Washington | Sunday
AN extensive paper trail left across Afghanistan by fleeing Taliban and al-Qaida fighters provides a glimpse into the mindset and inner workings of Islamic radicals who have declared jihad against the West, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Reporters for the daily collected over 5 000 pages of documents from abandoned safe houses and training camps destroyed by bombs, some as mundane as a grocery list, others as chilling as notes for the proper positioning of a truck bomb, the daily reported.
Times reporters came upon the documents in musty basements and yards strewn with trash and grenades and mines.
”Taken together, they tell a rich inside story of the network of radical Islamic groups that Osama bin Laden helped assemble in Afghanistan,” the Times wrote.
The documents show that the training camps, which the Bush administration has described as factories churning out terrorists, were instead focused largely on creating an army to support the Taliban, which was waging a long ground war against the Northern Alliance.
”The vast majority of them were cannon fodder,” a United States government official told the newspaper.
A smaller group of recruits was selected for elite training that appeared to prepare them for terrorist actions abroad.
”Observing foreign embassies and facilities” was the subject of one Qaida espionage course. Another taught ”shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle.”
Above all, the documents show how far bin Laden progressed in realising his goal of joining Muslim militants into a global army aimed at the West, according to the paper.
Lists found in houses around Afghanistan show that the men came from countries in the Islamic world and beyond: Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Russia, Britain, Canada and the United States.
The young men arrived in Afghanistan under the auspices of several different militant groups, each of which ran training camps. But once there, they received strikingly similar courses of religious indoctrination and military training.
Parts of the same Arabic-language terrorist manual were found in houses of three of those groups: al-Qaida, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Harkat ul-Ansar, the Pakistani group that changed its name to Harkat ul-Mujahadeen and has been linked to the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
The documents translated by the newspaper were in several languages, including Arabic, Urdu, Tajik, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, Russian and English.
In one house used by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Islamist publication inveighed against ”the phenomena of the Beatles and the hippies,” which had ”caused a great danger against the security of America and Europe.” – Sapa-AFP