After bin Laden, al Qaida will live on.

Afghanistan

Syed Saleem ShahzadAsia Times (China)Al Qaida’s torch is being passed, said Syed Saleem Shahzad in Hong Kong’s Asia Times. According to a source close to the Islamist group’s leadership, Osama bin Laden has been sick for many months. His kidney disease has grown worse, and the Saudi terrorist is now virtually bedridden, unable to stray from his dialysis machine. Two weeks ago, he asked his coterie to pray for him. Still, that doesn’t mean al Qaida is on the ropes. The No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri, is “very active in Afghanistan and controlling affairs,” says the source, the son of a top Uzbek Islamist. And while bin Laden exhausted his funds long ago, the group he founded is attracting cash from other sources. Uzbek militant Tahir Yuldeshev, an al Qaida operative based in South Waziristan, Pakistan, has already received money from private donors in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Yuldeshev says he has such steady funding that he was able to reject a Russian offer of arms and money. The Russians wanted him to promise to keep the jihad limited to Afghanistan and not bring it to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia—a promise al Qaida was not willing to give. For now, though, the source says, Afghanistan remains the focus. Al Qaida believes it is there that “Muslim armies will finally regroup and go to liberate” Muslim lands.

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