-Caveat Lector-
Copyright 2001 The
New York Times Company
January 16, 2001
Holy Warriors: Killing for the Glory of
God, in a Land Far From Home
By JUDITH MILLER
ANJSHIR VALLEY, Afghanistan —
Muhammad Khaled Mihraban, a polite, soft-
spoken 26- year-old Pakistani, thinks he
has already killed at least 100 people.
Maybe more; he isn't really sure.
"My goal was not to kill," he said. "But I
had a line to follow, an Islamic ideal. I
knew that Muslims needed their own
country, a real Islamic country."
Mr. Mihraban found that country when he
came to Afghanistan in 1992. Having
decided "to consecrate my life to jihad"
while studying Islamic law at Punjab
University in Lahore, he said, he joined a
Pakistani militant group that was fighting
India in the disputed province of Kashmir.
His training took place in Afghanistan.
"We learned how to plant mines, how to
make bombs using dynamite and how to kill
someone quietly," he recalled.
A gifted student, he was soon asked to
train others in group camps near Khost.
"But I wanted to act, not teach," he
explained. So after a stint waging war in
Kashmir, he returned to Kabul to fight
alongside the Taliban forces that control
most of the country.
Mr. Mihraban, who was captured by the
rebels fighting the Taliban in northern
Afghanistan, said in an interview in a
bleak prison that if he were released, he
would "stay right here and fight again for
Kabul." If he were asked to do so, he said,
he would go to London, Paris or New York
and blow up women and children for Islam.
"Yes, I would do it," he said quietly,
without hesitation.
If the international terrorism that has
haunted Americans for the last decade has
a home, it is Afghanistan, the place that
comes closest to the extremists' ideal of
a state ruled by the strict code of
Islamic law.
Afghanistan is an inspiration, an
essential base of operations, a reservoir
of potential suicide bombers and a battle
front where crucial ties are forged. It is
also, American officials say, where Osama
bin Laden is experimenting with chemical
weapons.
Participants in nearly every plot against
the United States and its allies during
the last decade have learned the arts of
war and explosives in Afghan camps,
authorities say, including the defendants
in the 1998 bombings of two American
Embassies in East Africa.
The Central Intelligence Agency estimates
that as many as 50,000 to 70,000 militants
from 55 countries have trained here in
recent years. The agency says the Taliban
permit a wide range of groups to operate
in Afghan territory, from the Pakistani
militants who trained Mr. Mihraban to Mr.
bin Laden's organization Al Qaeda (Arabic
for The Base). Middle East officials said
that as many as 5,000 recruits have passed
through Mr. bin Laden's camps.
American and Middle Eastern intelligence
officials believe that Mr. bin Laden
maintains a network of a dozen camps in
Afghanistan that offer training in small
arms and in explosives and logistics for
terrorist attacks. The officials said
the embassy bombings, which killed more
than 200 people, were rehearsed on a model
built to scale at one of Mr. bin Laden's
Afghan camps.
One camp, according to those officials, is
educating a new generation of recruits in
the uses of chemicals, poisons and toxins.
Within the last year, trainees at the
camp, which is called Abu Khabab, have
experimented on dogs, rabbits and other
animals with nerve gases, the officials
said. Recruits have also fashioned bombs
made from commercially available chemicals
and poisons, which have been tried out on
animals tethered to outdoor posts on the
camp test range, according to surveillance
photographs and informers' reports.
"The role of Afghanistan is now absolutely
clear," said Michael A. Sheehan, the
former coordinator of the State
Department's Office of Counterterrorism,
who in late December became assistant
secretary general for peacekeeping
operations for the United Nations. "Every
Islamic militant we've looked at goes
scurrying back there for sanctuary.
Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent Iran,
are the only major sanctuaries left."
The Training:
Where Recruits Study Tactics and
Explosives
Middle Eastern officials estimate that in
the last six months, more than 100 men
recruited by Mr. bin Laden's and
affiliated groups have been trained at the
camp, which is named after the Egyptian
militant who runs it, Midhat Mursi — whose
nom de guerre is Abu Khabab.
The camp is part of a large complex of
such training sites known as Darunta,
about eight miles from Jalalabad, an
Afghan eastern provincial capital, down a
dusty road that runs atop an old stone
dam of the same name. According to Western
and Middle Eastern officials, a cache
of chemicals is stored in the reinforced
caves of nearby mountains and naturally
protected underground tunnels.
Abu Khabab's graduates in the last year
include Raed Hijazi, the Jordanian-
American whom Jordan has convicted in
absentia as a ringleader of the failed
plot to attack tourists in Amman during
the millennium celebrations.
Mr. Hijazi, whom the Syrians arrested in
October and sent back to Jordan, has
described his advanced training on
explosives to Jordanian investigators,
according to Western officials. He has
told investigators that a key lieutenant
of Mr. bin Laden helped arrange his trip to
Afghanistan.
A rare reference to the explosives
training at the Abu Khabab camp appears in
the sealed indictment of Nabil abu Aukel,
a Palestinian arrested last June by Israel.
