PBS Frontline - Gunning for Saddam
Sabah Khodada was a captain in the Iraqi army from 1982 to 1992. He worked at what he describes as a highly secret terrorist training camp at Salman Pak (see Khodada's hand-drawn map of the camp), an area south of Baghdad. In this translated interview, conducted in association with The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2001, Khodada describes what went on at Salman Pak, including details on training hijackers. He emigrated to the U.S. in May 2001.[Editors Note, June 2004: A year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada's account of the activities at Salman Pak. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein.]
After your service in the army, you worked for a secret part of the Iraqi government?
Some of it is not very secretive. But there's another part, which has a lot to do with international terrorism and this kind of operation -- this is very secretive.
Maybe you could tell me what this section is called, and who runs it. And what did it do?
It's called the Division of Special Operations. ... This whole camp where their training is run by the Iraqi [security service]... The government organization [that] basically possesses or have control of the camp is the Iraqi intelligence. But different training people who come, they are headed or sent by different people in the Iraqi government.
You say that this is a secret camp. But what was it like? Was it something you drove by and could see on the highway? Did you need special clearance to go there? How would you describe this place, this location?
If you're driving on those farm roads, you could probably see the edges of the camp, but you wouldn't realize this is a special camp. The camp is huge. And the locations for the training are far from anybody can see them from the outside. But even when we have visitors, even at the level of a minister, or even higher than a minister in the Iraqi government, they will have to drive around the camp or be driven in the camp inside very specific type of a vehicle. They will sit on the back seat, for example, of this vehicle and they would have ... in addition to the shaded windows, they will have to pull down curtains and they snap those curtains on the bottom, to make sure nobody can see anything outside this vehicle while they're driven around.
This is even government officials [who] are not allowed to see this kind of training?
Yes. At the very highest level, they cannot see this training.
What kind of training went on, and who was being trained?
Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism.
The people being trained were Iraqis in one group, and non-Iraqis, or foreign nationals, in another?
Non-Iraqis were trained separately from us. There were strict orders not to meet with them and not to talk to them. And even when they conduct their training, their training has to occur at times different from the times when we conduct the Iraqis our own training.
The map:
