Paybacks are a bitch

9Jun/103

Bin Laden located?

Tally Ho!

According to DEBKAfile, a Kuwaiti newspaper published a story on Monday stating that the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, and his intelligence chiefs know that Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are living in Iran:

Osama bin Laden's hiding place was pinned down for the first time Monday, June 7, by the Kuwaiti Al-Siyassa Monday, June 7, as the mountainous town of Savzevar in the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, 220 km west of Mashhad. He is said to have lived there under Tehran's protection for the last five years, along with Ayman Al-Zawahiri and five other high-ranking al Qaeda leaders.

Debkafile's intelligence sources disclosed Monday night that Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan and his intelligence chiefs are well aware that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are hiding in Iran. The leak to the Kuwait paper was intended to show the Obama administration that the Turkish leader's ties with Iran had grown intense enough for him to be fully in the picture of Iran's secret sanctuary for the authors of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Savzevar, a small town of about a quarter of a million inhabitants, is connected by road to Tehran and Mashhad and has a small airport. A center for producing grapes and raisins, its location is remote and difficult to access because it is enclosed by lofty mountains and a salt desert 50,000 square kilometers in area.

I've personally suspected this for some time, but, what do I know, really. And, while Debkafile is considered by some to be a propaganda outlet for the Israelis, I'll leave that judgement to you, kind readers.

If true though, this begs some interesting questions. Foremost is why, if Iranian and Turkish relations are warming so, would Erdogan leak such sensitive information to a Kuwaiti newspaper. Is it indeed to lure the President into attempting some kind of dramatic SpecOps action; perhaps even a trap of sorts, assuming that Turkey is working in concert with Iran? Is it plain old fashioned realpolitik. That is, with all the talk of a resurgent Ottoman empire among Turkish nationalists, and Iran itself openly seeking regional hegemony, is this a thumb in Ahmadi-Nejad's eye? Or could it be that Turkey wishes to signal to the Obama administration that, because of it's cultural connections throughout the region, it is a much more solid and useful ally than the Israelis could hope to be?

A lot of questions and speculation to be sure. But what is certain is if Osama has been using Iran as sanctuary, and a base for operations in both Iraq, Syria, and proxy actions against Israel, coupled with Iran's single-minded defiance of all in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, wouldn't that be all the more reason to reconsider dropping the hammer on them?

At the very least I hope that this is being looked into further. Because if they could locate Bin Laden in Savzevar, or acquire his trail if flushed out by these revelation, the very least we could do is return his courtesies and reach out and touch him-so to speak...

I mean, why not dial 1-800-GPS-PGMs; when it absoluely, positively, has to be there-on target. And show him we still care.