Mystery of disappearing al-Qaida soldiers

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While U.S. troops scour the mountains and caves for Osama bin Laden, the bulk of his al-Qaida army has also disappeared.

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It was found to be missing when the Northern Alliance seized control of the northern Taliban enclave of Konduz-Khanabad Monday.

Roughly 1,500 of bin Laden's men are reported still holding out outside Konduz. A similar number is unaccounted for.

First the figures: At the peak of the battle of Konduz, Northern Alliance spokesmen estimated 10,000 "foreign fighters" were in the town, a figure military experts rate an exaggeration. The true figure was no more than 6,000. It included several thousand young student volunteers from the Islamic madresses (Islamic academies) of Pakistan who were told to go and fight America with very little army training or weapons but for their blind hero-worship of the ex-Saudi terrorist.

However, mixed among these eager students were several hundred Pakistani army officers and soldiers in civilian dress, as well as some 120 Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI service agents, representing Pakistan's secret intelligence and logistical support for the Taliban.

Most reached Afghanistan before the American offensive was launched Oct. 7; some entered later and, in a bizarre twist of the Afghanistan war, may even have given U.S. Special Forces useful inside intelligence on the Taliban and al-Qaida.

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According to military experts, 3,000 of these men, some injured, were evacuated from Konduz in a secret nocturnal Pakistani airlift before the Taliban enclave fell to the Northern Alliance.

Left, therefore, in the Konduz-Khanabad sector were no more than 3,000-3,500 al-Qaida fighting men, roughly the same number present before the siege of Konduz. Around 500 or 600 surrendered last week – together with a group of Taliban fighters who switched over to the Uzbek force – only to engage their captors in a suicide battle in a fortress-prison near Mazar-al-Sharif. Several hundred were killed in the fighting, but they also killed at least one American agent and injured a group of U.S. Special Forces troops.

That left a total of 2,500 to 3,000 at most that should have been found in the Konduz-Khanabad sector – Saudis, Gulf Arabs, Egyptians, Jordanians, Somalis, Yemenis, Chechens and Palestinians. Intelligence estimates before the Konduz siege put the Saudi extremist component fighting with al-Qaida at 500-700.

That is roughly the missing number about whose whereabouts speculation is rife.

Correspondents who entered Konduz with the Northern Alliance quoted local inhabitants as reporting that two nights before the town fell – and immediately after the Pakistani planes flew in – heavy Russian Antonov air transports touched down at Konduz airport and gathered up the al-Qaida "Arabs" – with their weapons.

Military sources, after checking on this lead with army intelligence sources in the Indian subcontinent, present this explanation of the mystery as the most plausible. Those Antonovs were chartered by the Pakistani ISI to lift the al-Qaida contingents together with a few Taliban units out of Konduz in north Afghanistan into north Pakistan.

And that was not the end of the transfer. It is still going on. Sources report that al-Qaida and their Taliban allies are streaming out of Kandahar in the south and crossing east into Pakistan. The two forces have thus far grouped some 4,000 fighting men on the Pakistani side.

According to intelligence sources, the United States hurriedly injected Marines to the south Monday in direct response to the enemy's redeployment. That, too, is why the first U.S. troop engagement was with a Taliban convoy approaching the Pakistani frontier. For the U.S. Marines' immediate objective is not to join the Northern Alliance offensive for the capture of Mullah Omar's bastion of Kandahar, but to block off the continuing passage of Taliban and al-Qaida units across the highly porous frontier.

Other al-Qaida fighters are thought to have taken advantage of the turmoil and confusion of battle to creep away to the Hindu Kush Mountains. There is no evidence of this happening, but it accords with their commanders' original plan; if it came to be, the suicide battle in Mazar-al-Sharif prison will not the last to be staged in Afghanistan.