‘ISI, CIA ran over 60 join operations against Qaeda commanders hiding in FATA’

NEW YORK - A senior Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s main spy agency, official has revealed that the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) and the ISI together have run over 60 operations against Al-Qaeda and other key extremists commanders hiding in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan.

The official said the missions included “snatch and grabs”, the abduction of important militants, as well as efforts to kill extremist leaders, The New York Times reports.

The operations were carried out on the basis of intelligence inputs provided by both the US and the Pakistani agencies, the official said, on conditions of anonymity.

The Obama administration has been pressing Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani group, which is controlled by one of Al-Qaeda’s top commanders, Sirajuddin Haqqani.

The US believes that the Haqqani network is using Pakistan’s lawless border areas to carry out attacks in Kabul and important locations in Afghanistan.

US troops, stationed in Afghanistan, have intensified their commando operations against the Haqqani network in Afghanistan and have gained substantial success.

Although President Obama and his top aides have never discussed these highly classified missions in public, such counterterrorism operations are expected to increase, along with the deployment of 30,000 more US forces in the next year, as part of the revamped strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

US Central Command Chairman General David Petraeus has also made it clear that following the surge there would be more focus on the counterterrorism operations.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, earlier this month, General Petraeus had said that more such commando offensive against hard-core Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists could be seen in the near future.

“We actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy,” General Petraeus had told the Senators.

“There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable.

And we are intending to do that, and we will have additional national mission force elements to do that when the spring rolls around,” he added. (ANI)