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Brigadier Zahoor Fazal Qadri is not the first high profile army officer to have been martyred by al-Qaeda-linked militants for fighting against terrorists in Waziristan area. On November 19, 2008, Major Gen Ameer Faisal Alvi, a former two-star general and the first General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Army’s Special Service Group, was shot dead in his car in Islamabad. Once considered close to General Pervez Musharraf, Alvi was the first Pakistani Major General to have captained the prestigious Armed Forces Skydiving Team (AFST) as a General Officer Commanding. But he was forcibly retired from the Pakistan Army on disciplinary grounds ‘for conduct unbecoming’ by then Army Chief General Musharraf in August 2005.
Subsequent investigations and the arrest of a former ISI Major had revealed that Alvi’s murder was masterminded by Commander Ilyas Kashmiri, the now deceased chief of the Azad Kashmir chapter of the al-Qaeda-linked Harkatul Jehadul Islami. After his arrest, Major (Retd) Haroon Ashiq, the former ISI official, confessed having killed Major Gen Ameer Faisal Alvi at the behest of Commander Ilyas Kashmiri who also used to head 313 Brigade in North Waziristan. Kashmiri was later killed in a US drone attack on June 3, 2011 in South Waziristan.
In fact, Major General Alvi had supervised “Operation Mountain Lion”, carried out by American and British troops on the Pak-Afghan tribal border belt. The operation on the Pakistani side of the border was conducted with the help of the Special Services Group commandos to track down fugitive al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. In one such military operation carried out in the Angoor Adda area of Waziristan in October 2003, a special SSG unit led by Maj Gen Faisal Alvi had reportedly killed 12 suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda militants and arrested 14 others.
At a subsequent media briefing, Maj Gen Alvi, the commander of the operation, had stated while showing the seized weapons to reporters: “Our guys are trying to flush out the militants. We are having problems actually flushing them out, because they are putting on strong resistance. Some of those arrested appeared to be from Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime. Most of the guys we have encountered so far here are foreigners hailing from different nationalities. You see those guys sitting under the tree, those prisoners we have taken, they are all foreigners and we have four dead foreigners lying here. The dead and most of the prisoners appear to be Arab nationals. A large cache of arms and basic surveillance equipment has also been seized from their compounds”.