Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

War Comes Home
A key recruiter for al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah was appointed as chief
of operations by bin Laden in 1996. 25 He was responsible for training
thousands of Islamic militants in al-Qaeda training camps in eastern
Afghanistan. When bin Laden and his inner circle planned an attack, it
was Abu Zubaydah who would contact the cells in the field to conduct
them. Bin Laden put him in charge of the millennium plot to bomb the
Radisson Hotel in Jordan and the Los Angeles International Airport on
New Year’s Day, 2000. He had also been in operational control of the
attack on the USS Cole in October 2000. US investigators believed Abu
Zubaydah knew names, faces and locations of al-Qaeda operatives
the world over. His arrest came as a gold mine of information to the
investigators and led to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the Hispanic American
arrested in Chicago in May 2002, who was believed to be coming to
the United States to let off a ‘dirty’, or radiological, bomb.
The al-Qaeda leader had developed strong connections with
Pakistani Islamic militants groups during his stay in Peshawar, where
he recruited and vetted al-Qaeda volunteers before sending them for
training in Afghanistan. The house he was occupying in Faisalabad,
was arranged by a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba. The central Punjab city
had been a stronghold of the group and it was quite apparent that the
al-Qaeda leader chose the city to set up his operational headquarters.
Several members of the outlawed outfit were among those captured
during the raid. 26 The fact that LeT had strong connections with Wahabi
Saudi clerics may also be one of the reasons for the strengthening
of its bond with al-Qaeda. The capture of Abu Zubaydah came as
a serious blow to al-Qaeda, but the network nevertheless continued
to operate in Pakistan. 27 The terrorist group was battered but not
beaten. A motley collection of old hands and new recruits from among
Pakistani militants had managed to form a nucleus that pushed forward
with plans to attacks targets, both inside and outside Pakistan. The
country’s largest city and its commercial capital, Karachi, had turned
into al-Qaeda’s new operational headquarters. Even before 9/11, the
city had been used by the militants as a transit point to Afghanistan.
Several hijackers involved in the attacks in New York and Washington
had passed through the city.
Scores of al-Qaeda operatives took shelter in the sprawling metropolis.
Mainly rich Arab nationals, better at blending in, vanished into the
mega-city of 12 million on the Arabian Sea. According to a senior police
official, they were in lower-class and middle-class neighbourhoods –
they were everywhere. Endless clusters of apartments, teeming slums
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