Al-Qaeda camp graduates provide inside view of system

MURREE, Pakistan – Yes, there was a time when he wasn't a model Muslim, Rashid Hussain earnestly admits. He prayed infrequently. He drank alcohol. He gambled on cricket matches. He even lusted after women.

That all changed last year, after 40 days in Afghanistan at a military training camp run by the ruling Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group, he says.

"Whether it's the Pakistani army, the U.S. Army, whatever army – the training they do in six years, we do in 40 days," said Mr. Hussain, 24. "God is with us."

The camp near Kabul where Mr. Hussain trained with thousands of other Muslim "holy warriors" last year, and as many as 54 others like it around Afghanistan, are primary targets of an ongoing U.S. military campaign against the Taliban and the al-Qaeda organization.

But Mr. Hussain and other graduates of the Afghanistan camps say the U.S. campaign comes too late to contain the Islamic militancy that is exploding around the world in terrifying acts such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

It is too late, they say, because tens of thousands of angry young men from across the Islamic world have already come to the camps to learn how to kill their non-Muslim enemies with their bare hands, fire automatic weapons, build bombs, hijack airplanes, and survive the sort of high-tech military onslaught a U.S.-led coalition is directing at Afghanistan.

The men trained in these camps are part of a shadowy, international Islamic army that has taken shape over the last decade – holy warriors trained to attack and resist what they view as U.S. and Western oppression, sent home to spread their militant ideology in places such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, and now poised to return to fight U.S. and allied forces in a ground war in Afghanistan, camp graduates say.

The accounts of Mr. Hussain and another Pakistani militant who trained in these camps in the early 1990s offer a look inside what one bin Laden associate called the "jihad camp for the world," a place where at least three of the men who participated in the attacks on the United States trained, investigators say.

Their stories provide insights into the ideological motivation – as well as the furious sense of aggrievement – that is driving a growing number of young men across the Islamic world to embrace terrorism as the preferred weapon against the United States and other perceived oppressors of Muslims.

The militants interviewed for this report have been identified with pseudonyms because they fear possible punishment for discussing the inner workings of the camps.

The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Mr. bin Laden, who is described by U.S. officials as the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks, lie at the heart of the global effort to build a radical, pan-Islamic army, according to graduates of the Afghanistan camps, foreign experts, and U.S. court testimony.

But while the root of this effort lies in Afghanistan, its branches reach around the world in a vast network of Islamic religious schools, militant organizations, radical political parties, and even military training camps – all tied to, funded, and loosely directed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistani militants and Western experts say.

In Pakistan, for example, the militant Islamic organizations "have different names, just to cover their operations," said Mohammed Mirza, 28, who trained in the Afghanistan camps in 1992 and remains active in a leadership role in Harkat-ul-Jihad, also known as Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, one of the dozens of Pakistani organizations under the al-Qaeda umbrella.

"If one particular organization is banned and branded as a terrorist organization, the others can operate," he said.

But when members of these organizations go for training in Afghanistan, he said, "they are one."

Mr. bin Laden's organization, al-Qaeda, plays a central role in the operations of the network, raising and dispensing funds, providing logistical support, giving ideological and operational guidance "to many different organizations, by different names, in different countries," Mr. Mirza said.

"Al-Qaeda funds us. Al-Qaeda is the base," he said, using the literal Arabic translation of the name. "There are many people. They are masters of their fields. They have been given different duties, and they are doing them. Al-Qaeda is providing them financial aid and things like that, whatever is needed."

U.S. officials say that in addition to the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaeda is responsible for the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen last year in which 17 people died. Russia has given the U.N. Security Council a list of 55 facilities used by Mr. bin Laden and al-Qaeda. U.S. court testimony this year by two graduates of the camps detailed the broad range of military and terrorist training offered by the facilities, ranging from small-arms instruction to courses in how to destroy a country's infrastructure.

Mohamed Atta and at least two other al-Qaeda operatives involved in the Sept. 11 attacks are believed to have undergone training at one of the specialty camps, U.S. authorities allege.

The testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former bin Laden lieutenant, supports Mr. Mirza's description of al-Qaeda and its network of training camps.

Mr. al-Fadl's testimony in a New York City trial resulted in the May conviction of four bin Laden followers for their role in a plot to kill Americans worldwide, including the embassy bombings. The four, including Arlington resident Wadih el Hage, were sentenced Thursday to life in prison without parole.

As described by Mr. Mirza and Mr. Hussain, interviewed separately for more than eight hours, the network directed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban exerts influence even down to the village level in Pakistan, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor and the world's second-most populous Muslim nation.

A key link in the chain of radicalization of Muslim youths are the Islamic schools, known here as madrassas, where militant clerics steer young men into the organizations that are supplying the recruits for the Islamic army trained in the Afghan camps, they say. Last summer, Mr. Mirza's 21-year-old brother disappeared from the family home, leaving a note under his pillow saying that he was going for jihad training. The young man said a local cleric had issued a religious ruling that allowed students to go against their parents' will to undergo such training, said Hafeez Mirza, his father.

"My son and my nephew [who recently completed training in Afghanistan] told me that they don't have to listen to me anymore, only the cleric," the elder Mr. Mirza said.

The global Islamic army grew out of a holy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s – a war that was organized, funded, and directed by the CIA, say U.S. and Pakistani officials and members of the militant groups. Some of the camps used by the Taliban and al-Qaeda were built by the CIA to train mujahedeen, or holy warriors, to fight the Soviets.

Camp graduates say they are not terrorists but are merely trying to prevent what they describe as the terrorism being committed against Muslims in places such as Indian-controlled Kashmir and the Israeli-occupied territories of the Middle East.

"We are training to save our country, our nation, our religion," Mohammed Mirza said. "This is a stupid statement to say this is terrorism."

Mr. Hussain, who went to Afghanistan last year with nine other young men from his village in northern Pakistan, said he was persuaded to undergo training at one of the al-Qaeda camps by a cousin who had lost a leg fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The cousin still maintains contacts with old comrades working with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, he said.

Many of the veterans of the 1980s CIA proxy war – from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, and elsewhere – are instructors in the training camps, said Mr. Hussain and Mr. Mirza.

The training is broken into stages, beginning with a basic training course that lasts 40 days, they said. Some young men – including Mr. Mirza's younger brother – complete the basic-training course at camps in Pakistan run by militant organizations such as Jaish-i-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, said Mr. Mirza, Mr. Hussain, and other people familiar with the training. The second level of training lasts three months at one of the Afghanistan camps and involves courses in more advanced weaponry and tactics, in addition to rigorous religious indoctrination, according to several people familiar with the training. There is also a 60-day course for men who first complete a training course in Pakistan, said Mr. Mirza.

Mr. Mirza said his younger brother, cousin, and three other village youths went to Afghanistan last summer to take the second course. All five of these young men declined to be interviewed, saying they had sworn an oath on the Quran to not discuss their training with outsiders.

Graduates of the second-level course can apply for even more specialized training that can last between three years and eight years, Mr. Mirza said. This training includes martial arts, intelligence gathering, proficiency in a range of weapons and explosives, and paratrooper capabilities.

"Those instructors who are training the guys, all of them can fight without enough food to eat for weeks," he said. "They can survive in snowfall. They can go through rivers. It is such a hard training that if you would wake them and not let them sleep for a week, it would make no difference to them."

In at least one of the training camps in Pakistan, run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, students are taught how to hijack an airplane. The instruction is given in a full-sized, fiberglass dummy airplane, said Haroon Asif, a law student who said he witnessed the class during a visit to a Lashkar camp in northern Pakistan.

