29 September: Increasing intelligence reports are reaching DEBKAfile that the 200 Taliban fighters reaching North Iraqi in mid-July were in fact members of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. They came in response to an Iraqi offer to train Al Qaeda terrorist personnel in the use of chemical and biological warfare weapons. In northern Iraq, the men underwent a secret intensive course at the hands of Iraqi army experts and instructors in the operation, by three- or four-men squads, of bombs and explosives containing chemical and biological material.
To explain the arrivals, the Iraqis fabricated an impending attack on Kurdistan, concentrating troops north of Mosul, to make the story credible to skeptical military and intelligence experts.
The Iraqi thrust into Kurdistan never came. After the course, the terrorists split into three groups. The largest, about 100 men, returned to Afghanistan by the same route it had come. They spent several days near the city of Jalalabad in Al-Bahder Camp 1, a facility that Bin Laden’s men call Abu Khabab.
About a week before the suicide attacks in the United States, the group was moved to Bin Laden’s hideouts (see separate item) in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Little Pamir.
Abu Khabab was completed evacuated and dismantled.
Western intelligence sources told DEBKAfile that the camp was the All-Qaeda’s research and development center for explosive material and chemical and biological weapons. Midhat Mursi, an Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant and one of the terror world’s top experts in the manufacture and operation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons systems, was in charge of the camp’s laboratories and manufacturing facilities.
DEBKAfile’s sources believe Mursi left with the last of the fighters to the hideouts in Little Pamir.
Another group of 40 Bin Laden terrorists trained in Iraq headed for Mogadishu, thence to Trieste and onto Kosovo aboard Albanian mafia smuggling craft
The third group of about 60 men flew on commercial airlines via Addis Ababa, Mogadishu, Tiblisi in Georgia, Tashkent in Uzbekistan to the Bin Laden Central Asian Command in the strategic Ferghana Valley.
DEBKAfile ’s sources report that US forces operating in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Balkans -- particularly in Kosovo and Bosnia -- are working on the assumption that Bin Laden’s men laid in their secret weapons stores in May or June.
They contain bombs or explosive devices, including mines that can be loaded with chemical material, nerve gas and biological agents.