The Associated Press October 9, 2001
Bin Laden's terrorist training combines math, missiles
BY JOHN J. LUMPKIN
WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden's training camps, prime targets of the U.S.-British military strikes, mix religious instruction with terrorist disciplines, including guns, explosives, hijacking and assassination.
Instructors train students in math so they can calculate how much of an explosive it takes to destroy a building, according to terrorist trial testimony. Others teach fighters the arts of surveillance and kidnapping. Still others train them to use weapons, from bare hands and knives to belt-fed machine guns and surface-to-air missiles.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 people from some 50 countries have trained at the camps since 1996, said one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said some of the camps were pummeled by airstrikes that began Sunday, though bin Laden himself - thought to be hiding in Afghanistan - wasn't targeted yet.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday he believed U.S. intelligence could locate bin Laden.
"I am confident we will able to locate and take as a prisoner, or through death, bin Laden," said Graham, who received a classified briefing from the CIA on Monday. To get to bin Laden's camps, trainees fly into neighboring Pakistan, disguise themselves as Afghans and travel overland into Afghanistan, according to recent testimony of people trained in the country.
Most, but not all, trainees have ties to Islamic extremist groups, although other groups, including the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are also believed to have trained fighters there. Some camps focus on specific kinds of training. Courses last from a few weeks to a few months.
"Think of Boy Scout camp with automatic weapons," said John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst with GlobalSecurity.Org.
The number of camps in Afghanistan is unclear. The United States has tied roughly two dozen camps in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, although British officials recently talked of 12 camps, and said terrorist training had taken place in at least four of them. Analysts say the discrepancy may be in what constitutes a camp - whether four camps close together count as one or four.
At the camps, no one uses his real name. Groups from the same country stick together at one camp, according to testimony from one former trainee. After initial training, some students were sent to fight alongside the Taliban in its war with the northern alliance.
Most of the training facilities are near Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad - targets of the U.S. military strikes. A few are remnants of camps built with CIA support in the 1980s; Afghan mujahedeen used them as bases to fight the Soviet occupation. B-52s dropped dozens of 500-pound gravity bombs on al-Qaida camps in eastern Afghanistan, according to another official.
The gravity bombs create a wide, indiscriminate swath of destruction, with little fear of civilian casualties. This could serve to demoralize any al-Qaida supporters who remained near the camps, Pike said. "There's a difference between one precision bomb coming down here and there, versus the entire valley erupting. At the end of the day, combat is about breaking the enemy's will to resist," he said.
Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, acknowledged that some of the camps may have been abandoned well before the strikes began, but said destroying the structures there would prevent al-Qaida from future use.
From high above, the camps aren't much to look at. Commercial satellite images of suspected camps show small knots of buildings in the middle of rugged terrain, some near entrances to caves and tunnels. They also show signs of limited fortifications and flat areas that could serve as helicopter landing pads.
Some insight into life at the camps comes from the testimony during this year's trial in connection with the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a Moroccan who said he trained at the al-Farouq camp near Khost, described his first two-month course of study, beginning with a month of training with pistols, rifles and submachine guns, followed by two weeks learning about mines, explosives and grenades, then two weeks on anti-aircraft weapons.
His first night in camp, he was awakened by gunfire. "It was a welcome to the camp," he said. "They want us to know that the next life was so hard, that's why you have to be prepared. Don't think that you are coming to sleep in the camp." Islamic religious instruction and the principles of jihad - or holy war - accompanied the terrorism training, Kherchtou said.
Ahmed Ressam, convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in January 2000, described in trial testimony how he was taught to survey targets, set up terrorist cells and keep an operation from being discovered.
Blending in is the key. "You would wear clothing that would not bring suspicion to yourself; you would wear clothing that tourists wear," Ressam said.
Copyright 2001 The Kansas City Star
