WASHINGTON, June 15 (UPI) -- Al-Qaida has spread its tentacles across Karachi, creating a cobweb of affiliated groups and cells that are not even aware of each other, Pakistani intelligence officers told United Press International.
One of the groups Pakistani authorities busted during the weekend is known as Jund-Allah or the Soldiers of God. "We had never heard of this cell before. It's a total surprise for us," said Karachi's police chief Syed Kamal Shah.
Shah said the group had 18 or 19 members and "police have so far arrested only eight, the rest are still at large."
Jund-Allah leaders now in police custody include Abu Mosa'ab al-Balochi or Aroochi who has a $1 million bounty on his head. He is a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged planner of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Shaikh, who also was arrested in Pakistan more than a year ago, is now in U.S. custody.
Police say they also have arrested Jund-Allah's leader Ata-ur-Rahman, also known as Omar or Ibrahim. Those interested in the war against terror had seen Jund-Allah's name before on CDs propagating al-Qaida ideology and often distributed free at various mosques in Pakistan. But it is the first time that Jund-Allah has been associated with terrorist attacks.
But Pakistani law enforcement agencies are not just worried about the missing members of Jund-Allah. "We are more concerned about the groups that we do not know about, dozens of little Jund-Allahs spread across the city," says a senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified.
Besides Jund-Allah, Maj. Gen. Javed Zia, who heads the Pakistan Rangers, announced the arrest this week of another terror suspect, Daud Badiani, who is associated with the disbanded Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group.
After the arrests, Pakistan's Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said police had "broken the backbone of" the group responsible for most of the terror attacks carried out in Karachi during the last six months.
But investigations conducted by UPI show, the arrests have only exposed one of dozens of terror cells al-Qaida and Taliban operatives and their supporters are running in Karachi.
With a population of more than 15 million, Karachi is Pakistan's largest city and the commercial hub. During the last 20 years, it also has become the headquarters of regional terrorist groups and drug gangs. It all started after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, helped establish dozens of armed groups to fight the Soviet occupiers.
Most of these groups were based in Pakistan and returned to their hideouts after carrying out hit-and-run attacks inside Afghanistan. Almost all major groups had offices in Karachi, the region's only all-weather port, where arms shipments from the West arrived.
Some of these groups were also involved in drug trafficking. Since they were using the money they raised from this lucrative trade for financing their wars against the Soviets, both the Americans and the Pakistanis ignored them.
Some of the money from this trade and the weapons brought for Afghanistan stayed in Karachi. The weapons were often sold to dozens of ethnic and sectarian groups who also appeared on the scene during the Afghan war.
The Afghan war had two immediate affects on Karachi, groups that were using sticks and bricks to fight with each other now had access to AK-47 assault rifles and they too tapped into the drug money to finance their own private wars.
"With the help of the drug mafia, they established a subterranean network, which is still intact," says a retired official of the Pakistani military agency, ISI.
"So, when al-Qaida appeared on the scene, it simply connected to this network," the official said.
Al-Qaida's need to develop its links to Karachi's underworld further increased after December 2001, when U.S. forces defeated its Taliban patrons in neighboring Afghanistan, taking away the training camps and bases it had established in that country.
The first strong evidence of al-Qaida's presence in Karachi came more than two years ago when its operatives kidnapped and later beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl. The group identified itself as Harkat-ul-Mujahedin-e-Alami, the international movement of holy warriors.
"But when we started arresting its people, we discovered their links to known al-Qaida operatives," says Shah, the Karachi police chief. "We arrested almost all known members of this group."
Although police interrogated Harkat men for months, the interrogation did not lead to the discovery of other al-Qaida cells in Karachi. An al-Qaida training manual, discovered and published by UPI in February, shows why.
"There's no need for one group to be aware of the existence of other groups. Group leaders should never contact each other. Members of one group should not even know that there are other groups operating in the area," says the manual.
"If one group is busted, other groups should immediately become inactive and wait to see how much information police have retrieved from the busted groups before resuming their activities."
"No body should contact the nazm (the executive), if they need your help, they will contact you. There is no need to disclose your real identities and personal details to other members of the group," says the manual while explaining how to deal with police interrogation and how to work after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"No place is safe, not even in a Muslim country. The enemy has access to all Muslim governments, their agencies and their data. So we must never forget that we are living in hostile conditions all the time," the manual says.
Working on these instructions, all al-Qaida cells in Karachi went underground after the busting of Harkat-ul-Mujahedin-e-Alami. "After assessing the damage and securing their tracks, they soon resurfaced," says a senior official of the Karachi police.
