Al Qaeda Organization

Under cover of darkness Tuesday, American soldiers crept across a bridge where just days before insurgents had left a chilling warning: a severed head with a message identifying the Iraqi victim as a U.S. collaborator scrawled across the forehead with a black marker. Through the biting cold, the troops crunched down a winding gravel road, past frost-glazed reeds, empty storefronts and spacious homes surrounded by orange and pomegranate trees.

President Pervez Musharraf said U.S. troops were not welcome to join the fight against Al Qaeda on Pakistani soil, despite the growing threat from Islamic extremists. Musharraf said that Pakistan would resist any unilateral U.S. military action against insurgents in its mostly lawless tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan. "I challenge anybody coming into our mountains," he told Singapore's the Straits Times newspaper. "They would regret that day."

Islamic extremists attacked and seized a small Pakistani army fort near the Afghan border, leaving at least 22 soldiers dead or missing. A military spokesman said this morning that the militants had left the fort and disappeared into the surrounding hills. Although the fighters did not gain significant ground in the attack Tuesday night on Sararogha Fort, they did further erode confidence in the U.S.

The young man had been through a miserable few years. He had been rejected by the army and failed to finish his studies. Security officials kept summoning him for talks. At 25, he left his parents' home in the city, telling them he wanted to be a shepherd. They heard nothing more from him until newspapers reported that he was wanted in Germany for involvement in a plot to bomb a pair of trains.

The top U.S. military officer on Friday described the airstrike that killed a leading Al Qaeda commander in Pakistan as an important victory, but he refused to say whether the U.S. government had anything to do with it. "The strike was a very important one, it was a very lethal one," Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference. He brushed aside questions about any role the Pentagon may have played.

After a U.S. airstrike leveled a small compound in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions in January 2006, President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence officials announced that several senior Al Qaeda operatives had been killed, and that the top prize was an elusive Egyptian who was believed to be a chemical weapons expert. But current and former U.S.

The death of Abu Laith al Libi, a Libyan Al Qaeda chief, has cast a spotlight on the rise of Libyan militants in a network dominated by Egyptians and Saudis, Western anti-terrorism investigators say. Al Libi was killed last week in an American missile strike on a hide-out in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, officials say. In addition to overseeing a paramilitary campaign in Afghanistan, Al Libi had become a top figure in a propaganda barrage on the Internet, according to experts.

The three boys in black hoods and green T-shirts hold Kalashnikov assault rifles as the youngest shouts to the camera in a pre-pubescent voice, "Fight them and God will torture them through your hands." The videotape, found during a U.S. military raid Dec. 4 in Diyala province, also shows about 20 boys in dark blue sports jerseys jumping walls and storming houses.

Gen. James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, said Monday he was confident the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq had been defeated here in western Iraq but that he was disappointed the central government in Baghdad had not done more to reconcile with the region and begin providing essential services. Conway, on a whirlwind tour of sprawling Anbar province, declined to say whether he would recommend to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S.

U.S., Afghan and Pakistani officers Saturday opened the first of six joint military intelligence centers planned along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The centers represent the latest American efforts to get Afghanistan and Pakistan to coordinate in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The centers are to be staffed by about 20 personnel from the three countries. Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, the commander of U.S.