Al Qaeda Controlling Terrorist Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan

According to Mullah Dadullah, a military official of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden is alive and controlling terrorist operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Mullah Dadullah said that Osama Bin Laden planned and supervised the suicide operation that targeted the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, on February 27, 2007. (Al Jazeera article.)

In the exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Mullah Dadullah said, "Thank God, he [Osama Bin Laden] is alive, we get updated information about it. Thank God, he plans the operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You may remember the martyr operation inside the Bagram base which targeted a senior US official [United States Vice President Dick Cheney] ... that operation was a result of his wise planning. He planned that operation in details and guided us through it. The operation was a success."

In Afghanistan, Al Jazeera comments on the fierce resistance of the Taliban fighters against NATO forces in Operation Achilles. It reports Taliban fighters showing its reporters a room full of explosives being made into anti-tank bombs and saying, "Thanks to God we have good guns ... we are ready all the time to face them [NATO and Afghan government forces] in a battle." The Taliban fighters also claim to have anti-aircraft weaponry.

In Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, a group connected to Al Qaeda, claims to have been behind the murder of 40 United States soldiers. "Two knights from the Islamic State in Iraq ... driving two booby-trapped trucks hit the heart of the crusader American headquarters in the region of Diyala." Sources say that nine soldiers were killed and more than 20 others were injured in an attack considered to be bloodiest since 2005 when ten United States Marines were killed and eleven more wounded by a roadside bomb outside Falluja.