The Pakistan quake’s effect on Al Qaeda

This is the news article I’ve been waiting to find:

No accurate estimate is as yet available on the human losses and material damage suffered by the Al Qaeda and other jihadi terrorist organisations belonging to Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front (IIF) as a result of the earthquake, which struck Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan on October 8,2005.

2. Of the members of the IIF, only the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) has openly admitted extensive damages to its infrastructure in the POK. It has also admitted the death of at least 70 of its cadres and an unspecified number of its POK-based office-bearers in the quake. It has not ruled out the possibility that many more of its cadres might have died in the POK. It has claimed that Prof-Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the leader of its political wing called the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD), is alive and denied reports that he was in the POK at the time of the quake.

3. Maulana Abdul Aziz Alvi,a spokesman of the JUD, said at Karachi on October 11: “The group has taken a severe blow. The casualty figure may cross 100 and even more, as we have no information about those killed in other areas of Muzaffarabad.” He added that the organisation’s members, who survived the earthquake, were attending funerals after every two to three hours.According to him; the Jamaat’s religious schools and mosques had been razed to the ground. More than a dozen members died when the roof of the party office collapsed during a meeting, he said.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information, but Al Qaeda and the Taliban had to have taken one hell of a hit in the earthquake. For all we know, Osama could have really bought it this time.

Rantburg has more. With a really funny Photoshop of a Fox News crawl.