Free Republic

The United States has started engaging the Taliban in negotiations through Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, highly-placed sources told Dawn on Monday. He said that four “major neutral players” were engaged with the Afghan Taliban on behalf of the Saudi leadership and the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) of Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani leadership and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).The GID and ISI have been doing the job on behalf of the US government and CIA. The source said that one of the main objectives of the recent visit to Pakistan by CIA chief Leon Panetta was to assess progress in...

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

NEW DELHI: Pakistan-based terrorist organisations Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), who are active in Jammu and Kashmir, have renamed themselves as Khaddamul Islam and Jamiatul Ansar respectively, the Pakistani media reported. According to the Pakistani Urdu daily Khaberen, both the organisations have presumed preaching and organisational work for restoring all the former provincial and district units. The report said that at the Central level, Maulana Farooq Kashmiri and Fazlur Rehman Khalil would continue to remain as chief and secretary general of Jamiat-ul-Ansar. However, it reported that Maulana Masood Azhar has been kept away from Khaddamul Islam and his role would...

March 17, 2002 Al Qaeda's Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing By DAVID ROHDE and C. J. CHIVERS n Aug. 17, 1995, Amir Maawia Siddiqi, the son of a bookshop owner in a small village in Pakistan, set down his oath of allegiance to the jihad. "I, Amir Maawia Siddiqi, son of Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, state in the presence of God that I will slaughter infidels my entire life," he wrote. "And with the will of God I will do these killings in the supervision and guidance with Harkat ul-Ansar." He accepted a code name, Abu Rashid, signed his name...