DAILY MAIL (London) October 4, 2001
SECRETS OF BIN LADEN HIDEOUT
By MATTHEW HICKLEY
Afghanistan
Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite one-meter resolution image of the Darunta terrorist training complex in Afghanistan. |
The most important parts of the site are believed to be underground. At least 14 tunnel entrances can be seen dug into the hillsides - indicating a network of concealed storage facilities, armouries, dormitories and command posts. The tunnels could also be used as safe storage for Bin Laden's massive stockpile of opium, which is grown in the surrounding countryside. SAS or other ground forces sent to overrun the bunkers would have to slip through a network of defensive trenches and look-out posts, with little natural cover on the hillsides to help them.
American warplanes could drop satellite-guided 'bunker-busting' bombs - designed to destroy key command posts protected by layers of reinforced concrete - but tunnels dug deep into rocky hills could still prove extremely difficult to destroy. In recent days, Pentagon spy satellites have been manoeuvred to photograph every square yard of Afghanistan's remote terrain.
This picture was taken by the commercially-owned Ikonos satellite eight miles north of the Taliban-held city of Jalalabad -apparently prior to the September 11 attacks on the United States. The Darunta complex, which takes its name from a nearby dam, commands the strategically vital road that runs from the capital Kabul through Jalalabad to the Kyber Pass and Pakistan. It is around 5,000ft above sea level, with the surrounding rugged mountains soaring to more than 15,000ft.
CIA analysts working at their headquarters at Langley, Virginia, have access to higher-resolution pictures, capable of picking out facial features of individuals on the ground. American intelligence chiefs have long been familiar with Darunta and its importance. The base was developed on the site of a camp first established by the CIA in the early 1980s for Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet army.
According to Global Security.Org, the Virginia-based think-tank which has released the pictures, the most southerly of the four individual camps which make up the complex is a Taliban base. Two hundred yards to the west is a camp run by the Pakistani Hizbi Islami group, used to train Moslem fundamentalists to fight in the Kashmir guerilla war against India. To the north, atop a low hill, is another training base which analysts claim is run by Assadalah Abdul Rahman - a Bin Laden associate and the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, who was jailed in the U.S. for the 1993 bomb plot that killed six people at the World Trade Centre.
Finally, on the north-west edge of the complex is a site of particular interest to American experts. The Abu Khabab camp - named after its Egyptian commander, who was formerly known as Midhat Mursi - is said to be 'focused on development and training with chemicals, poisons and other toxins'. A road checkpoint can be made out with a convoy apparently moving south towards the town of Darunta. The Darunta base has been empty since the atrocities in New York and Washington, according to reports based on more recent satellite pictures.
Think-tank chief John Pike, a former military analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, said: 'There is now an assumption that the people who knew about the World Trade Centre attack moved out of this camp before it happened. 'Anybody who had not moved out by then has almost certainly moved out since.'
Copyright 2001 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
