Author: Gregg Jones
Publication: The Dallas Morning
News
Date: November 5, 2001
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.
[Caption] A U.S. Defense Department
photograph released last week shows a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan
after it was attacked. - The Associated Press
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-Qaida group, he says.
The camp near Kabul where Hussain
trained with thousands of other Muslims last year, and as many as 54 others
like it around Afghanistan, are primary targets of the U.S. military campaign
against the Taliban and the al-Qaida organization.
But 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
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 were
sent home to spread their militant ideology in places such as Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. Now, they are poised to return to Afghanistan
and fight U.S. and allied forces in a ground war, camp graduates say.
The militants interviewed for this
report have been identified with pseudonyms because they fear punishment
for discussing the inner workings of the camps.
The Taliban, al-Qaida and bin Laden,
whom U.S. officials describe 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- Qaida and the Taliban, according to Pakistani militants
and Western experts.
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 a leader in one of the dozens of Pakistani organizations under
the al-Qaida umbrella.
"If one particular organization
is banned and branded as a terrorist organization, the others can operate,"
he said.
Bin Laden's organization, al-Qaida,
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," Mirza said.
"Al-Qaida funds us. Al-Qaida is
the base," he said. "There are many people. They are masters of their fields.
They have been given different duties, and they are doing them. Al-Qaida
is providing them financial aid and things like that, whatever is needed."
Schools' role
U.S. officials say that in addition
to the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaida 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 bin Laden and al-Qaida. U.S. court
testimony this year by two graduates of the camps detailed the military
and terrorist training offered by the facilities, ranging from small-arms
instruction to courses in how to destroy a country's infrastructure.
U.S. authorities believe Mohamed
Atta and at least two other al-Qaida operatives involved in the Sept. 11
attacks have undergone training at one of the specialty camps.
The testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl,
a former bin Laden lieutenant, supports Mirza's description of al-Qaida
and its network of training camps.
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 were sentenced Oct. 25 to life in prison without parole.
A key link in the chain of radicalization
of Muslim youths is the Islamic schools, known here as madrassas. It is
there that militant clerics steer young men into the organizations that
supply recruits for the Islamic army that is trained in the Afghan camps,
Mirza and Hussain say.
Last summer, Mirza's 21-year-old
brother disappeared from home, leaving a note saying he was going for jihad
training. The young man said a local cleric had issued a religious ruling
that allowed students to leave against their parents' will to undergo such
training, said Hafeez Mirza, his father.
The global Islamic army grew out
of a war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- a war
organized, funded and directed by the CIA, say U.S. and Pakistani officials
and members of the militant groups. Some of the camps used today were built
by the CIA to train mujahedeen 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."
Guns and religion
The training is broken into stages,
beginning with a basic-training course that lasts 40 days, they said. Some
young men -- including Mirza's younger brother -- complete the basic-training
course at camps in Pakistan, said Mirza, Hussain and others 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.
Mirza said his younger brother,
cousin and three other village youths went to Afghanistan last summer to
take the second course. All five of the young men declined to be interviewed,
saying they had sworn an oath on the Koran 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, 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, 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 in northern Pakistan.
Thousands trained
Mirza and 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 warriors are
whipped into peak physical condition and fired with religious zeal, they
said.
Mirza said 2,500 to 3,000 students
were in the camp where he trained. Hussain said about 10,000 were in his
camp, about five or six miles south of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Many of the instructors were "Arab
Afghans," associates of Osama bin Laden and Arab veterans of the war against
the Soviets. The students represented virtually every Islamic country,
including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan and Bangladesh,
said Mirza and Hussain.
The camp where 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.
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, Mirza and Hussain said.
The day began at 4 a.m. with prayers
and Koran 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 1-1/2 hours
of stick fighting and hand-to-hand combat.
Most of the afternoon was devoted
to prayers and recitations of the Koran. 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," 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, 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,"
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,"
Mirza said.
Lesson in punishment
Hussain recalled one of his favorite
stories, told by an instructor called 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 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," 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
Hussain. "When all the soldiers fainted, then they beheaded them, put their
heads on their guns and brought their heads back to Pakistan."
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 Hussain went by the name 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, 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," 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.
Last 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 other men
trained in the camps of Afghanistan and Pakistan, 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 the U.S. State Department lists as a terrorist organization.
"We knew that America would attack
Afghanistan, and so we went to prepare to retaliate against that attack,"
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," Hussain
said, although he also said he would like to become a rich software tycoon
and "support the jihad financially," as bin Laden has done.
Mirza said tens of thousands of
trained militants in Pakistan alone are awaiting orders from their superiors
to cross the border and fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Thousands of recently trained al-Qaida
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 safe houses and secret
contacts. Others, he said, will move into place to launch attacks on the
Pakistani air bases U.S. forces are using.
The chain of command is secret and
strictly compartmentalized, "but we are in contact, all of us," 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."
"We are training to save our country,
our nation, our religion."