"Although we did not know that there was an organization called Jund-Allah, it was already working secretly," said the Karachi police chief, Shah.
According to the Karachi police, soon after the arrest of its operatives, al-Qaida decided to send a message to the world that it was still around and active. On May 8, a suicide bomb attack outside a Karachi hotel killed 11 people, most of them French naval engineers.
Their next target was the U.S. Consulate in Karachi. But it needed more planning. Days after the French bombing, Jund-Allah sent a fake bridal party to the site to film the location. Videocassettes police received from the consulate show a cameraman accompanying the bridal party turning his camera towards the building and filming the location. On June 14, 2002, a huge bomb exploded outside the building, killing about 11 Pakistani policemen and passersby.
Pakistani police say that Jund-Allah is more radical than the Harakat. When al-Qaida brought Jund-Allah on the scene, it also introduced suicide bombing. The first suicide bombing in Karachi was that of the French engineers on May 8, 2002.
Since then, it was repeated on several occasions. The latest suicide attacks were on two Shiite mosques in Karachi. The first one killed 15 people on May 7 and the second, on May 31, killed 16. About a dozen more died later of wounds sustained in the attack or in riots that followed the bombing.
Police identified the second bomber as Akbar Khan, a trainee police officer, who came in contact with religious extremists when he participated in the Afghan war. "He was married, had a child and a good job and there's no apparent reason for him to indulge in such a violent act," says Tariq Jamil, a senior police officer who investigated the attack.
Suicide-bombings were also used in attacks on Shiite minorities in the southern city of Quetta, close to the Afghan border. Police say that Badiani, who was arrested this weekend in Karachi, had organized these attacks. He was associated with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian group trained by the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and blamed for killing hundreds of Shiites in Pakistan.
The Taliban and their supporters, like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, attack the Shiites because the world's only Shiite state, Iran, opposed the Taliban government in Afghanistan. They also see the Shiite as heretics.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani intelligence agencies have either arrested or killed most leading members of this group and until recently they believed the group no longer had a central figure and an organization setup. They have been proven wrong.
Pakistani intelligence officials, who spoke with UPI, said that they now have discovered a new leader of this group called Mufti Eid Mohammed. A prayer leader in eastern Karachi suburb of Malir, Mufti disappeared several years ago. They do not even have a picture of this elusive person but believe that he has played a key role in recent terrorist attacks. Badiani worked with him before he was arrested.
Police in Pakistan are also bracing themselves for a new wave of suicide bombings, this time by female bombers. They say that a woman named as Mrs. Abdullah is leading this new cell of suicide bombers. She is the widow of an Uzbek terrorist who was killed in a recent military operation by Pakistani troops and she is now training female suicide-bombers to avenge her husband's death, police said.
There are certain common elements in the new terror groups emerging in Pakistan. All of them, at one stage or another, have been trained in Afghanistan, mostly at al-Qaida camps, many of their members are ethnic Pashtuns from the areas bordering Afghanistan and have lost close relatives and friends in the anti-terror war.
"They all seem to believe that they have been wronged and they use this to justify giving away their lives in suicide attacks," said a Pakistani intelligence officer.
Pakistani investigators say the terrorists are turning to bombing as their favorite method because it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to get other weapons. "There is no more a Taliban government in Afghanistan and nobody else in the region is interested in arming them," said the intelligence officer.
"So they go for the easiest option, making bombs. They can make a powerful explosive with 200-250 aspirin tablets and some commercial chemicals easily available in the market. For timers, they use the gadget that comes with washing machines," said the Pakistani intelligence officer.
Pakistani investigators also point out links between terrorist attacks in Karachi and the military operation against al-Qaida in the northwestern tribal belt along Afghanistan's border.
May 7, when the first Shiite mosque was bombed in Pakistan, was also the deadline for al-Qaida fighters in the tribal belt to surrender to the Pakistani military.
On May 26, when a bomb exploded outside a school in Karachi, the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province announced that negotiations with al-Qaida suspects were useless and Pakistan was preparing for a military action.
A pro-Taliban Sunni cleric was killed on May 30, days before he was expected to issue an edict about the fight between the Pakistan army and the al-Qaida suspects in the tribal belt.
Pakistani officials say that Shamzai was expected to urge the tribesmen not to fight the army.
Now that Pakistan has mopped the military operation in al-Qaida's tribal hideouts, killing 55 people in four days of fighting that ended this weekend, authorities fear revenge attacks.
