Newsweek Inside Al Qaeda ..... A must read

[Botany]

Miran Shah, Pakistan


The incident didn’t get much international attention at the time: just another Predator strike on suspected jihadis in the mountains of North Waziristan.
This one took place on March 16 at a compound near the town of Datta Khel. Several news services ran items, although they differed on almost every important
detail.

Hafiz Hanif saw it happen. The young Afghan and other members of his Al Qaeda unit were passing through the area in two cars when they made a stop outside
a big walled compound, and Hanif was sent to fetch some supplies that had been left there a few days earlier. He knocked at the front door and then politely turned
away, toward the cars. In Pashtun country it’s considered rude to wait facing someone’s door, in case it happens to be answered by a woman. But as Hanif’s gaze
passed over the cars, one of them exploded. Moments later the other blew up. The roaring blasts from the American Hellfire missiles knocked him down. When the
dust cleared, there was only a tangled mess of smoking metal where the cars had been. Seven Al Qaeda Arabs, including a ranking Syrian and an Egyptian, had been
killed instantly. But Hanif found a badly injured fighter and tried to help him. “He had serious head and chest injuries,” Hanif tells NEWSWEEK. “He died in my lap.”


snip


Al Qaeda’s total strength in the tribal area couldn’t be more than about 130 Arabs, together with some Chechens, Uzbeks, and a few Turks, Hanif says, and roughly
half of that force left Pakistan this spring to help confront the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan. They left in groups of five or six, traveling to link up with Afghan Taliban
commanders in different areas. Their mission is chiefly to make IEDs, suicide vests, and other bombs, and to train the local Taliban in bombmaking techniques, rather
than to fight. He estimates there are some 65 Arabs who stayed behind and are still operating in the tribal area, taking care of the organization’s daily affairs. (In late
June, CIA chief Leon Panetta publicly estimated that Al Qaeda had roughly 50 to 100 men inside Afghanistan, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism
Center, put the number in Pakistan’s tribal areas at “more than 300.”)


snip


The boy wrote a last will and testament, like all Qaeda suicide bombers, and it remains on his computer, addressed to all of his male kinsmen. He urges them to join the
jihad and seek martyrdom “so I will see you, my beloved brothers, in the company of virgins with me.” The document was dated Dec. 21, 2009, just as he was turning 16.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/04/inside-al-qaeda.html

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I know this will get me flamed here but if you leave your home to train and kill Americans and Westerners so as to advance a radical form of Islam that has followers sprays acid
into the faces of girls who want to go to school, beat people who listen to western music, and want to kill one of my best friend's son (he is deployed in Afghanistan) I hope
a predator drone missile finds you before you can kill some innocent people.

BTW I am of lets get the hell out of Afghanistan camp ..... that dung hole is not worth one American life.

[unhappycamper]

1. That's about $320 grand worth of Maverick missiles. n/t

[Botany]

2. I know they are not cheap and that civilians get killed but until

late December this year until my friend's son come home "they" can fire
them 24/7 if it gets his ass home in one piece.

BTW thanx for your posts on the military!

BTW part 2 ..... God Damn W for getting us into this mess ..... the mongols,
the turks, the brits, the Indians, the tartars, and the russians all have found hell
in Afghanistan and because W took his eye off this war and blundered into Iraq
we are now seen as one as one more "outsider" sticking our nose into Afghani
issues.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. +1000, damn all of this, damn it to hell.

>>At other camps he later found some suicide trainees who weren’t even teenagers. At one Mehsud camp he saw boys who looked no older than 12. While he was there, Baitullah Mehsud made an inspection visit and noticed one very young boy, and ordered his deputy and chief instructor, Qari Hussain, to send the boy home. After Mehsud’s death in a Predator strike in August 2009, Hanif revisited the camp and saw that the orders had been ignored: more child bombers were being trained.<<

>>But Pakistan’s military sweeps began intensifying there, too, and the American Predators became an even bigger danger. The sound of the drones in the sky is so incessant you stop noticing it, like the buzzing of insects, Hanif says. “You don’t see or hear anything before the missile’s impact.” He says the aftermath of a drone attack can be particularly hard. He recalls spending hours searching the rubble alongside other fighters after an attack that killed a Qaeda commander known as Abu Suleiman. They eventually found his head. After another drone attack, they dug for eight to nine hours in the debris of a collapsed house to try to find a Qaeda fighter, his wife, and his kids who had been killed. “We finally found parts of them,” Hanif recalls, “but not all of them.”<<

[Warren Stupidity]

4. So 'getting out of Afghanistan' includes

continuing to blow people up in pakistan and afghanistan with predator drones?

Sure al qaeda is awful and does awful things, like blowing up innocent people to demonstrate their power and strike fear into the population.

Our use of devices like the Predator Drones has a very similar effect. Newsweek of course reports the 'good' strikes. They leave out all the ones where the victims are not al qaeda soldiers but civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is a vicious circle. We blow up people, other people get angry at us and join the jihadists. They blow up people, we send in our high tech weapons. On and on.

We need to stop.