How The Indian Parliament Attack Allowed Bin Laden's Escape From Tora Bora

AL QAEDA SUPREMO OSAMA BIN LADEN MAY HAVE believed an unseen force was protecting him.

He survived close calls fighting the Soviet troops in Afghanistan but was never in as much peril as when sheltering in the caves of Tora Bora with the core of Al Qaeda leadership, three months after 9/11. By December 2001, the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan lay in tatters, attacked by vengeful B-52 bombers from the air and the Northern Alliance and US special forces on the ground. Bin Laden was caught between the hammer of US special forces and their Afghan allies fighting their way up towards his mountain cave redoubt and the anvil of Pakistani frontier troops blocking his escape. When it seemed like all was lost for the terrorist chief, providence once again came to his assistance in the form of another sensational terror attack. This one, carried out by Pakistani terrorists against India’s Parliament in New Delhi on December 11, 2001. The attack saw India deploy its army along the border threatening Pakistan with war. The Pakistani anvil disappeared. An escape route opened up for the terrorist chief and his followers who would live to fight another day. The attack on India’s Parliament, it seems, was no coincidence. Excerpts from The Exile:

November 25, 2001, Tora Bora

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his fighters reached Osama high up in the White Mountains, exhausted from the climb and carrying the extra baggage of distressing news. The bin Laden family convoy had been ambushed at the border. Like so many other Arabs, their driver had been hog-tied with electrical wire and turned over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty, while their chaperone, Osama’s autistic son Saad, and his brother-in-law, the Saudi husband of Osama’s daughter Fatima, were “missing, presumed dead”.