The New Bin Laden

newsweek.com

The terrorist behind recent scares in Europe and America has a grim record—and a knack for staying alive.

Evil geniuses are a rare breed, even in the ranks of Al Qaeda. Those few who planned the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen 10 years ago and the atrocities in America on September 11, 2001, were killed or captured by the spring of 2003, and Osama bin Laden has been hard pressed ever since to recruit anyone able to take their place. But now, at last, he seems to have found his man, and that’s a major reason intelligence services from Washington to Paris to Islamabad have been acting so jittery of late.

Ilyas Kashmiri, 46, has the experience, the connections, and a determination to attack the West—including the United States—that make him the most dangerous Qaeda operative to emerge in years. “This guy ties everybody together,” says a veteran U.S. intelligence officer who has been watching Kashmiri’s rise to prominence closely but is not authorized to speak publicly. Kashmiri fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Indians in Kashmir and in India itself. He also worked with the Pakistani intelligence service, but turned on Islamabad with a vengeance in 2003, trying to murder then-president Pervez Musharraf. Since then Kashmiri has been linked to planned attacks in Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, most probably Chicago.

Today, Pakistani intelligence assets on the ground and American drones in the air hunt Kashmiri relentlessly in the ungoverned tribal areas near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Pakistani officials fear that if Kashmiri carries out another major attack on India or in the West, their country could suffer massive retaliation. A senior Pakistani military officer who tracks militants, and declines to be named for security reasons, says Kashmiri’s “skill, his leadership, and his wide relations with Pakistani and foreign militants make him the most dangerous man for Pakistan, Europe, and the U.S.” Kashmiri agrees. After erroneous reports that he’d been killed in September 2009, he gave an interview and gloated that the Americans were right to pursue him. “They know their enemy well,” he said. “They know what I am really up to.”


Born in the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir in 1964, this veteran terrorist lost an index finger and one of his eyes during the fight against the Soviets in the 1980s. In such photographs as exist, he’s often shown wearing aviator sunglasses. He reportedly changes the color of his thick beard frequently, and it may be white or dyed red with henna, or then again dyed black. But his imposing presence and the deference shown him can still make him stand out.