Taliban guerrillas awaiting leader’s signal, official says

Associated Press

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Biding their time on the instructions of elusive leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban are regrouping in mountain hideouts, waiting for the Afghan government to falter, a Taliban intelligence official in hiding said Sunday.

The official, Obeidullah, was an important member of the Taliban command structure as the deputy of Qari Ahmadullah, the intelligence chief targeted and killed by the U.S.-led coalition. Obeidullah oversaw Kargai, the military training camp where al-Qaida and other radicals trained north of Kabul.

"We are not unhappy, afraid or finished. We are just waiting, gathering our strength," Obeidullah said.

He said Omar, though high on the U.S. wanted list, is safe in Afghanistan and continues to lead the Taliban. But the man the Taliban call "the guest" — Osama bin Laden — "could be anywhere."

"He could be in Afghanistan, or Chechnya or Yemen," Obeidullah said.

Obeidullah said senior members of both Taliban and al-Qaida move relatively freely in Afghanistan despite the six-month-old war against terrorism.

Omar himself has recently been to Shah-e-Kot, scene of the largest U.S. ground assault in the war. The Taliban leader has spent 20 days in the stark, arid region of eastern Afghanistan since the assault in March, Obeidullah said.

From his hideout in Peshawar, a city of 1.5 million about 30 miles west of the Afghan border, Obeidullah said the Taliban in Afghanistan were waiting — and confident.

"There aren’t just 100 or 200 of us — there are thousands … (and) we know how to fight a guerrilla war," Obeidullah said.

"We will give this government time to show the people how they aren’t able to govern, then we will show our face more and more."

With bitter fighting between rival warlords turning cities and towns in eastern Afghanistan into war zones, many people there say they long for the relative security that existed during the Taliban rule.

Obeidullah said fugitive Taliban are taking advantage of the anarchy in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost, Paktika and Paktia provinces to establish small cells in villages and towns throughout the east and south and create the core of a revived Taliban movement.

In eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. special forces and their allies are concentrating their resources, other Afghan sources say senior figures like Egyptian Ayman al Zawahri, bin Laden’s lieutenant and convicted killer of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the No. 3 man in the Taliban movement, have been sighted.

Pakistan’s intelligence service, the InterServices Intelligence, supported the Taliban until the country’s about-face six months ago to join the U.S.-led war on terror, and its search for Taliban is not an all-out effort, Obeidullah said.

Obeidullah expressed confidence he would have no trouble returning to his homeland, despite coalition forces scouring mountains along the border.

"It’s a long border, with so many ways to cross," he explained. "If not one way then I will go another. It’s not a problem. I just came from Afghanistan."

"It was easy."