Paul Overby | |
---|---|
Born | November 27, 1942 Illinois, United States |
Disappeared | May 17, 2014 (aged 71) Waziristan, Pakistan |
Status | Missing for 10 years, 3 months and 29 days |
Nationality | American |
Other names | Paul Edwin Overby, Jr. |
Occupation | Author |
Known for | Disappeared mysteriously in Waziristan |
Paul Edwin Overby Jr. (born November 27, 1942) [1] is an American author who disappeared on his way to Waziristan, in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Overby's wife, Jane Larson, revealed it happened on May 17, 2014. Journalists agreed not to publish his identity until January 2017, when she agreed to make his identity public. [9]
Larson had believed Overby had been kidnapped by the Taliban. [5] However, on February 28, 2017, the Taliban released a statement denying that they had kidnapped Overby. [10]
Reporters Without Borders called for his release, on January 27, 2017. [11] On March 19, 2019, journalist David Rodhe, a former hostage himself, noted in the The New Yorker , that Overby was one of the Americans still in captivity. [12]
On May 8, 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation offered a $1 million reward for information leading to his rescue. [7] In addition, the US government's counterterrorism Rewards for Justice Program offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his location. [13]
In 1993, Overby published a book on the Soviet–Afghan War, Holy Blood: An Inside View of the Afghan War. [14]
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was a militant Islamist group formed in 1998 by Islamic ideologue Tahir Yuldashev and former Soviet paratrooper Juma Namangani; both ethnic Uzbeks from the Fergana Valley. Its original objective was to overthrow President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and create an Islamic state under Sharia; however, in subsequent years, it reinvented itself as an ally of Al-Qaeda. The group also maintained relations with Afghan Taliban in 1990s. However, later on, relations between the Afghan Taliban and the IMU started declining.
Terrorism in Pakistan, according to the Ministry of Interior, poses a significant threat to the people of Pakistan. The wave of terrorism in Pakistan is believed to have started in 2000. Attacks and fatalities in Pakistan were on a "declining trend" between 2015 and 2019, but has gone back up from 2020-2022, with 971 fatalities in 2022.
Rewards for Justice Program (RFJ) is United States Department of State's national security interagency program that offers reward for information leading to the location or an arrest of leaders of terrorist groups, financiers of terrorism, including any individual that abide in plotting attacks carried out by foreign terrorist organizations. RFJ directly addresses the foreign threat by identifying entities such as key leaders and financial mechanism of the foreign terrorist organizations. RFJ's mission objective is to obtain information that will protect American lives in best interest of U.S. national security. RFJ is managed by the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) administered by the U.S. State Department Office Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
The Waziristan Accord was an agreement between the government of Pakistan and tribals resident in the Waziristan area to mutually cease hostilities in North Waziristan. The agreement was signed on 5 September 2006 in the North Waziristan town of Miranshah. The agreement effectively ended the Waziristan War, fought between the Pakistani military and rebels in the border region with ties to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. However, recent attacks by the pro-Taliban militants suggest that the truce has been broken by the militants who attacked and killed 50 Pakistanis including soldiers and police. The attacks are also believed to have been as a retaliation for the Lal Masjid attacks by Pakistan Army.
Sirajuddin Haqqani is an Afghan warlord and Specially Designated Global Terrorist who is the first deputy leader of Afghanistan and the acting interior minister in the internationally unrecognized post-2021 Taliban regime. He has been a deputy leader of the Taliban since 2015, and was additionally appointed to his ministerial role after the 2021 withdrawal of foreign troops. He has led the Haqqani network, a semi-autonomous paramilitary arm of the Taliban, since inheriting it from his father in 2018, and has primarily had military responsibilities within the Taliban.
The insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, also known as the War in North-West Pakistan or Pakistan's war on terror, is an ongoing armed conflict involving Pakistan and Islamist militant groups such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jundallah, Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI), TNSM, al-Qaeda, and their Central Asian allies such as the ISIL–Khorasan (ISIL), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, East Turkistan Movement, Emirate of Caucasus, and elements of organized crime. Formerly a war, it is now a low-level insurgency as of 2017.
