The Gitmo Files: (Shocker!) Mullah Omar meets with Pakistan’s ISI

A recently leaked threat assessment authored at Guantanamo contains this piece of intelligence:

As of February 2005, Mullah Satter attended a meeting with Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, PK. The meeting included high-level Taliban leaders Mullah Abdul Bari, Mullah Mohammed Nabi, Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, representatives from the Pakistani government and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID). Mullah Omar told the attendees that they should not cooperate with the new infidel government (in Afghanistan) and should keep attacking coalition forces.

This is not a real shocker, of course, as we know that the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment has sheltered Mullah Omar for years.

The file does not say how this was learned. And it would be most interesting to find out who the “representatives from the Pakistani government,” in particular, were.

Another leaked Gitmo file says that former detainee Abdul Hafiz, who quickly rejoined the Taliban’s jihad after being transferred in December 2009, was part of an insurgency group that “consisted of 40 to 60 Taliban and HIG fighters who were ordered by a Quetta-based Taliban commander on a mission to conduct attacks against Westerners and Afghans sympathetic to the Afghan Transitional Authority.”

The same file says that in January 2003:

Three Pakistani military officers provided one month of training for the group in explosives, bomb-making, and assassination techniques. This training was conducted in preparation for a planned spring campaign to assassinate Westerners.

In March 2003, this Pakistani-trained Taliban/HIG group kidnapped and assassinated a Red Cross worker.

It is no wonder, then, that yet another leaked Gitmo file includes the Pakistani ISI on a list of “terrorist and terrorist support entities” associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The US officials who authored the document wrote: “Through associations with these groups and organizations, a detainee may have provided support to al Qaeda or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against U.S. or Coalition forces.”

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

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3 Comments

  • Caratacus10ad says:

    Can only come to one conclusion…
    The Pakistani’s have never been ‘our’ friends an d with the best will in the world, never will be either!
    The West has backed the wrong horse and the smell of well rotted maure get steamier by the month…
    ArcLight Waziristan and prior to so doing warn all westerners in or around Pakistan, that its a no-go zone…

  • Charu says:

    Time to bring out the playing cards with the top wanted AQ and Taliban leadership pictured on them, and add Kayani, Pasha, Musharraf and Gilani onto a backup deck of cards and show this to them as a warning of what might come. Since this rogue military has done nothing positive to show in the WOT in AfPak, it should be intentionally progressively weakened by withholding blood payments and spare parts until it is unable to suppress the Baloch rebellion. An independent supply route from Gwadar into Afghanistan will be a game changer for that country and for the Central Asian Republics beyond.

  • Hanna Greene says:

    How could we support the PK regime when they consistently thumb their nose at us! I think Bush hit the nail on the head – “You’re with us or agaisnt us” Time to realize that PK is not for us and do some internal weeding of Taliban supporters in this country.

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