Last night, a United States military official in Washington said that the American-backed forces had surrounded Mr. bin Laden and the last of his die-hard fighters in a complex of caves between two valleys just south of Tora Bora.
"But no matter how hard the fighter jets hit them, without an effective force on the ground, it wouldn't change anything".
By Fertitta's reckoning, the program developed respect for how hard the fighters trained.
At 17, McLarnin had already established himself as a hard-punching fighter blessed with phenomenal speed.
"Sometimes it's hard against fighters with more experience than I've got.
"He was always a hard-core fighter for increasing the Republican majority.
But there is a catch: the harder a fighter has to breathe, the more quickly the oxygen runs out.
After seven years at war, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains an enigma and has only about 200 "hard core" fighters, according to the United States military.
His experiences in dealing with the Soviet Union, particularly over the issue of German reunification, soon converted him from an advocate of friendly cooperation to a hard-line fighter in the Cold War.
Mr al-Suri comes across as a lone wolf, neither a hard-bitten fighter like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, nor a religious ideologue, like the jailed Palestinian-Jordanian cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.