Israel has accused Mr. Aukel of
collaborating with Hamas, or the Party of
God, the militant Palestinian
organization, and several Arab-Israelis on
plots aimed at military and civilian
targets inside Israel. The indictment, a
copy of which was provided by Steven
Emerson, an American expert on Islamic
terrorism, states that Mr. Aukel, a
Palestinian, received advanced training
in explosives using chemicals at the Abu
Khabab camp in March 1998.
The camp leader warned Mr. Aukel "never to
discuss the nature of the training," the
indictment says. Israeli officials said
Mr. Aukel's arrest marked first time
Israel had uncovered an Al Qaeda cell
inside its borders.
At the urging of the United States and
Russia, which also sees a threat from
Afghan training camps, the United Nations
recently imposed the harshest economic
sanctions on Afghanistan to press the
Taliban not only to evict Mr. bin Laden and
his senior entourage, but also to close
down all the militant camps to foreigners.
The Taliban, or "students of Islam," who
rule all but a sliver of Afghanistan, deny
that they harbor terrorists or those who
train them. Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the
Taliban foreign minister, said the
pressure to expel Mr. bin Laden was both
"insulting and useless." Mr. Mutawakil
denied in an interview in November that
Mr. bin Laden was financing the Taliban,
saying he had become a "very poor man."
Mr. bin Laden, the foreign minister said,
could not possibly be planning terrorist
operations since his activities were
"closely supervised by Afghan guards."
Mr. Mutawakil recently invited a New York
Times reporter to visit any location in
Afghanistan identified by Western
officials as part of Mr.bin Laden's
network.
But Taliban officials in Afghanistan
ultimately barred the reporter from
visiting any of the locations. At Darunta,
the reporter was stopped several miles
from the gates of the complex. After five
days in Kabul, Jalalabad and environs, the
reporter and her Afghan- American
interpreter were politely escorted to the
border and told to leave Afghanistan.
The Inspiration:
Afghanistan's Appeal as a War Zone
The Afghan cause has inspired several
generations of young men determined to
wage holy war. Thousands came here in the
1980's to fight the Soviet forces in
response to a fatwa, or religious order,
from leading Islamic scholars. Thousands
more have come since then to help the
Taliban expand their power, or to be
trained for jihads elsewhere.
Taliban officials boast that they have
imposed true Islamic rule, cleansing
Afghan society of Western influence. Since
their capture of Kabul in 1996, they have
among other things banned education for
girls and most work for women, and
instituted harsh punishments for
blasphemy, playing cards, watching
television, listening to music and
trimming one's beard.
Mr. bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in
1996 after he was expelled from Sudan.
American officials and Afghan opponents of
the Taliban say their loyalty to him has
been well earned. The officials say Mr.
bin Laden provided the Taliban with
some of the cash they used to buy off
local warlords in their march to power.
His financial support of the Taliban is
said to continue. Several diplomats and
aid workers in Afghanistan estimated that
he had put up millions of dollars — one
diplomat's estimate was $40 million — to
rebuild roads destroyed in the war against
the Soviets and the ensuing civil war.
Mr. bin Laden is also said to be providing
the Taliban with military help.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of a group
of rebels in northern Afghanistan, said in
an interview at his headquarters that he
was fighting a unit of soldiers specially
trained by Mr. bin Laden, the 55th
Brigade, which includes some 700 Arabs and
other militant Muslims. Mr. Massoud said
he had captured brigade members, whom he
called the most seasoned fighters.
Despite financial aid and weapons from
Iran and Russia, Mr. Massoud's alliance
lost ground to the Taliban last year. His
forces are now confined largely to the
northern region's impregnable Panjshir
Valley with its soaring, snow-tipped
mountains and dazzling vistas.
Mr. Massoud said his soldiers were holding
some 1,200 Taliban prisoners, 122 of them
foreign Muslims. There are Pakistanis, an
immigrant to Pakistan from the Burmese
province of Arakan, Yemenis, Britons and
Chinese Uigurs, among others. Interviews
with several of them illustrate the
attraction that Afghanistan still has for
militants around the world.
Mr. Mihraban, the young Pakistani, comes
from the town of Chaghi, in the province
of Baluchistan. His gentle eyes and polite
manner gave no hint of the fervor that had
led him to this stark prison in the harsh,
craggy mountains of the Hindu Kush.
His trip to Afghanistan began when he
joined Harakat ul Mujahedeen, a group
whose dedication to unlocking India's grip
on Kashmir has landed it on the State
Department's list of terror groups. He
trained first in 1992 at the Salman i Farsi
camp in Baktiah, Afghanistan, which was
run by Harakat. He said he also fought in
Tajikistan.
Obeida Rahman, 21, a Yemeni from Sana from
a poor family of 10 children, had his
living and training expenses in
Afghanistan paid for by the teachers at
his madrassa, or religious academy. They
had urged him to fight in Afghanistan
against his family's wishes, he said. He
had relished his training. "When you have
a gun, you're free," he said. "You feel as
if you can do anything."
Abdul Jalil, 21, from Kashgar in Xingiang
Province, China, said that despite his
capture, he was glad that he had come and
fought in Afghanistan on the $1,000 his
father, a farmer, gave him to study. "I
still want to create an Islamic state all
over the world, God willing," he said.
When he is released, he said, "I will go
fight a jihad in China."
The goal of returning home to continue the
jihad is common among the prisoners. Julie
Sirrs, a former Defense Intelligence
Agency analyst who has interviewed many of
the non-Afghan prisoners held by Mr.
Massoud, said nearly half belonged to
groups that the State Department has
designated as terrorist. None had ever
met Mr. bin Laden, they said, but he was
their hero. Ms. Sirrs, now an independent
consultant, financed her own studies of
the prisoners.
In an interview at one of his camps in the
Panjshir Valley in late summer, Mr.
Massoud said his prisoners had been
deluded into believing that they were
fighting a jihad in Afghanistan by helping
the Taliban.
The prisoners, he said, are in fact
"sinners" for conducting terrorism and
violating Islam's injunction against
fomenting division within Muslim ranks.
"My message to those fighting in
Afghanistan now is that they will never
get God's blessing for what they are doing
in my country," he declared.
The Enablers:
How Islamic Schools Urge Students On
American officials acknowledge that they
have limited influence over the Taliban,
who they say have a powerful regional ally
in Pakistan.
Relief officials and Afghans said they saw
soldiers in Pakistan Army uniforms
fighting for the Taliban last summer and
fall. The witnesses reported that
Pakistani Army buses with blackened
windows and burlap-covered trucks filled
with weapons and supplies routinely crossed
into Afghanistan heading for the front
near Taliqan, a northern town that the
government captured last fall.
Mr. Massoud and relief officials in
Afghanistan said the Taliban were finding
it ever harder to recruit fighters for the
civil war and had even encountered armed
resistance to their recruitment missions
in different towns and villages. The
Taliban forces, he asserted, are
increasingly dependent on Pakistani
soldiers and students sent to the front to
fight for the Islamic cause.
Pakistan denies that it has sent soldiers
to fight alongside the Taliban. But
diplomats, relief workers and Afghans
interviewed in Kabul and Jalalabad insist
that Pakistan has provided not only
weapons, logistical and other assistance,
but soldiers as well.
"Some soldiers apparently came to fight;
others for just a look-see at real
fighting," said a United Nations official
who visited areas near the front during
the offensive. "The Taliban were doing
quite badly at first. But there is no
doubt that Pakistani support gradually
turned the tide."
There are also suggestions that Pakistani
authorities have pressed students to fight
for the Taliban. One relief worker who
visited the Indira Gandhi Children's
Hospital in Kabul in late June said that
all of its 400 beds were filled by
Pakistanis wounded at the front, some as
young as 15. Several patients said that
they had been sent to fight by their
religious academies, many of which closed
for the summer battle season, leaving
impoverished students with no place else
to go. A doctor at the hospital said
Chechens, Yemenis and Saudis were among
the patients.
American officials say they have little
leverage over Pakistan. The United States
cut off military aid in 1990 after the
Pakistanis detonated a nuclear bomb.
With no ally in the region to help, the
Clinton administration has mounted a wide-
ranging diplomatic campaign to isolate the
Taliban militia from the world community.
The effort bore fruit late last year when
the United Nations, prodded by the United
States and Russia,expanded economic
sanctions on Afghanistan — a change that
will take effect on Jan. 19.
Senior American officials said that for
all their concern about the threat of
terrorism, the administration never
explicitly offered the Taliban what they
most want: formal diplomatic recognition.
In its dealing with the Taliban, officials
said, the administration promised only that
relations would dramatically improve if
they expelled Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda's
leaders and barred foreigners from the
camps.
Officials said they decided against
directly offering recognition, because,
they said, the administration had profound
reservations about the Taliban's abuses of
human rights, particularly of women.
Senior officials also felt that they could
not trust the Taliban to deliver on their
promises, citing what they called repeated
"lies" from the Afghan leadership about
Mr. bin Laden's status.
In late December, President Clinton's top
national security advisers gathered in
Washington to consider the next steps
against the Taliban, including possible
military action.
A senior C.I.A. official told the group
that the bombing of the destroyer Cole in
Yemen in October 2000 appeared to have
been organized by Muhammad Omar al-Harazi,
a longtime member of Al Qaeda also
involved in an earlier attempt to destroy
an American warship, The Sullivans, as it
passed through Aden in January 2000. Mr.
Harazi founded the first Al Qaeda cell in
Saudi Arabia and was arrested in 1997,
accused oftrying to smuggle antitank
missiles into the kingdom. Between the
failed attack on The Sullivans and the
bombing of the Cole, officials said, Mr.
Harazi fled to an Al Qaeda guest house in
Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. The C.I.A.
said this evidence did not conclusively
establish that the group ordered the
attack.
Several officials at the meeting opposed
military action on the ground that it
would achieve little and would make
Americans targets of further terrorist
attacks. And officials said a military
strike could even be counterproductive,
enhancing Mr. bin Laden's public standing
among militants. "Making him a hero is the
last thing we want to do," said one senior
American official.
--
Having nothing, nothing can he lose. -William Shakespeare: Henry VI
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
