Their modus-operandi was simple but elaborate. Local jehadi organizations were instructed to rent apartments across Karachi at least two months in advance of a planned attack and wait. By 2002, Al Qaeda had turned Karachi into the center of its activities. Al Qaeda selected Karachi because it was known for ethnic and sectarian violence. But with the arrival of Al Qaeda, a new dimension was added to the cities growing crime problem: suicide bombings.
[quote]Khaled Sheikh Muhammad ran Al Qaeda from upscale flats in posh localities of Karachi[/quote]
The suicide bombing of French naval officers in Karachi in May of 2002 came as a surprise to many and was officially the start of Al Qaeda operations in Karachi. It was also the first time a local jihadi group – Harkat ul Mujahideen al Almi – was used for logistics while the suicide bomber was Al Qaeda. During his interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Khaled Sheikh Mohammad explained how Al Qaeda wanted to recruit locals from Sindh to join Al Qaeda. A senior security official said the top terrorist leader said the plan was initially successful. “We had lot of Al Qaeda members who were from Sukkur who had fought along in Afghanistan. In Karachi, we often sent out our brothers to Sindh to hide and migrate to Iraq via Balochistan and Iran,” Khaled Sheikh Mohammad told his interrogators.
A month later, President Pervez Musharraf and the US consulate in Karachi were targeted. And although Pakistan extradited 422 Al Qaeda members that summer (86 of them caught from Karachi alone) the first major breakthrough was the arrest of Ramzi al-Shaibah who once worked for Al Qaeda’s Hamburg cell.
Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, who became Al Qaeda’s operational chief in 2002, had formed a close operational link with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and ran Al Qaeda from flats in the posh DHA and Bahadarabad localities. Breakthrough intelligence regarding his whereabouts came in June of 2002 when Al Jazeera anchor Yosri Fouda received an invitation from Al Qaeda to conduct an interview in Karachi with KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
In January 2003, Jack Thomas – an Australian Al Qaeda fugitive – was captured in Karachi and gave ‘actionable intelligence’ on the whereabouts of KSM who was finally caught in Rawalpindi in March – too late to prevent the beheading of Daniel Pearl and the establishment of a strong nexus with the local sectarian groups working in Karachi, including Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which had turned into Al Qaeda’s B team along with another spinoff name “Jundullah.”
Jundullah’s Karachi chapter was founded originally by a student activist named Attaur Rehman in 2003. Jundullah was initially a well-knit cell comprising of some 20 militants, most of them educated professionals in their twenties and thirties. They attacked Karachi Corps Commander General Ahsan Saleem Hayat, bombed a US Consulate, and carried out a series of terrorist attacks, including last year’s triple bombings in an Ashura procession in Karachi.
[quote]Talat Hussain orchestrated a deadly attack to free Al Qaeda captives in an ISI detention center in Sukkur[/quote]
In March 2004, Karachi police arrested brothers Dr Akmal Waheed and Dr Arshad Waheed who were suspected of assisting wanted militants and providing medical treatment to three fugitives: Abu Massab, Gul Hasan and Qassam al-Sani, who were wounded in the Gen Hayat Attempt.
The Waheed brothers were sentenced in 2005 to seven years in prison, but were acquitted later. Following his acquittal, Dr Arshad Waheed shifted his activities to South Waziristan and was running a clinic in Wana, until a US drone missile killed him. Al Qaeda’s media wing Al Sahab Media Foundation released the third part of a series of videos entitled “The Protectors of the Sanctuary” in memory of Dr Arshad Waheed, confirming his association with Al Qaeda.
By 2006, Al Qaeda was recruiting hundreds of students through its website and an active support network in Karachi University. These new recruits were sent to Waziristan for training.
Among these boys was Yousaf bin Mohammad, 26, who was arrested by intelligence agencies and is now in an undisclosed detention center. According to Yousaf, “I was recruited and trained to work with a sleeper cell by another student from NED University who belonged to Islami Jamiat Talaba. Our task was to monitor local media and make translations.”
Today, Al Qaeda continues to be the biggest terrorist planning and financing organization in the country, while the TTP’s Qari Zafar Group, with its huge Mehsud support base in Karachi’s outskirts, provides logistical support and suicide bombers. The operational aspects are entirely outsourced to the sectarian terrorist groups like Jandullah and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. It was on a visit to Karachi that Faisal Shezad was picked by TTP and trained for the failed Manhattan bombing.
In Karachi city, Al Qaeda was led by a little known but dangerous Yemeni militant Abdul Moeed Islam aka Saeed Abdul Salam, who operated from DHA Phase V and later moved to Gulistan-e-Jauhar after a divorce. Saeed Abdul Salam reported directly to Al Qaeda’s Pakistan chief Abu Hafs al Shahri (killed in a drone strike) and the Al Qaeda leader in Balochistan Younis al Mauritani (later arrested by FC). When Pakistan Rangers tracked him down in 2011, he blew himself with a hand grenade.
The incident was followed by a wave of suicide bombings on Rangers in Karachi. Their headquarters in North Nazimabad and offices in other places in Karachi were bombed by Al Qaeda’s sleeper cells.
The new commander of Al Qaeda in Sindh and Balochistan is Talat Hussain – an Urdu speaking militant from Orangi Town who commands enormous respect from Dr Aymen al-Zawahiri and was recruited by Sheikh Khaled Mohammad. It was in fact Talat Hussain who was given the task by Al Qaeda to kill Benazir Bhutto in Karachi.
According to a Karachi police official, “Talat Hussain had earlier tasked Al Qaeda operative Adil Azeem Sheikh to assassinate Benazir Bhutto in Karachi in 2007, but the task was later given to other teams operating in the city headed by Rehan, Azeem and Daudullah.” All three of them were killed by Talat Hussain when they failed.
Hussain also orchestrated the deadly attack to free Al Qaeda’s captives in an ISI detention center in Sukkur.
Al Qaeda has been shifting its base from North Waziristan to the urban areas of Pakistan, and especially to Karachi, to avoid US drone attacks. In Karachi, it is in a better position to disrupt NATO supplies to Afghanistan, and plans to exploit sectarian and ethnic conflicts in the city to create a trap for Pakistan Army in Karachi –Pakistan’s commercial capital and among the most dangerous cities in the world.