Kidnapping and hostage taking has become a common occurrence in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Kidnappers include Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters and common criminal elements.
Mir Ali or Mirali is a town in North Waziristan District, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Mirali is located in the Tochi Valley, about 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) east of Miramshah, 40 kilometres (25 mi) west of Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 70 kilometres (43 mi) southeast of the city of Khost, Afghanistan. Mirali is at an altitude of 674 metres (2,211 ft).
The Pakistani Taliban, formally called the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan, is an umbrella organization of various Islamist armed militant groups operating along the Afghan–Pakistani border. Formed in 2007 by Baitullah Mehsud, its current leader is Noor Wali Mehsud, who has publicly pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban share a common ideology with the Afghan Taliban and have assisted them in the 2001–2021 war, but the two groups have separate operation and command structures.
The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamist group, built around the family of the same name, that has used asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan to fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s, and US-led NATO forces and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan government in the 21st century. It is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United Nations. It is considered to be a "semi-autonomous" offshoot of the Taliban. It has been most active in eastern Afghanistan and across the border in north-west Pakistan.
The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, commonly known as FATA, was a semi-autonomous tribal region in north-western Pakistan that existed from 1947 until being merged with the neighbouring province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 through the Twenty-fifth amendment to the constitution of Pakistan. It consisted of seven tribal agencies (districts) and six frontier regions, and were directly governed by the federal government through a special set of laws called the Frontier Crimes Regulations.
John William "Mick" Nicholson Jr. is a retired United States Army four-star general who last commanded U.S. Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A) and the 41-nation NATO-led Resolute Support Mission from March 2, 2016, to September 2, 2018, succeeding General John F. Campbell. He was the longest-serving commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan until 2021, having been the senior officer in theatre for 2 years, 6 months. He was previously commanding general, Allied Land Command from October 2014 and commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Nicholson is the son of John W. "Jack" Nicholson, also a retired general officer in the United States Army, and is distantly related to British brigadier general John Nicholson.
Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen is a Pashtun human rights activist against enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and other human rights abuses in Pakistan. Pashteen leads the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, a social movement based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. From 11 to 14 March 2022, he was part of the Pashtun National Jirga, held in Bannu to discuss the critical issues faced by the Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Terrorist incidents in Pakistan in 2018 include:
Mohammad Tahir Khan Dawar was a Pakistani police officer who was abducted from Islamabad on 26 October 2018 and then tortured and killed. His body was found on 13 November 2018 by the locals in the Dur Baba District of Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, close to the Torkham border crossing. His postmortem report revealed he had no marks of bullet injury, but was rather killed by excessive torture during captivity. He was kept hungry and thirsty for several days, and his legs and arms were broken. He had died a few days before his body was found.
The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) has held public gatherings and marches at various places, including Bajaur, Bannu, Chaman, Charsadda, Dera Ismail Khan, Islamabad, Karachi, Khyber, Killa Saifullah, Lahore, Loralai, North Waziristan, Peshawar, Quetta, South Waziristan, Swabi, Swat, Tank, Zhob in Pakistan, as well as in several Western countries, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, and the United States.
Mark Randall Frerichs is an American civil engineer and former US Navy diver who disappeared in Afghanistan in January 2020 and was later confirmed to be captured by the Haqqani network, a group closely aligned with the Taliban. In September 2022, Frerichs was released by the Taliban-led government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in exchange for Bashir Noorzai.
The People's Peace Movement or Helmand Peace Convoy is a nonviolent resistance grassroots group in Afghanistan, created in March 2018 after a suicide car bomb attack on 19 March in Lashkargah, Helmand Province. The PPM calls for the military forces of both the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban to implement a ceasefire and advance the Afghan peace process. The group marched across Afghanistan to Kabul, where it met leaders of both parties and conducted sit-ins in front of diplomatic posts, before continuing its march to Balkh and Mazar-i-Sharif, arriving in September 2018.
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