Juan Cole

*Pakistani authorities have arrested Yasser al-Jaziri, a North African al-Qaeda leader, in the posh Gulburg district of Lahore. They met no resistance after acting on a tip. The report identified him as a Moroccan or Moroccan-Algerian dual national responsible for al-Qaeda business interests. He was apparently arrested based on information brought in by the apprehension […]

*Saudi-based reporter John R. Bradley says in the Sidney Morning Herald that the Saudi Defense Minister, Sultan b. Abdul Aziz, has confirmed that “that United States troops have arrived in the northern garrison town of Tabuk.” He says other credible reports indicate a US presence there and at Arar airport not far from the Saudi-Iraqi […]

*Today is Ashura’, the holiest day of the Shiite Muslim calendar, consecrated to mourning the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn. It is a time of religious excitement, and young men often beat their chests and backs, sometimes with chains. In Lebanon yesterday, the head of the Shiite militia Hizbullah, Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah, warned the […]

*A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has remanded `Aqil Ahmad Abdul Quddus, the harborer of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, to jail. A warrant is out for his father, Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who had been at a wedding in Lahore and appears to have gone into hiding. Pakistani intellectuals like Najam Sethi have been demanding that the fundamentalist […]

*The Pakistani parliament has been sent home by Gen. Pervez Musharraf after having been paralyzed for several days by the chanting and filibustering of opposition politicians. They object to the sweeping powers he has arrogated to himself, including the “Legal Framework Order” of 19 unilateral amendments to the 1973 Constitution inserted by the general last […]

*An al-Qaeda leader reports on a militant web site that there were only 1900 “Arab Afghan” fighters in Afghanistan during the US war against the Taliban, and that 350 were killed. This is a lower number than most estimates I’ve seen. *A major rally of tens of thousands of protesters took place Sunday in Rawalpindi […]

*Dawn is reporting that the computer files and CDs confiscated from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on his arrest in Rawalpindi demonstrate the breadth of his networking in the Philippines, Europe and the US. (He had lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and plotted terrorism there against US targets like airliners. Like many al-Qaida goons, he […]

Although the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, an al-Qaeda mastermind, has raised hopes that the war on terror is bearing fruit, the question of his patron inside Pakistan remains murky and troubling. He was arrested in a house owned by a Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, a 78-year-old microbiologist characterized in Pakistani news reports as a […]