Mr. Mirza and Mr. Hussain describe their experience in Afghanistan as a cross between a Boy Scout summer camp, a religious retreat, and U.S. Army basic training. Prospective holy warriors are whipped into peak physical condition and fired with religious zeal, they said. Mr. Mirza said there were 2,500 to 3,000 students in the camp where he trained. Mr. Hussain said there were about 10,000 in his camp, about five or six miles south of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

Many of the instructors were so-called Arab Afghans, Arab veterans of the war against the Soviets and associates of Osama bin Laden. The students represented virtually every Islamic country, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan, and Bangladesh, said Mr. Mirza and Mr. Hussain.

The camp where Mr. Hussain received his training "was huge," built on a mountain, he said. The students slept in tents, but there was also a vast complex of man-made caves that offered security in case of air attack – like the 1998 U.S. cruise missile attack on several training camps after the embassy bombings in Africa.

At Mr. Hussain's camp, the emir – a veteran of holy wars in Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, India, and Indian-controlled Kashmir – boasted that their arch-enemies, the United States and India, knew about their camp, "but they cannot do anything."

In the first week of training, daily life revolved around religious instruction emphasizing strict adherence to their fundamentalist Islamic faith and the religious basis of their armed struggle, said Mr. Mirza and Mr. Hussain. The day began at 4 a.m. with prayers and Quran recitations, followed by calisthenics and sprints up and down the mountainsides. After breakfast and a short rest, the students reported for two hours of religious instruction at 9 a.m., followed by 11/2 hours of stick fighting and hand-to-hand combat.

Most of the afternoon was devoted to prayers and recitations of the Quran. After dinner and evening prayers, the emir presided over a general assembly at which guard assignments and other security arrangements for the night were announced, the men said.

Living on a diet of only rice three times a day, "the first few days we were very weak, but then after a few days we grew stronger and our stamina grew," Mr. Hussain said. Military training began in earnest in the second week, when the morning religious instruction was replaced by three hours of weapons training. The students learned to fire various types of assault rifles, pistols, mortars, rockets, and small artillery, Mr. Hussain said.

As the days went on, they learned to climb trees and rappel from mountains, how to sneak up on their enemy by crawling stealthily, how to swim across icy cold rivers. The students were pushed to their limits, running up and down mountainsides without water, deprived of food and sleep.

"They were training us in such a hard way to make sure that we'll not run when we'll be actually fighting, we'll be aware of every problem, and we'll be in a position to handle anything," Mr. Mirza said.

Every Thursday evening, instructors would regale the students with war stories about mujahedeen who had been martyred in the cause of Islam.

"The circumstances of when they fought, how they died, what they did, what they learned, what they ate – all those stories are told to the new guys, just to build their morale," Mr. Mirza said.

Mr. Hussain recalled one of his favorite stories, told by an instructor who went by the nom de guerre Commander R.K. The setting of the story was a village called Lanjot, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. "The Indian army went in, claiming there were some mujahedeen within that village," said Mr. Hussain, recounting the story told by Commander R.K. "They beheaded 20 innocent civilians, picked up their heads, put them on their guns and put their heads on display to the Pakistani side.

"Commander R.K., who saw all this, said that the Pakistani army is not doing anything, so within 48 hours I'll take revenge," Mr. Hussain said. "He, with his fellow commandos, crossed into Indian-occupied Kashmir. There were three Indian soldiers drinking water. They beheaded them, took their uniforms, and went to one of the Indian army camps.

"When they went in the Indian army camps, first they shot the soldiers in their feet and legs," continued Mr. Hussain. "When all the soldiers fainted, then they beheaded them, put their heads on their guns and brought their heads back to Pakistan."

Mr. Hussain said the story drove home to the students the importance of learning how to defend their fellow Muslims – and how to punish their oppressors.

Another instructor who made a lasting impression on Mr. Hussain went by the nom de guerre of Sheikh Osama. He is a legendary figure among the Islamic militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan for his role in the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian commercial jetliner. The jet and its passengers were flown to Kandahar, the Taliban spiritual capital. To end the standoff, India agreed to release a jailed militant cleric named Masood Azhar.

