqawi,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the spokesman for the American military in Baghdad. “Through painstaking intelligence effort, they were able to start tracking him, monitoring his movements and establishing when he was doing his link-ups with Zarqawi.”
Yet for all the excitement, one critical piece of the puzzle still remained: The Americans might be able to track Mr. Rahman, but how would they know when he was meeting with Mr. Zarqawi?
The Americans had gotten close before, but Mr. Zarqawi had always managed to get away. He was an elusive and wary figure who knew well how much the Americans relied on high technology to track down suspects: he and his men refrained from using cellphones, knowing how easily they could be tracked. Instead, American officials said, they relied on handheld satellite phones, manufactured by a company called Thuraya, to communicate with one another. The Thurayas were more difficult to track.
Indeed, what the Americans had always lacked was someone from inside Mr. Zarqawi’s network, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who would betray him — someone close enough and trusted enough to show the Americans where he was.
According to a Pentagon official, the Americans finally got one. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the raid are classified, said that an Iraqi informant inside Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia provided the critical piece of intelligence about Mr. Rahman’s meeting with Mr. Zarqawi. The source’s identity was not clear — nor was it clear how that source was able to pinpoint Mr. Zarqawi’s location without getting killed himself. “We have a guy on the inside who led us directly to Zarqawi,” the official said.
In a news release on Thursday morning, American military commanders hinted strongly that a member of Mr. Zarqawi’s inner circle had pointed the way. “Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi,” the release said.
Iraqi officials confirmed that Mr. Zarqawi had indeed been sold out by one of his own. “We have managed to infiltrate this organization,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser. He declined to elaborate.
How U.S. Forces Found Iraq’s Most-Wanted Man
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 9, 2006; A01
To kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, U.S. forces first found his spiritual adviser. Then they had to wait. They tracked the adviser for weeks, until he met Iraq’s most-wanted man Wednesday night in a village north of Baghdad. As the two huddled in a farmhouse, an F-16 warplane blasted it with two 500-pound bombs, killing them and at least four other people.
[...]
For years, Zarqawi and his top aides have been hunted by an elite and highly secretive team of U.S. Special Forces personnel known as Task Force 77. They nearly apprehended Zarqawi on several occasions, most recently in April during a series of raids near the southern city of Yusufiyah, according to a defense official familiar with the Zarqawi hunt.
A crucial breakthrough in the hunt came last month when Jordanian intelligence officers captured one of Zarqawi’s mid-level operatives near the Iraqi border, according to the official. Employed by the Iraqi government as a customs clearance officer in Rutbah, along the main road from Amman to Baghdad, the operative identified himself as Ziad Khalaf al-Kerbouly. Kerbouly said in a statement broadcast by Jordanian television on May 23 that he used his position to help Zarqawi smuggle cash and materiel for the insurgency.
Under questioning, Kerbouly told Jordanian interrogators something that they did not broadcast: the identity and contacts for Zarqawi’s new “spiritual adviser,” Sheik Abdel Rahman. Task Force 77 located Abdel Rahman, kept him under surveillance and learned that there was “a very high probability” he would meet Zarqawi at the house on Wednesday.
According to a U.S. intelligence source, Abdel Rahman served as Zarqawi’s liaison to Muslim clerics across Iraq, gathering recruits, funding and popular support for the insurgency. Unlike Zarqawi’s previous spiritual adviser, Abdullah Janabi, Abdel Rahman — a Sunni Muslim, as was Zarqawi — supported al-Qaeda in Iraq’s campaign of attacks against Iraq’s majority Shiite population.
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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, master of the Web war
Al-Qaida leader in Iraq harnessed the Internet to wage his jihad
By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:39 p.m. ET June 8, 2006
As the U.S. military announced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death, al-Zarqawi’s lieutenants did the same, with a statement on his own Web site, with a highly positive spin. “We are bringing the good news of the martyrdom of our Sheikh,” reads the site. “What hit us is a blessing to our nation. … It will encourage us to continue waging Jihad.” Jihadi bulletin boards and chat rooms were quickly overwhelmed. Al-Zarqawi’s photo was posted, adorned to glorify his death. One posting said: “Zarqawi’s blood will serve as fuel to burn the invaders and the apostates.”
It is fitting for a man who experts say pioneered the use of the Internet as a powerful tool for terrorists. “Zarqawi really created the idea of a comprehensive information war on the Internet,” said Evan Kohlmann of globalterroralert.com, a terrorism analyst for NBC News. He pioneered “the use of the Internet in order to provide disinformation, in order to provide support, in order to recruit people directly over the Internet.”
Al-Zarqawi was a master of the propaganda war — martyrdom videos, military successes and images that repulsed and shocked the West and inspired his followers. One month into his campaign, he had the full attention of the world with a video of his personally beheading U.S. contractor Nicholas Berg. When the beheading videos got old, he moved to suicide bombing videos. When those got old, he moved to full-length Hollywood-style productions.
Al-Zarqawi also used the Internet to create his own larger-than-life persona — as a masterly military commander and an equal to Osama bin Laden. Only recently did the U.S. military unearth outtakes that dented that image, including a video showing al-Zarqawi failing to operate his own weapon correctly.
But in the end — as U.S. military video showed the smoldering ruins of a house crushed in the attack that killed one of the most ruthless men on the planet — it was the Pentagon that won the battle of images, at least for this day.
In response, counterterrorism officials told NBC News, bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, will likely release a new video or audiotape of their own embracing al-Zarqawi and his mission. But privately, the officials said, the leaders of the worldwide al-Qaida movement will not be mourning his death. Al-Zarqawi, they said, actually caused more problems for the movement than he solved, by stealing attention from bin Laden.
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