Fallujah, Iraq's Tora Bora

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The terrorists look on Saudi Arabia as the rear base for their operations against the US-led occupation troops in Iraq. The immediate priority of all jihadi terrorist groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia triangle is the continued bleeding of the Americans in Iraq. As the Lashkar-e-Toiba leaders keep pointing out during their recruitment and fund-collection campaign for Iraq in the mosques and madrassas (seminaries) of Pakistan, Iraq has provided them with an opportunity to defeat the only superpower in the world, just as they had defeated the erstwhile USSR, the other superpower, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They keep stressing that they should not miss this opportunity and that until they succeed they should focus all their attention on Iraq. Even though the overthrow of the Saudi regime and the capture of power in Saudi Arabia continues to be an important aim of theirs, they give it second priority after Iraq.

The Jeddah incident indicates that Fallujah has become the Tora Bora of Iraq. Toward the end of 2001, US troops thought they had cornered Osama bin Laden and his followers in al-Qaeda and the IIF in the Tora Bora mountainous area of Afghanistan. After having asked the Pakistani army to seal the Pakistan-Afghanistan border effectively to prevent their escaping into Pakistan, they mounted an air and ground offensive to wipe out the jihadi terrorists.

The operation was unsuccessful. While some Pakistani and Southeast Asian members of the IIF were killed in the US air strikes, most of the Arab members of al-Qaeda, including bin Laden and his No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a large number of the Pakistani and Southeast Asia members of the IIF managed to slip across the border into Pakistan, with the connivance of Pakistani troops. The Southeast Asian survivors escaped by sea to Bangladesh and the Pakistani and Arab jihadis dispersed into small groups and scattered across Pakistan. Some of the Arabs moved across to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Uzbek, Chechen and Uighur members took shelter in the South Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan adjoining the border with Afghanistan.

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Just before the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in March-April last year, many of these dregs - including Pakistanis belonging to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), Arabs belonging to al-Qaeda and other Arabs of Chechen origin who were fighting in Afghanistan as members of the Taliban - moved across to Iraq via Saudi Arabia and Iran and took up position to start a jihad against the US and allied troops - sometimes in tandem with the Iraqi resistance fighters and, more often, independently.

Asia Times