Camps Are Rubble but Their Threat Remains
WASHINGTON — Surrounded by mud walls and hidden in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the Khalden camp was the birthplace of deadly terrorist attacks and plots against the United States for nearly a decade.
With 50 to 100 recruits at a time, studying everything from small arms to heavy explosives, the hardscrabble boot camp provided basic terror and guerrilla training to a generation of Al Qaeda suicide bombers, hijackers and saboteurs from around the world.
Although Khalden now has been bombed to rubble, its grim legacy lives on. Indeed, U.S. officials fear that many of the Muslim militants who trained and were indoctrinated there remain at large outside Afghanistan and may be planning further terrorist strikes against the United States or its allies.
Khalden was publicly cited last week when a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted Zacarias Moussaoui for his alleged role in the Sept. 11 hijackings. The indictment charges that Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was a camp alumnus. But he is not the first to face charges of terrorism.
Other Khalden graduates were involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the suicide truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa five years later and an aborted millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport and other civilian targets.
Khalden--located in Paktia, a small, cave-filled province not far from Tora Bora--is one of at least two dozen guerrilla and terrorist training camps that the CIA and FBI had identified over the years in Afghanistan. Some had classrooms and communication systems for intelligence training, as well as firing and demolition ranges, tunnels and bunkers. A hospitality section welcomed new recruits. On visits, Osama bin Laden exhorted his acolytes with fiery sermons against America.
The camps' role as proving ground and networking center for Al Qaeda has become evident in recent searches of their ruins, interrogations, court records and the Moussaoui indictment. The indictment alleges that training camps helped Bin Laden create a far-flung terrorist army.
"Since at least 1989, until the filing of this indictment, Osama bin Laden and the terrorist group Al Qaeda sponsored, managed and/or financially supported training camps in Afghanistan, which . . . were used to instruct members and associates of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups in the use of firearms, explosives, chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction," the indictment charges.
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