WASHINGTON, September 13, 2006 – About 50 jihadist leaders have left Pakistan for Somalia since a pro-al-Qaida militia movement took control of the capital there, say Pakistani officials.

Alexis Debat, a terrorism analyst and former adviser on counter-terrorism to the French prime minister, told a Washington briefing Tuesday that the assessment came from a senior official in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

In June the Union of Islamic Courts, an Islamic extremist coalition which U.S. officials say supports al-Qaida, won control of the Somali capital Mogadishu after a four-month-long armed struggle with the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. The organization is an umbrella group for several warlords supported, according to media reports, by CIA funding.

Somalia, a failed state with a history of Islamic extremism, has long been regarded by U.S. counter-terror specialists as a haven for al-Qaida and other Islamic terror groups.

Debat also said that ISI confidently believed al-Qaida's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to be hiding somewhere in a 25 square-mile area between Bajaur in Pakistan and Kunar in Afghanistan.

Debat, who has just returned from a month-long trip to Pakistan said al-Qaida was becoming increasingly intertwined with native Jihadist groups there, a process he referred to as the group's "Pakistanization."

"What was previously a very disparate, very complex mosaic of groups is increasingly ... coming together: the (Pakistani) Taliban, the al-Qaida foreign element and the sectarian Kashmiri element," he said, adding all three were enjoying sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border.

In all seven of Pakistan's so-called tribal agencies, the areas under the autonomous jurisdiction of fierce Pathan tribesman, Debat said, the traditional structures of tribal power were increasingly being supplanted by the rule of Islamic clerics sympathetic to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

He said Islamic religious schools or madrassas were providing "the base for the take over of the tribal areas'... local administration by the local Taliban."

Source: United Press International (UPI)

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