Daily Times, January 24, 2006
‘US has deal with Pakistan on strikes in FATA’
Daily Times Monitor
Washington has an understanding with Islamabad that allows the US to strike within Pakistan’s border regions, providing the US has actionable intelligence and Pakistan cannot take firm action, according to a report in US weekly magazine Time.
The source of the report is a Peshawar-based Pakistani intelligence official. “Pakistan’s caveat (to the agreement) is that it would formally protest such strikes to deflect domestic criticism. Some ranking Pakistani officials deny such an agreement exists,” says the report headlined ‘Can Bin Laden be caught?’
According to the Time report, Pakistani and US intelligence agencies have stepped up their search for top Al Qaeda leaders in recent weeks, “with the skies above the mountains buzzing with spy planes and unmanned Predator drones, and a network of local spies and informants has been scouring the landscape for information”. A Pakistani security officer told Time that the CIA has installed sophisticated surveillance equipment in several offices of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), to monitor any radio and Internet communications between Al Qaeda and its sympathisers.
A Peshawar-based official told Time that in the past month, Pakistani intelligence field agents had been tracking two groups of men who had crossed from Afghanistan into Bajaur Agency, which borders Afghanistan’s Kunar province. In the days before the US air strike of January 13, the search zoomed in on the group headed for Damadola village; counter-terrorist officials believed that some top Al Qaeda figures, including possibly Al Qaeda number 2 Ayman al-Zawahri, might have been in that group. “We knew there were going to be some VIPs, and any of those were worthy” targets, says a US official.
The infiltrators sheltered in a small compound of three houses just outside Damadola. Shortly after 3 am on January 13, locals say, several missiles fired from Predators crashed into the compound, practically obliterating the houses. At least 13 civilians were killed in the attack. Pakistani intelligence officials have been reported as saying four senior Al Qaeda members were killed, but this has not been confirmed. Some counter-terrorism experts are optimistic that the turmoil in Al Qaeda’s high command they hope was caused by the strike in Damadola may force its leaders to expose themselves.
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