World News
Al Qaeda Kingpin Resurfaces In Afghanistan Surrounded By Taliban Security
Amin Al Haq’s reappearance under Taliban protection highlights concerns about the US government’s remote counter-terrorism strategy going forward.
A video has emerged online today that reportedly shows Dr. Amin Al Haq, who served for a time as the personal security chief for Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden, traveling in the open in Afghanistan for the first time in a decade with a Taliban escort. If the description of this video is accurate, it can only raise questions about the current relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and whether the former group will again give the latter safe haven in the country.
At the same time, a controversial American drone strike in Kabul yesterday, which, regardless of its intended targets, increasingly appears to have killed a number of innocent civilians, highlights the potential limits of future “over-the-horizon” counter-terrorism capabilities that will be available to the U.S. government going forward. All of this comes on the eve of the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the end of what American officials now say is set to be the largest evacuation airlift operation in U.S. military history.
It’s unclear when it was shot, but the video was reportedly taken at a checkpoint in Nangarhar Province, which is where Al Haq was born. He is believed to have fled Al Qaeda’s cave complex in Tora Bora into Pakistan with other senior members of the terrorist group, including Bin Laden himself, sometime between 2001 and 2002.
Al Haq was arrested in the Pakistani city of Lahore in 2008, but was released in 2011 under murky circumstances, and subsequently disappeared from the public eye. It’s unclear whether this is actually his first trip back to Afghanistan since then, but it certainly looks to be the first time that he has been spotted out in public, which is notable in its own right.