Garsalloui went ahead alone, leaving the others to a harsh monthlong trek. Turkish smugglers frightened them by waving a pistol around, charged extra because they were "Arabs," and stole their gear and clothes, claiming it was for charity.
"They cleaned us out," Othmani recalled. "What they took was for the so-called poor, but evidently it was nothing of the kind."
Later, the recruits tried to burn their passports "because we all intended to die as martyrs in Afghanistan," Othmani said. But the smugglers confiscated the documents.
Next came a nocturnal mountain crossing into Iran. The recruits struggled through deep snow. A Belgian's foot turned blue. Beyayo fell repeatedly, dragged along by comrades as he moaned that this was the place where they would die.
After several men called their mothers from Iran, the group entered Pakistan via Zahedan, an Iranian border town that is a hub for militants and smugglers, the Belgian anti-terrorism official said. As they approached the tribal zone dominated by the Taliban, military patrols looked the other way and diners at a roadside restaurant seemed to know exactly where they were headed.
Their destination was a village in the Waziristan region about two hours past Bannu. But the reception was nothing like the heyday of the Afghan camps when Westerners, especially converts, got a chance to meet Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden himself.
Saudi Arabians armed with AK-47s emerged from a mosque looking hostile. They thought the French in particular could be spies, a senior French anti-terrorism official said. Increasing infiltration has contributed to recent captures and killings of militants, investigators say.
"They thought they would get a hero's welcome because they were Europeans," the Belgian official said. "That was not the case."
Tensions eased when Garsalloui showed up. But the recruits were kept in a kind of limbo. They had the misfortune of arriving just as U.S. forces unleashed a drone-fired missile barrage that would kill half a dozen veteran Al Qaeda chieftains in 2008. In an e-mail to his wife, Garsalloui said he narrowly escaped a strike that had killed a top Libyan. "I came close to dying," he wrote.
Fearful of the drones as well as informants spotting them and targeting hide-outs for missile strikes, the trainees hunkered inside during the day. They moved frequently among crowded, squalid houses shared with local families in mountain hamlets.
