Bin laden hung virus

Their June edict was enforced with a vengeance. The Taliban's method was always the same: Two riders on a motorcycle would race up to a polio worker in the street and shoot the worker twice in the head.

When the polio teams started using police escorts, the Taliban set off hidden roadside bombs that would wipe out an entire convoy. Clinics were bombed or set afire. And cases of polio were beginning to soar. By that point, says Dr. Elias Durry , the WHO's emergency coordinator for polio eradication in Pakistan, "we'd pretty much given up all hope of eradicating polio from Pakistan.

Durry, who is from Ethiopia, isn't the type to give up easily. Dressed in battered leather hat, jeans, and cowboy boots, he looks more like a Western gunslinger than a renowned polio expert who has successfully battled the virus in some of the world's most dangerous places, including Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan.

In other words, the Taliban were willing to use a contagious disease, one that could cripple their own children, as political blackmail to end the drone strikes. However, this strategy didn't stop several top Taliban commanders from secretly buying polio vaccine drops and giving them to their own children, according to a health worker in Peshawar, who told National Geographic that he personally provided doses of the vaccine to one militant chief and his family.

Meanwhile, the upheavals of the Arab Spring were starting to reverberate inside the al Qaeda and Taliban encampments in Pakistan. The overthrow of despots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, starting in December , inspired the departure of a first wave of Arab militants, who had been fighting in Afghanistan for more than three decades, first against the Soviets, then against NATO forces.

Numbering several hundred, they and their families left hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistani border and set off to join in the foment roiling the Middle East. According to Muhammad Amir Rana , director of an Islamabad-based think tank called the Pak Institute of Peace Studies , high-profile terrorists traveled by road across Balochistan Province in southwestern Pakistan into Iran, aided by Sunni tribes opposed to the ayatollahs in Tehran, and from there made their way into Iraq, Syria, and Egypt.

Another preferred route was to hop aboard one of the many smugglers' boats plying the waters between the Pakistani coastline and the Persian Gulf ports of Dubai and Bahrain. From there, the jihadists headed back home to stir up revolt. Most of these Islamic militants were coming from areas near the Afghan border or from the polio-infected slums of Karachi and Peshawar.

Adults can be carriers of the polio virus but otherwise remain healthy. Children are more susceptible to the crippling paralysis of the disease. A second, larger wave of Islamic militants began to leave Pakistan once fighting erupted in Syria in the spring of , and this migration of fighters continues today.

They departed for a variety of reasons: Drone strikes had taken their toll; fighting was winding down in Afghanistan with the rollback of NATO forces; and al Qaeda and its extremist Sunni offshoots had called for a jihad against Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria. But according to Rana and other defense analysts in Islamabad, another incentive compelled Pakistanis to join the jihad in Syria: money.

They recruited from the Taliban training camps and among Pakistan's own homegrown extremist Sunni groups, such as Lashkar-e- Jhangvi and Sipah-e- Sahaba. This second wave of fighters had also been hiding in the same tribal regions where polio was prevalent. And after the killing of polio workers brought a halt to vaccinations, the virus began spreading rapidly, and many analysts believe some of these jihadists, almost certainly, would have become infected carriers.

This stream of jihadists from Pakistan to Syria increased in early By December, two children with the telltale paralysis of polio were identified in Syria's eastern province of Dayr az Zawr, which was under the control of Islamist rebel factions. The number of cases soon multiplied. WHO officials say 36 new cases have so far been detected in Syria.

As Islamist rebels swept into Iraq, several other polio cases appeared in their wake. Genetic sequencing by the U. With some diseases, scientists can pinpoint not only its geographic source and its fatal trajectory as it spreads from village to town, country to country, but also the identity of the individual who was its first victim.

In October , for example, a cholera epidemic in Haiti , which infected more than , people and killed another 8,, was traced back to a brigade of UN peacekeepers from Nepal.

But with polio, medical experts say, it is impossible to find "patient zero" and thus track the disease's movements. The virus remains submerged in a community, manifesting its symptoms in only one out of every to 1, people.

Infants are most vulnerable to the virus, which attacks the brain and the spinal cord, causing paralysis. Polio has been afflicting humans since ancient times.

