USAToday

11/26/2001 - Updated 03:35 AM ET

Bin Laden's camps teach curriculum of carnage

By Jack Kelley, USA TODAY

JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Plastic explosives, timing devices and sketches of the best places to hide a bomb on an airplane filled the files of Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camps near here. Gas masks, cyanide and recipes for biological agents lined the shelves of his chemical weapons laboratory. Kalashnikov rifles, silhouetted targets and lesson plans teaching children to shoot at their victims' faces lay among the toys and near the swing set at the elementary school bin Laden established.

Hundreds of U.S. Marines land near Kandahar Battle rages anew for fortress prison Bin Laden's camps teach curriculum of carnage The terrorist camps around this eastern Afghan city were apparently abandoned sometime in the past few weeks as bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network fled U.S. bomb attacks and Northern Alliance fighters. The camps offer clear evidence of the systematic way bin Laden and his lieutenants have been pursuing their efforts to wage jihad, or holy war, against the United States.

Last week, USA TODAY, with the permission of Jalalabad's new governor, alliance ally Haji Abdul Qadir, visited two of bin Laden's former camps. One, in the village of Farm Hadda, is about 12 miles south of the city. The other, near Darunta, is about 15 miles west.

Both are guarded by alliance troops sent by Qadir. Neither has yet been searched by U.S. troops or intelligence agents because, U.S. officials say, the area is still considered too dangerous.

U.S. and alliance officials say bin Laden and up to 1,500 of his fighters, as well as some Taliban troops, may still be hiding in the hundreds of caves south of Jalalabad. For now, it is assumed that only heavily armed U.S. commandos involved in the hunt for bin Laden are in the region — but U.S. officials won't comment on the record about such operations.

In Washington, Marine Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, says U.S. forces have begun "the business of checking those sites as they fall under our control." Once U.S. forces get to the camps, officials say, some of the information gathered could provide a "windfall" of intelligence.

USA TODAY was escorted to the sites by Jalalabad security officials who insisted that it was not necessary to wear a gas mask or protective clothing. Nothing threatening happened the day of the visits, but ominous lesson plans for war were everywhere, out for display as if the camps were some sort of museum.

The evidence shows that recruits at bin Laden's two main camps, at least those visited by USA TODAY, were trained in conventional, biological and even nuclear warfare, according to class manuals. They came from at least 21 countries, including Bosnia, Egypt, France, Great Britain, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other U.S. allies, enrollment records show.

Nearly all the students were told to return to their countries after training and "await orders" to carry out attacks against the United States, class notes reveal.

"These materials provide circumstantial evidence that corroborates the suspicion that Osama bin Laden had been seriously pursuing weapons of mass destruction," says military analyst Rifaat Hussein of Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. "They give us a clue as to what this guy was up to. You're dealing with an enemy that has to be taken seriously."

Targets identified

Many of the buildings and barracks at the Darunta camp, a former Soviet military base, were destroyed by U.S. airstrikes Oct. 28. But the most important building at the camp, which contains the one-room laboratory lit by a single light bulb, was untouched. U.S. officials, who were unable to explain why it was not hit, say it has now been added it to their target list.

A drawer in the lab contained three manuals. One appears to be an 18-chapter, 179-page training book written by bin Laden operatives. It identifies "buildings, bridges, embassies, schools, (and) amusement parks" as targets for destruction in the West. Another chapter discusses the destruction that can be wreaked by "atomic explosions." Hand-drawn sketches of bombs fill the margins of those pages.

The two other manuals, both printed in the USA, are titled Middle Eastern Terrorist-Bomb Designs and Advanced Techniques for Making Explosives and Time-Delay Bombs. There were also 84 pages of bomb-building techniques involving dynamite and C3 and C4 plastic explosives that appear to have been downloaded from the Internet.

In another drawer were several fake visa and immigration stamps, one purporting to be from the Pakistani Embassy in Rome and another from the Tajikistan Consulate in Islamabad, Pakistan. There was also a photocopy of a money transfer requesting that a London branch of Pakistan's Habib Bank AG Zurich credit the account of an individual identified as Moazzam Begg in Karachi for an unspecified sum of money. U.S. and Pakistani officials say they do not know who Begg is but will try to find him.

On one shelf of the laboratory was a long metal box lined with wood shavings. It held 18 bottles of liquids with labels identifying them as lead acetate, nitric acid, carbolic acid and glycerin, all of which are highly toxic. On another shelf were several plastic containers, including one labeled cyanide. A dozen gas masks lay on the floor.

