AMERICAN officials
seeking to understand how Osama bin Laden’s closest
advisers escaped Kabul last November are being urged to
go to the town of Logar, at the centre of a rich farming
district south of the Afghan capital.
Locals still talk of the night-time escape, past the
Bala Hissar fortress and south through the Logar Valley,
when the advisers escaped US airstrikes.
Mohammed Rahim, a local businessman, said that the
al-Qaeda convoy arrived between November 1 and 15.
“We don’t understand how they weren’t all killed the
night before because they came in a convoy of at least
1,000 cars and trucks,” he said. “It was a very dark
night, but it must have been easy for the American
pilots to see the headlights.”
The next evening the convoy moved on. “The main road
was jammed from eight in the evening until three in the
morning. When the road cleared, Mrs Rahman (the wife of
Abu Abdul, a high-ranking al-Qaeda intelligence planner)
and her children were gone.”
The exodus is also thought to have included Ayman
al-Zawahiri, considered to be the policy and strategy
chief of al-Qaeda, and Muzzamil, another senior leader,
who uses only one name.
The al-Qaeda link with Logar began after the American
airstrikes last September, when Abu Abdul bundled his
American wife and their six children out of Kabul to a
friend’s farm. Despite the drought, farmers in the Logar
Valley used their underground water supplies to nurture
their orchards.
Mr Rahim was not clear when the last al-Qaeda leader
had left, but one man listening to his account said that
he had taken charge of an abandoned Japanese Prada
four-wheel-drive vehicle, which he believed had been
left by a senior al-Qaeda commander before he took off
on foot in the direction of Gardez, on the way to the
Pakistan border.
Other cars used by Taleban or al-Qaeda loyalists and
their families were found further down the same road,
but the Prada was the most expensive of the abandoned
vehicles. It is now part of the motor pool used by local
Governor.
In the boot the locals discovered a sheaf of
documents that are now being passed around the Logar
souk. They include what could have been propaganda. Two
large maps are drawn in thick black ink. One with
accompanying descriptions scribbled in Arabic shows the
Philippine islands with a large ship near Luzon.
The other map depicts what seems to be an American
city. The main street near a clearly labelled “shopping
centre” has a McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut next to each
other.
