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Qaeda gaining ground in northwest

* Militant says fight not possible without Qaeda support
* Ex-CIA official says losing Swat is shocking
* Militant organiser says he recruited militants for Fazlullah

SWAT: Militants are expanding their control of northern Pakistan, challenging the US-backed government of President Gen Pervez Musharraf and adding to the lands where terrorists allied with Osama bin Laden find refuge.

Once restricted to pockets in the mountains along the Afghanistan border, radical mullahs and their followers now wield power in vast areas of northwest Pakistan. They have moved in the past few months beyond the tribal regions and into northern cities and Swat.

Qaeda support: “I can tell you there is money coming from Al Qaeda and if Al Qaeda did not lead these things we couldn’t fight,” said Abdul Samad, a stocky militant from Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province who serves as a liaison between Taliban groups on both sides of the border.

‘Losing Swat shocking’: “The Pakistanis, and by extension the United States, have almost no control of events” in the northern, ethnically Pashtun regions, said Milt Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan.

“I don’t think anyone in Washington really gets it,” he said. “Losing Swat is shocking.”

Pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Fazlullah has set up a virtual mini-state in Swat. He uses an FM radio station to help spread fundamentalist Islam in an area once known to tourists as the “Switzerland of Asia”.

Qaeda’s influx: Samad, the militant organiser, says he traveled in recent weeks to North Waziristan and recruited scores of militants to reinforce Fazlullah’s followers in Swat.

“It’s not just in Swat or in Waziristan or in Bajaur. We are getting stronger everywhere in the area,” he said. Recent suicide bombings are direct evidence of Al Qaeda’s influx, he said.

This month, authorities sent about 2,500 extra police and troops into Swat district to challenge Fazlullah’s followers. A group of tribal elders and clerics has been holding talks with Fazlullah’s aides about ending the bloodshed.

Still, many Pakistanis fear the government has waited too long to confront militant clerics like Fazlullah.

A confidential memo circulated to the National Security Council in July and made public soon afterward warned that militants from the border region were exerting wide influence.

It spoke of a “nexus” between radical clerics behind the bloody siege of Lal Masjid in Islamabad, which resulted in more than 100 deaths, and the clerics in northwest Pakistan.

“When I was following Lal Masjid, one thing was very clear – that they had strong sympathisers within the establishment and within the military,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading independent Pakistani defense analyst. He said Pakistan’s armed forces remain ambivalent about religious extremists, whom the military supported during the Afghan war with the Soviets in the 1980s. ap

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