In the hunt for al-Qaeda, a missile attack on a mountain
village killed women and children. The attack was precise,
the intelligence was flawed, and the strained relation
between Pakistan and the US has been pushed to breaking point

Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul in Islamabad
Tuesday January 17, 2006

Observer

The missiles were deadly accurate. In the pitch dark of a
night in Pakistan's sparsely populated North West Frontier
Province, they not only located the three targeted houses on
the outskirts of the village of Damadola Burkanday but
squarely struck their hujra, the large rooms traditionally
used by Pashtun tribesmen to accommodate guests.

Yesterday some of the results of the strike were very clear:
three ruined houses, mud-brick rubble scattered across the
steeply terraced fields, the bodies of livestock lying where
thrown by the airblast, a row of newly dug graves in the
village cemetery and torn green and red embroidered blankets
flapping in the chilly wind. Four children were among the 18
villagers who died in the brutally sudden attack on their
homes.

Yet evidence emerging appeared to indicate that, though the
technology that guided the missiles to their targets at 3am
on Friday was faultless, the intelligence that had selected
those targets was not. Even as American military and
intelligence sources spoke of the possible death of Ayman al-
Zawahiri, the second-in-command of al-Qaeda and the man
considered to be the brains behind the militant group's
strategy, Pakistani officials said that there was no evidence
any 'foreigners', shorthand locally for al-Qaeda fighters,
were among the 18 victims, though they said that 'according
to preliminary investigations there was foreign presence in
the area'.

In a bid to distance themselves from what was looking like a
tragic and counter-productive tactical error that had cost
many innocent lives, Pakistan announced it would file a
formal protest with the Americans. Information Minister
Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told a news conference that the Pakistani
government wanted 'to assure the people we will not allow
such incidents to recur,' adding that the government had no
information about al-Zawahiri.

'We deeply regret that civilian lives have been lost in an
incident. While this act is highly condemnable, we have been
for a long time striving to rid all our tribal areas of
foreign intruders who have been responsible for all the
misery and violence in the region. This situation has to be
brought to an end,' he said.

But his words did little to calm the anger in and around
Damadola, a bastion of conservative religion and tribal
chauvinism, and elsewhere in Pakistan. The village lies in
the semi-autonomous Bajur tribal region around 120 miles
northwest of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. It is a rugged
and desperately poor region, until recently a centre of opium
cultivation, where local men habitually go armed and
government authority is limited to main roads. Thousands of
local men marched in a series of protests yesterday, one
crowd attacking the office of a US-funded aid group. In
another incident, police were forced to fire tear gas to
disperse as many as 400 protesters chanting anti-American
slogans and waving banners condemning the Pakistan President,
General Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf, who came to power in 1999, has maintained a
difficult and domestically unpopular alliance with Washington
since 2001 and has deployed unprecedented numbers of troops
on bloody operations to capture senior al-Qaeda figures.
However, to the Americans' intense annoyance, he has not
granted US forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the
border into Pakistan, even in pursuit of militants. American-
led coalition forces clashing with militants in the
mountainous province of Kunar, immediately adjacent to Bajaur
which lies a mere four miles from the frontier, say they have
often been frustrated by their enemies' use of Pakistan as a
sanctuary. Yesterday the Pakistani Foreign Ministry took
pains to point out that 'in all probability [the village] was
targeted from across the border in Afghanistan'.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in
recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations
against militants. Pakistan has already lodged a protest with
the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike
killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, an
almost deserted area of mountains 300 miles south of
Damadola. In Damadola itself, locals said they had never
sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-
Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born
ex-doctor.

'This is a big lie... Only our family members died in the
attack,' said Shah Zaman, a jeweller who lost two sons and a
daughter in the attack. 'They dropped bombs from planes and
we were in no position to stop them... or to tell them we are
innocent. I don't know [al-Zawahiri]. He was not at my home.
No foreigner was at my home when the planes came and dropped
bombs.' Haroon Rashid, a member of parliament who lives in a
village near Damadola, told The Observer that he had seen a
drone surveying the area hours before the attack.

'A drone has been flying over the area for the last three,
four days, and I had a feeling that something nasty was going
to happen,' he said in a phone interview. 'There was no
foreigner there - we never saw a single foreigner here. They
were all local people, jewellers and shop-keepers, who used
to commute between Bajaur and their village. We knew them.'

The dead were reported to include four children, aged between
five and ten, and at least two women. According to Islamic
tradition, they were buried almost immediately. One Pakistani
official, speaking anonymously, told The Observer that hours
before the strike some unidentified guests had arrived at one
home and that some bodies had been removed quickly after the
attack. This was denied by villagers.

US and Pakistani officials have also said that the missiles
were launched from American pilotless predator drones, which
have previously been used to target senior al-Qaeda figures.
A man alleged to be al-Qaeda's third-in-command was killed in
a 'stand-off' missile attack around a month ago. However,
several eyewitnesses spoke of seeing planes and illuminating
flares over the village, which if true would indicate the use
of missiles from planes guided in by special forces teams on
the ground rather than CIA-operated drones.

Obaidullah, a local doctor, said he saw the airstrike from
his home about five to six kilometres away. 'There was one
plane flying (overhead). Then more planes came. First they
dropped light and then bombs,' he said. If US troops have
crossed the frontier from Afghanistan in pursuit of
militants, it would be a major diplomatic incident and a
domestic disaster for Musharraf.

The Americans have become increasingly frustrated by their
inability to catch al-Zawahiri, whom analysts see as the
strategic mentor of Osama bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was already
a hardened Egyptian militant when he joined bin Laden, a
Saudi Arabian six years younger, in the late 1980s to form
the al-Qaeda group out of the remnants of Arab 'mujahideen'
who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan. After
masterminding a series of attacks, culminating in the 11
September atrocities, from camps in Afghanistan in the late
1990s, al-Zawahiri has been on the run. However, this has not
stopped him providing broad strategic direction for the
international Islamic militant movement and, through
appearing in frequent propaganda videos, becoming almost as
well known as bin Laden himself. Despite a huge manhunt and a
$25m reward, he has escaped capture. Strong local sympathy
for al-Qaeda fugitives in the harsh hills that line the
Afghan frontier with Pakistan has been a major advantage.

'The Americans are really not much closer to finding him than
they were years ago,' said one intelligence analyst. 'They
are hunting in an area that is about a thousand miles long
and two hundred miles wide. That is a tough job by anyone's
standards.' The carnage at Damadola indicates that the hunted
is still a step ahead of the hunters.

The Al-Zawahiri file

· Born 1951, Cairo. Son of a chemistry professor. A trained
paediatrician.

· Travelled to Pakistan in 1985 after being arrested,
imprisoned and tortured in sweep of militants following
killing of President Sadat.

· Spent 1991-1996 in Sudan with Osama bin Laden before moving
to Afghanistan.

· A key theorist of modern Islamic militancy, he developed
strategy of using spectacular violence against American
interests to 'wake up the masses'.

· From series of mountain hideouts along Pakistan -
Afghanistan frontier he has issued videos and communiqués
aimed at inspiring militants