Intelligence

"For each Taliban you kill, I can find 20 more to fill his place"

Telegraph | News | 'For each Taliban you kill, I can find 20 more to fill his place'

By Massoud Ansari
(Filed: 02/07/2006)

With his neat moustache and casual clothing, Hafiz Ihsanullah is the new face of the Taliban. The 28-year-old former fighter has eschewed the trademark turban and prayer beads of the ultra-conservative Islamic group since he took on a new and powerful role.

He has switched from being a frontline warrior to front man for Mullah Dadullah Akhund - the one-legged Taliban commander in Afghanistan, renowned for his viciousness and cruelty.

Dadullah is believed to be spearheading the Taliban's biggest offensive since they lost Kabul in 2001, killing at least 100 Afghan civilians and 40 coalition soldiers this year, including two SAS troops during a fierce firefight in southern Afghanistan last week. After the leaders of al-Qaeda itself, Dadullah is at the top of the coalition's wanted list.

Yet, just across the border in neighbouring Pakistan, a supposed ally of the West in the war on terror, Ihsanullah is leading an apparently untroubled life, beating the drum for new Taliban recruits, co-ordinating volunteers and supervising the flow of dead -Taliban fighters as their bodies are returned for burial as heroes in their home villages.

"Every time you bring one dead, you will find 20 more volunteers willing to join the fighting," he boasted to The Sunday Telegraph.

An 11,000-strong, US-led force - including 3,300 British soldiers, newly based in the restive southern province of Helmand - are battling to re-assert control across southern Afghanistan as part of operation Mountain Thrust. More than 1,000 fresh Taliban fighters have reportedly poured in from the Pakistani province of Balochistan in recent weeks to face them.

Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, has accused Pakistan of failing to curb the Taliban militia operating from within its borders, and of not doing enough to control the frontier with its neighbour.

Pakistan's insistence that it has cracked down on cross-border activity is hard to square with the ease with which Ihsanullah, acting as Dadullah's "chief co-ordinator", shuttles regularly between Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Balochistan, where the Taliban have found safe haven since they were routed five years ago.

He visits religious seminaries in Balochistan, in effect the main enlisting centres for insurgents, and collects lists of new recruits whom he subsequently dispatches to the front line. His only concession to his own security is his insistence that he must not be photographed.

As the fighters go one way across the border, the bodies of their predecessors, killed by coalition troops, go the other, brought by Ihsanullah's men to be buried in their Pakistani home towns.

In the Balochi district of Pasheen alone, 24 corpses have been returned for burial in the past two months, according to Ikramullah Khan, a local resident. They included the body of Molvi Azizullah Agha, a Taliban commander who was among several dozen killed by a US airstrike on their Kandahar safe house in May. His funeral was attended by several thousand Taliban supporters, including six local and national Pakistani politicians from Balochistan, all of whom vowed to avenge Agha's "martyrdom".

"Mountain Thrust", the joint coalition and Afghan operation aimed at smashing the extremist presence in Afghanistan's four southern provinces, has chalked up more than 90 militants killed since it was launched in May - but has met a fierce surge in Taliban violence.

"It was a do-or-die situation for Taliban," said Ihsanullah. "Had we not responded to their call, the volunteers who were ready to join the Taliban's ranks in the last few months might have dubbed us cowards, and switched over to other groups. It was a must for the Taliban to respond to the fresh call."

He outlined the Taliban's propaganda campaign, aimed at galvanising potential recruits. Markets across the region have been flooded with cheap DVDs, sold for as little as 30p, in which Taliban militia are shown fighting Americans. Meanwhile, Taliban preachers have stepped up their promotional strategy through broadcasts on low-frequency FM radio, inciting listeners to take up the fight against the "infidel army".

Much of the recruitment propaganda is aimed at Pakistani recruits, he said, and it has had an immediate impact. Many of the 34 suicide bombers who have struck targets in Afghanistan this year have been Pakistani.

Taliban insiders also claim that Arab and central Asian militants, who had earlier left Afghanistan to join compatriots fighting in Iraq, have now returned to resume the original -struggle.

"Dozens of Arabs have returned to Afghanistan to reinvigorate the militia's fight against coalition troops," said Nawabzada Haji Lashkari, a tribal chieftain in Quetta.

Consequently, some of the training videos show Arab militants in Afghanistan demonstrating to new recruits how to make explosives. In one, a masked man - believed to be the Egyptian militant Abu Ikhlas - explains in Arabic how to turn a pressure cooker into an improvised explosive device (IED), and how to convert a washing machine timer into a detonator.

"They want to keep the momentum alive," said Lashkari. "Even if the number of these militants who die during the insurgency is more than the coalition troops, they know they are causing dents against the West's economy." He added that part of the Taliban's strategy was to force the West to spend billions of dollars defending its ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pakistan intelligence officials admit that "Pakistani Talibs" have joined Afghan and Arab fighters for "suicide squads".

A senior counter-terrorism official told The Sunday Telegraph that a group of militants planning to join these units had recently been arrested in Karachi. Under interrogation, the men disclosed that would-be suicide bombers are taken to seminaries in the lawless tribal areas of Balochistan, or southern Afghanistan, where they are mentally fortified for the task ahead.

President Karzai claims that he has handed over extensive intelligence dossiers to Pakistan leader Gen Pervez Musharraf, detailing how suicide bombers who attack targets in Afghanistan are recruited, trained and equipped in Pakistan, but little is being done to clamp down on their Pakistani strongholds.

Pakistani officials, though, claim it is impossible to monitor radical activity across the northern region.

"There are thousands of seminaries across the country which they are using as a shelter and it is no easy job to monitor every seminary," said one. "These schools look very ordinary. They do not impart any kind of physical training, but make them mentally strong in order to cause maximum impact when they strike their targets."

He added that many of the militants' safe houses were in the lawless tribal belts, where it was almost impossible for the intelligence agencies to operate effectively.

"These tribal areas have always acted as a harbour for the militants," he said.

July 20, 2006 at 07:57 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home