Posted on 09/22/2001 2:38:25 PM PDT by Movemout
Now the manhunt begins, on an epic scale, in a vast and forbidding landscape, and for a man whose cunning is internationally renowned.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 22 Now the manhunt begins, on an epic scale, in a vast and forbidding landscape, and for a man whose cunning is internationally renowned.
The United States has demanded the handover of Osama bin Laden under threat of American military might, and the Muslim clerics who rule Afghanistan, after days of vacillation and obfuscation, have finally refused.
More than that, the Taliban, heedless of the risk to themselves and their government, seemingly unknowing and even uncaring about the scale of outrage across the United States, continue to disavow any knowledge of Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts and have challenged America to a fight.
"Our guest has gone," was their message this week.
Even as droves of residents were reported to be fleeing the Afghan capital, Kabul, in anticipation of an American strike, the Taliban, who boasted this week of their country's long history of thwarting more powerful invaders, claimed today to have shot down an aircraft over northern Afghanistan, perhaps an opposition helicopter or an unmanned American reconnaissance drone.
For his part, Mr. bin Laden is where he has so often been since he proclaimed his holy war in the mid- 1990's and set out to kill as many Americans as he could everywhere, and nowhere, the subject of countless rumors and speculations. The only thing certain is that each passing day gives the world's most wanted fugitive more opportunity to move and to hide.
As of today, 24 hours after the Taliban announced their "final decision" to refuse his handover, this much was known publicly about Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts: virtually nothing.
All week, a raft of stories trickled out of Afghanistan, where no Western reporter remains after an expulsion order from the Taliban on Wednesday. These accounts, some said to be from Taliban sources, some from newspapers in Pakistan that have a strong record of reporting on Mr. bin Laden, vary widely. But all seem to agree that the Saudi- born terrorist leader disappeared from his most common hideouts around Kandahar and Kabul sometime after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Beyond that, nothing is even remotely sure. One report, in The Dawn, an Islamabad-based newspaper that is among the most respected in Pakistan, said earlier this week that Mr. bin Laden had last been seen at one of his training camps outside Kabul, at a village called Chahar-i-Ansari, last Sunday.
There, this report said, he took an oath of allegiance from 500 fedayeen fighters Arabs sworn to die for their cause then rode out of the camp on horseback. "They left behind the vehicles, and left on horses," the paper quoted a source in Kabul as saying. "He must have gone to some place which is not motorable."
Another report in The Dawn today gave a different account. It said that Mr. bin Laden had left a heavily protected house in the "air force colony" on the outskirts of Kandahar, near the airport, and taken his three wives and many children to the province of Uruzga, in a mountainous region north of Kandahar on the southern side of the Hindu Kush mountains, the home region of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. The paper quoted "highly competent sources in Afghanistan," but did not say they were with the Taliban.
In the same account, the paper listed what it said were some of Mr. bin Laden's habitual hideouts in nine Afghan provinces, stretching nearly 700 miles from Nimruz, in the southwest, through Uruzgan, Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Nangahar, Logar, Khost and Kabul in the east, and at points as far as 200 miles north and west of the Pakistan border a region about half the size of Texas.
Describing Mr. bin Laden as "a security-conscious man who does not stay at one place for more than two nights," the paper said that since the Sept. 11 bombings Mr. bin Laden had been moving around Helmand and Uruzgan, in the southwest.
Beyond these accounts, reports of where America's quarry might be have assumed a speculative and almost fantastic quality. Mr. bin Laden, according to an array of pro- Taliban newspapers and other accounts, could have fled Afghanistan altogether to Pakistan, most credibly, since the two countries share a 1,400-mile border of mountains and deserts that has long been porous to fugitives, smugglers and refugees.
But he might possibly also try to make his way to any one of a dozen Muslim countries and regions, including, among others that have featured in the speculation Chechnya or Dagestan in southern Russia, western China, Lebanon or even Paraguay.
Experts who have studied international terrorism say that Lebanon, for one, is an unlikely destination. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group that has been a scourge of Israel, has provided refuge in the past for other wanted terrorists, including members of Japan's Red Army Faction.
But Dr. Magnus Ransdorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, said that ideological and religious differences the Hezbollah adhere to the Shiite sect of Islam, while Mr. bin Laden and his followers are mostly Sunni Muslims would complicate matters for Mr. bin Laden.
"Any connections would be at arm's length," he said, because of Iran's loathing for the Taliban.
Other destinations outside Afghanistan, other than Pakistan, seem similarly improbable. After the terrorist attacks in the United States, if not before, the watch for Mr. bin Laden would have been intense at the frontiers of every country bordering Afghanistan.
One theory has been that he might have shaved his beard an expedient that an Al Qaeda training manual found by investigators after attacks in Europe urged on the group's conspirators as a means of escaping detection.
Another possibility floated in Pakistan has been that Mr. bin Laden might have flown out of Afghanistan on an aircraft that Al Qaeda members are believed to have bought in the United States before the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.
At a trial in Manhattan earlier this year in which three Al Qaeda members were convicted in the bombings, one of the defendants told of helping to buy the plane, and said the purpose was to ship American-made Stinger missiles from Kandahar to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.
But much the most likely hideouts for Mr. bin Laden, in the view of Bush administration officials, and also of the officials in Pakistan's military intelligence wing, remain in the remoter regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the United States had "reason to believe" that Mr. bin Laden was still in Afghanistan, but refused to discuss any specifics. A Western diplomat in Islamabad said on Friday that Western officials did not know where the terrorist leader might be. "I don't know, I honestly don't know," the diplomat said.
FReegards,
Bin Laden is a fugitive on the run, nothing more. The 500 man guard surrounding him would fall in minutes before a regiment or two of U.S. Special Forces troops.
There's something else to remember, which I haven't seen mentioned too often since Sept. 11. All these fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Southwest Asia are very well aware that the United States defeated Saddam Hussein in four days, a feat the Iranians couldn't accomplish in eight years. All the braggadocio emanating from that region these days is just that---bravado and hot air. They know we are a formidable and deadly force, one far more dangerous than anyone else in the history of the region has ever been, including the Soviets.
This report makes it seem as if ONE guy is controlling the world, and WE are helpless. I refuse to believe it. Of course the man is dangerous--but he isn't God. He's a human being, incredibly capable of being killed. Let us not let reports like this turn him into a superman.
Gotta check out every camp!!!
Another scorpion on the barby!
The New York Times is whining because Powell won't tell them where bin Laden is.
What a piece of shiite.
His options include war zones and "collapsed states".
These are places where anarchy reigns, local warlords might share his hatred of the US and its allies and - most importantly - his money would buy instant recruits, power and protection.
Dozens of such zones exist throughout Asia, Africa and even South America.
This is from a BBC page; they lay out a few places where he might bbe hiding.
The press made them sound invincible by the start of that war.
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