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| | Al Qaeda massing for new fight | csmonitor.com |
 | | To fight a new war against American forces, Al Qaeda is reportedly broadening its base of support to include new like-minded members, including the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Pashtun-dominated radical Islamist Hizb-I-Islami party. |
 | | Hekmatyar's party, which received substantial Saudi funding, CIA training, and Pakistani military support during the war against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, still enjoys support in Kunar and other Pashtun-dominated provinces and is also the closest in ideological terms to the Taliban. |
 | | Their battle plan, Afghan intelligence sources say, is to launch a massive attack on eastern Afghanistan, by crossing along the poorly defended mountainous border of Kunar Province, where opium and timber smugglers take their products out of Afghanistan either undetected or with the compliance of corrupt Afghan border officials. |
| www.csmonitor.com /2002/0809/p01s01-wosc.html (2452 words) |
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