FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES
Osama's secret citadel
His elaborate fortress won't be easy target
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If there is a part of the world that is still inaccessible to any but a special breed of mountain goats, it is the forbidding panhandle of Afghanistan’s Pamir Mountain area known as Little Pamir.
It is here that Osama bin Laden plans to make his last stand against American and allied forces, according to the intelligence sources of DEBKA-Net-Weekly.
The approximate locations of his bases are known to American strategists. But reaching them is a daunting prospect. The basic U.S. intelligence working proposition is that winkling the master terrorist out of his lair will not be achieved by going in with guns blazing and cannons booming. Neither will it be served by propping up the Northern Alliance of the Afghan opposition, or even by ousting the Taliban rulers in Kabul. Bin Laden will still elude them.
Therefore, the United States has posted a small force of Special Forces commandos – mostly Seals and Delta units – in the Tadjik center of Dzhartygumbez, no more than 35 miles from the Little Pamir panhandle, sending small squads in with orders to avoid engagements but searching for any clues to bin Laden’s whereabouts. Some have already skirmished with outlying al-Qaida patrols and sentries scattered around the mountain valleys.
The U.S. crack troops are escorted by Russian elite forces intelligence officers – armed with maps of a Little Pamir site the Soviet Union occupied and abandoned in 1993 – Russian troops permanently posted in Tadjikistan, and Tadjik mountain guides familiar with the smuggling trails between Russia, Afghanistan and China.
The Americans hope to cut the Pamir panhandle off, bottle bin Laden up in his retreat and then move in to capture him before the cruel mountain winter sets in. The first snow has already begun to fall.
Bounded by Tadjikistan in the north, Chinese Xinkiang in the east, Pakistan’s northern areas leading into Kashmir in the south, the peaks of the Pamir range average 20,000 feet. The tallest, towering to 24,590 feet, was dubbed “Communism” peak in the Soviet era, the highest mountain in the USSR.
Little Pamir is a finger pointing east. Its peaks, rising from a high foundation, are separated by wide, flat-bottomed valleys, where only low-growing plants, the arkhar mountain sheep and the kiik mountain goat, survive the severe conditions of the cold, high, snow-clad mountain desert. The population density of the Pamirs is one of the lowest in the world – predominantly Kazakhs in the west and Kirgiz in Little Pamir, who scrape a livelihood from primitive farming and smuggling.
The few roads follow ancient caravan routes through mountain passes to China’s northwestern Xinjiang province (formerly known as Chinese Turkestan) and south into Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush of which the Pamirs are an extension.