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

War Comes Home
prize on his head, from a hideout in Gujrat on 25 July, after a fierce gun
battle which lasted for several hours. 52 Two South African men, who
were being trained for suicide bombing, were also apprehended in the
raid. Ghailani was considered the most important catch by Pakistani
security forces, second only to KSM. ‘We have done nothing against
you and Pakistan. Why are you doing this to us?’ Ghailani shouted as
he was taken out of the house. 53
Ghailani, who had moved to a sprawling house in an up-market
neigbourhood in the central Punjab town almost a year earlier, was
a master forger and would prepare travel documents and passports
for al-Qaeda operatives. Also an explosives expert, he would seldom
leave the house where he lived with his Uzbek wife, staying inside for
months at a stretch. His wife had also been associated with the international
jihadist network, and her sister was involved in a suicide bombing
in Russia. Ghailani was a key member of the al-Qaeda network
operating from Pakistan, which included Naeem Khan, Abu Hamza
Rabia, an Egyptian, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. The house worked as al-
Qaeda’s regional headquarters, manned with a sophisticated communications
system. The information gleaned from the computers and
other written material found in the house provided the most substantive
insight yet into al-Qaeda’s worldwide network and its terror plans.
During the interrogation, Ghailani and his companions revealed plans
for terrorist attacks, not only in the USA and Britain, but also in Africa.
There was also a scheme to target the top Pakistani leadership, and a
detailed map of Islamabad airport was recovered. 54 Ghailani’s capture
led to the arrests of some two dozen more al-Qaeda operatives across
Pakistan. It was the single largest haul in Pakistan’s war on terror.
Long accused of not doing enough to stamp out terrorism on its soil,
Pakistan, at least, made a significant breakthrough with the subsequent
high-profile arrests. The wave of arrests and intelligence discoveries
in Pakistan in mid 2004 caught many US officials and outside experts
by surprise. It had revealed a network of operatives connected to past
al-Qaeda operations and aligned with the imprisoned masterminds of
the 11 September 2001 attacks. More importantly, the material gleaned
from the two computers seized during the raids and the information
received from the captured men had provided intelligence agencies
with a rare insight into al-Qaeda’s modus operandi. That proved to
be the biggest breakthrough in the efforts to dismantle the terrorist
network, whose tentacles spread from the mountains of Waziristan to
Europe, Africa, East Asia and America.
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