As Sheikh Osama told the story, he and five friends flew to Nepal to put their plan into action, Mr. Hussain said.

"They had five Kalashnikov automatic assault rifles in their bag, and they prayed to God that if God is with them, these guns should not be detected," Mr. Hussain said. "They went through the security check, God was with them, and the guns were not detected. They boarded the plane and in midair they took over the plane."

After his release, Maulana Masood returned to Pakistan and formed a militant group known as Jaish-i-Mohammad. This month, after Jaish claimed credit for a car bomb attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed 38 people, the U.S. State Department added the group to its list of terrorist organizations. A Jaish spokesman has since disavowed responsibility for the attack.

These days, like many men trained in the camps of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Hussain talks of going to Afghanistan to join the holy war against the United States. He went to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir on Sept. 30 with seven friends for another week of military training at a camp run by Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen – another group listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. "We knew that America would attack Afghanistan, and so we went to prepare to retaliate against that attack," Mr. Hussain said.

Seven of his friends have already gone to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces, and four more friends are planning to go, he said.

"God willing, so will I," Mr. Hussain said – although he also said he would like to become a rich software tycoon and "support the jihad financially," as Mr. bin Laden does.

Mr. Mirza said there are tens of thousands of trained militants in Pakistan alone who are awaiting orders from their superiors to cross the border and fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Thousands of recently trained al-Qaeda soldiers were sent to Pakistan before the U.S. bombing began "to avoid the casualties of trained persons," he said. "But when the Americans arrive, they will go back to fight. It could be me, too."

Some of the men have been specially trained as commandos and guerrillas, "and they will try their best to capture [American soldiers] alive," he said.

"If I could speak to a reasonable person from the allied forces, I would like to advise him to go back," he said. "In the history of the United States, this would be the most major mistake they are going to commit."

When the call goes out, as it will soon, he said, tens of thousands of men will begin moving toward Afghanistan, working their way through an underground network of safehouses and secret contacts. Others, he said, will move into place to launch attacks on the Pakistani air bases being used by U.S. forces.

The chain of command is secret and strictly compartmentalized, "but we are in contact, all of us," Mr. Mirza said. "We are organized from the very base. We are in touch with Kabul, we are in touch with the Taliban. There are many ways for the trained persons, the warriors, the mujahedeen, to get to Afghanistan."

The militants interviewed for this report have been identified with pseudonyms because they fear possible punishment for discussing the inner workings of the camps..........BIG RED FLAG....... Propoganda to keep the peace-niks quaking in their sandles

Ashland, Missouri

Excellent. The more Islamofascists that enter Afghanistan to join the fray, the less work it will be for us to hunt them down and exterminate them.

"Whether it's the Pakistani army, the U.S. Army, whatever army – the training they do in six years, we do in 40 days."

Seriously deluded, but we knew that anyway.

YOU KNOW, closing our borders to them would be a good start. Finding and revoking the breathing privileges of those already here would be another good idea.

"Whether it's the Pakistani army, the U.S. Army, whatever army – the training they do in six years, we do in 40 days."

This is the biggest bunch of crapola !! LOL!! Forty days training and you can retain and execute in combat everything you've learned, must have gone to the Evelyn Woods school of commando training !LOL! MOhammed, or whatever your real name is your bones will fertilize the Kabul mountainside.P.S. fighting the US military is a little different than tussling with the other towel heads1 Ask Iraq! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Life in Afghanistan
Beware….when you click on the pictures which takes you to even more pictures…they are very disturbing.

What do you think about this?

That all changed last year, after 40 days in Afghanistan at a military training camp run by the ruling Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group, he says.

Probably the exact same attitude held by the knight crusaders of medieval times--the ones the muslims hate so much. Live a life of debauchery and hypocrisy, and make up for all of it at the end of it by killing people.

Yeah, thanks I've seen it. I just can't view the video's with my set-up here. Our government is presently tackling with the dilemma as to whether they ought to bend a few elbows behind the backs of the people they have collected since 9-11.

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