Just a Tiny Minority of Extremists traversing what has become known as the “Al Qaeda Pipeline” between Pakistan and Britain. “The Regathering Storm,” by Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau And Mark Hosenball for Newsweek:
Dec. 25, 2006 – Jan. 1, 2007 issue – For the past year, a secret has been slowly spreading among Taliban commanders in Afghanistan: a 12-man team of Westerners was being trained by Al Qaeda in Pakistan for a special mission. Most of the Afghan fighters could rely only on hearsay, but some told of seeing the “English brothers” (as the foreign recruits were nicknamed for their shared language) in person. One eyewitness, a former Guantánamo detainee with close Taliban and Qaeda ties, spoke to NEWSWEEK recently in southern Afghanistan, demanding anonymity because he doesn’t want the Americans looking for him. He says he met the 12 recruits in November 2005, at a mud-brick compound near the North
Waziristan town of Mir Ali. That was as much as the tight-lipped former detainee would divulge, except to mention that Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the notorious fugitive “American Al Qaeda,” was with the brothers, presumably as an interpreter.
Another Afghan had more to say on the subject. Omar Farooqi is the nom de guerre of a former provincial intelligence chief for the Taliban; he now serves as the Taliban’s chief Qaeda liaison for Ghazni province, in eastern Afghanistan. He says he spent roughly five weeks this past year helping to indoctrinate and train a class of foreign recruits near the Afghan border in tribal Waziristan, and among his students were the English brothers. The 12 included two Norwegian Muslims and an Australian, along with nine British subjects, says Farooqi. Their mission, Farooqi told NEWSWEEK, will be to act as underground organizers and operatives for Al Qaeda in their home countries””and their yearlong training course is just about finished.
U.S. and British security agencies have known this threat would come sooner or later. While saying he could not confirm the English brothers’ case specifically, a spokesman for Britain’s Foreign Office (unnamed as a matter of standard policy) calls it
“common knowledge” that jihadist recruits have been traveling from Britain to Pakistan for indoctrination and training. The existence of a Qaeda pipeline between those two countries has grown harder to deny with every new terrorism story that has broken since the suicide bombings in London that killed 52 subway and bus passengers on July 7, 2005. Each new case that emerges features at least one or two suspects with ties to Pakistan””such as an alleged plot that began before 9/11 to bomb financial buildings in New York, Newark, N.J., and Washington, and this past summer’s alleged plot to blow up airline flights from Britain to the United States.
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American intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK that their people are definitely concerned about terror suspects and operatives shuttling back and forth between Britain and Pakistan. One particular worry is that under current practice, British visitors to the States are not required to apply in advance for temporary visas, which are routinely granted to any British passport holder who is not on a watch list. In other words, the door is wide open for Britain’s growing ranks of young jihadists, even those who have attended Qaeda
training camps, if they are unknown to intelligence agencies. U.S. officials are discussing how the visa system could be tightened. “For the most effective background checks on passengers, the United States needs information and assistance from the country where the traveler resides,” says Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke, adding that such help should be “routine.”
While the Americans talk, Al Qaeda is pressing on with its training plans, Farooqi says. He confidently described those plans to a NEWSWEEK correspondent at a mud-brick house in Paktia province, not far from the Pakistan border, mentioning the English
brothers almost in passing as an example of the jihad’s recent successes. The specifics of his story could not be independently corroborated. But one gunman among the dozen or so guarding the house, with most of his face hidden by a black-and-white kaffiyeh, appeared to be a European with light -colored eyes; Farooqi later confirmed that the guard was one of the brothers. An open notebook lay on the carpet where Farooqi sat, and the NEWSWEEK correspondent caught a fleeting glimpse of scrawled names and phone numbers, including several that were preceded by the United Kingdom’s country code: 44.
Farooqi says he first met the brothers, all of them in their 20s, soon after they reached Waziristan in October 2005. He recalls one of them, known as Musa, telling him that the 7/7 bombings in London “were just a rehearsal of bigger acts to come.” A few, he couldn’t say how many, had arrived in Pakistan by air, but most had taken a clandestine overland route across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, escorted by a network of professional smugglers. As NEWSWEEK has reported previously, Al Qaeda uses the same underground railroad to transport Iraqi bombmakers and insurgent trainers to share their skills with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to Farooqi, the brothers’ travel arrangements were made by Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, one of Al Qaeda’s top operations men and a liaison with insurgents in Iraq. (His name has also cropped up in an ongoing British criminal trial in which seven London-area
defendants of Pakistani descent are accused of conspiring to bomb British targets with homemade explosives. Prosecutors have alleged that Abdul Hadi’s deputy even visited Britain and prayed at a mosque near London with one of the suspects.) The transcontinental journey
took a month to complete, but Farooqi claims the brothers left no official traces of their passage, slipping past every border-control post without showing any travel documents. Once they get home, there may be no record that they ever visited
Pakistan.
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Farooqi says the recruits were taught a wide variety of subjects, from religious and ideological doctrine to the art of molding, assembling and detonating state-of-the-art Iraqi-style shaped-charge IEDs. They learned how to make and use suicide-bomb vests, how to rig car bombs, how to motivate other men to sacrifice their lives for the jihad and how to maintain communications with Al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. They’re not meant to be suicide bombers themselves, Farooqi says; they are far too valuable to waste. The recruits that M.I.5 was tracking also seemed bound for bigger things than cannon fodder.
The English brothers completed their Waziristan stay in October, Farooqi says, but before going home, they had one final assignment. Their Arab handlers separated them into several smaller groups and sent them into Afghanistan to see the jihad firsthand, embedded with Taliban units in Khowst and Paktia provinces. The unit commanders were warned to avoid putting them in any danger. After that, the brothers were supposed to return to Britain the same way they got to Pakistan. That means most of them could be getting home any day now””if they aren’t there already.