All the chemicals had labels reading "Made in China." The equipment in the lab, ranging from scales to heaters, was from the United Arab Emirates. A packet of earplugs, apparently purchased in Britain, still had a price tag reading 2.51 British pounds.

Perhaps most telling about the minds of those who trained here is a document found at the camp. "I am interested in suicide operations," wrote Damir Bajrami, a 24-year-old ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, on his entry application in April 2001. "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. I need no further training. I recommend (suicide) operations against (amusement) parks like Disney."

Hijackers among thousands trained

More than 5,000 recruits, including at least four of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, received training at bin Laden's camps, starting in the early 1990s, U.S. officials say. Muslim militants involved in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors, and the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, which killed more than 200 people, also graduated from the camps, they say.

"It is from these camps that much of the world's terror has originated," says Qadir, the Jalalabad governor. "What was taught at these camps is sickening. The more I learn, the more I am in disbelief at what was going on here."

Qadir has designated the camps "crime scenes" and ordered police to seal off the sites to prevent looters or intruders from disturbing them.

Bin Laden, who has lived in Jalalabad at various points since coming to Afghanistan in 1996, operated at least six terrorist training camps near the city. He also owned or rented at least six homes and dozens of apartments and ran the elementary school for the children of his fighters here.

The camp at Farm Hadda was one of the largest. The camp, made up of mud and brick buildings, was abandoned quickly by its 600 recruits after suffering a major U.S. bombardment in late October. Tanks, family photographs and even a pair of dentures were left behind. A bucket of black facial hair, indicating that some of the recruits may have trimmed their beards to disguise themselves, was also found.

Amid the rubble were dozens of copies of a 26-page booklet, Jihad Against America. The booklet, which Pakistani officials say was given to all new recruits to the camp, contains speeches and statements by bin Laden. In it, the Saudi financier-turned-terrorist sets out his goals. At the top of the list: ousting thousands of U.S. troops still stationed in Saudi Arabia after driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991. Saudi Arabia is home to Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden has stated that he does not want non-Muslims, or infidels, defiling Saudi Arabia's "holy ground."

'Eliminate all these problems'

The cover of the booklet, which is printed in English, Arabic and Bengali, shows a map of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with American flags pinpointing the locations of U.S. military bases.

Bin Laden also has taken up several other Muslim causes. "Americans and Jews (are) shedding Muslim blood every day, looting their property," bin Laden writes in the booklet, apparently referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "I want to eliminate all these problems created by the Americans and the Jews."

He goes on to list various militant groups that he says are "helping Afghanistan in its fight against the infidels" around the world. They include the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Libyan Jihad Fighters, the Abu Sayyaf rebels of the Philippines, and what it calls "jihad militants" from Burma, Bosnia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Men from these countries or regions also were students at his camps.

Bin Laden says in the booklet that he has found a home in Afghanistan, the country where in the 1980s he and other Islamic fighters defeated another great superpower, the Soviet Union.

"We can defeat the infidels from here," bin Laden writes. "I will give you the training so you can carry on after we are gone. Our struggle will never end; it will grow stronger and more lethal by the year."

Back at Darunta — and its lab — were other reminders of the lengths to which bin Laden and his supporters are apparently willing to go.

Outside the laboratory, next to a vegetable garden, were four metal poles with chains attached to their bases. At the end of one of the chains were the remains of what appeared to be a dead animal with white fur.

Nerve gas experiments

U.S. officials, citing satellite photographs taken of the camp earlier this year and intelligence gathered from local residents, say a 60-year-old Saudi man named Abu Khabab experimented with nerve gas on dogs, rabbits and other animals here.

Khabab's neighbors said they saw large trucks, all of them with Pakistani license plates, delivering chemicals and other supplies to the camp at least once a week. Most of the neighbors said they thought Khabab was a doctor.

"Everyone was afraid of him," says Shah Ahmadi, 35, who lives nearby. "One day, he was making something and there was a big explosion. The entire area smelled of chemicals for hours. We protested, and he limited his work. From then on, we knew something evil was going on inside."

Similar chemicals, weapons and manuals, including a brochure for a $4,200 Korean-made chemical agent alarm, were also found among the rubble of bin Laden's palatial home and the elementary school.

It all leads U.S. and Pakistani officials to wonder what the recruits did not leave behind but took with them.

"I fear there's a lot more out there that we just don't know about," Jalalabad governor Qadir says. "I'm afraid what happened at the World Trade Center and Pentagon was just the beginning. The worst terror may be yet to come."

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2001