Highly contagious, the polio virus lodges in an infected person's throat and intestines. It then spreads to others who come in contact with a polio carrier's feces or droplets from a sneeze or a cough.

But over the ages, the virus has reached a kind of accommodation with its human hosts. It just wants to infect, replicate, and go infect someone else.

Its stealthy nature makes it hard to detect, Pallansch says. Since polio's symptom of paralysis strikes only a few people within a community, the best way to detect the virus's presence is through periodic tests of sewage water. Once the virus is located, scientists use genetic sequencing to find its geographical origin. Meanwhile, the Pakistani strain left several clues along its zigzag course to Syria.

Scientists found traces of it in the sewage of Cairo, the Sinai, Gaza, and even in Israel's Negev, but the disease never claimed any victims in any of those places, which notably have all maintained effective polio inoculation programs. Even so, Maher doubts that jihadists from Pakistan spread the disease to Syria. More likely, he says, the disease was carried by one of the thousands of Pakistani migrants seeking work in the Middle East.

But by , Syria was engulfed in war, and few if any Pakistanis were venturing into the chaos looking for jobs, especially in the besieged parts of eastern Syria. And given the numbers of fighters leaving their polio-ridden strongholds in the Pakistani border region, it would seem a greater likelihood that one or more of them may have been carriers. Intelligence officials in Washington, D. We could have been looking at thousands of cases," says Maher.

Help came from an unexpected corner: The Islamic State—the extremist group known for beheading foreigners and massacring hundreds of Syrians and Iraqis—has allowed polio workers to vaccinate in the broad swaths of desert territory now under its medieval rule. It's political. It's a way of influencing the situation. Unlike the Taliban, Islamic State chiefs were savvy enough to realize that they needed to avoid a full-blown polio epidemic in the areas under their control.

Back in Pakistan, Durry and other health experts were in a quandary over how to keep the steady rise of polio cases from turning into an epidemic. First, health officials had to figure out a way to restart the polio vaccinations without risking the lives of any more workers. Vaccination drives usually take place over three days, and the WHO had noticed that Taliban assassins usually scoped out their ambush on the first day of vaccinations and attacked on the second day.

Peshawar, a city of three million, was at the top of the WHO's list. But the ancient crossroads was a deadly hive of narrow lanes and bazaars hiding thousands of Taliban and their sympathizers. A charismatic former cricket idol, Khan was stridently anti-American in his views and an outspoken critic of the drone strikes in his northwestern province. Khan also knew how unpopular the polio campaign had become to his fellow Pashtuns, especially after it was erroneously linked to the U.

On Dec. Agents never managed to capture a clearly identifiable image of bin Laden to prove they had finally uncovered his hiding place. Obama was convinced. He ordered the US Navy to begin planning the operation that would ultimately, on May 1, , snuff out the terror master at age 54 — a decision that might never have been made if Osama bin Laden had thought to give his wives a clothes dryer. July 31, am Updated July 31, pm.

Osama bin Laden was hiding out, but his family's clothing on the washing line gave him away, a new book reveals. NY Post photo composite. Although his family almost never came out, a bodyguard spotted by a US informant unwittingly led the CIA back to the home. Share This Article. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. As a major international news event, bin Laden's death has shown the amazing way information can spread online.

Many learned of the terrorist leader's death through Twitter, where the story first broke, or Facebook. But it also underscores how the unfiltered media can quickly spread bad information worldwide. In the two days since the early morning raid, the bin Laden story has generated fake photographs , fake quotes , and plenty of scams. Security experts said that shady marketers and so-called rogue antivirus vendors have also jumped on the bin Laden bandwagon. The rogue antivirus software bombards victims with pop-up messages telling them they have a computer problem.

Its aim: to nag them into paying for bogus software. Shady marketers are spreading messages on Facebook that try to lure victims into spreading the message to friends and visiting marketing Web sites, by claiming they have a censored video.

Users are encouraged to cut and paste malicious JavaScript code into their browser, which then sends the message to all of their Facebook friends. Security experts say never to cut and paste scripts into the browser.