French Rabbi Warns of Ant-Semitism

Duni, Sonntag, 23. November 2003, 21:38 (vor 8057 Tagen) @ Duni

"The Afghan experience was important for
traditional training, indoctrination and
networking," said Paul Pillar, a U.S. intelligence
analyst, speaking at Columbia University last
week. "Those who were trained are now training the
next generation."

How many of these attacks are being directed by
al-Qaida´s senior leadership - bin Laden and his
deputy Ayman al-Zawahri - is unclear. Certainly,
al-Qaida is considered to have had a direct hand
in two attacks this year in Saudi Arabia, bin
Laden´s homeland and his avowed enemy.

U.S. counterterrorism officials suspect al-Qaida´s
former No. 3 man, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was
directly involved in last year´s bombing of an
ancient Tunisian synagogue. Mohammed was arrested
in Pakistan in march. In other instances, al-Qaida
seems to have acted as inspiration for attacks.

The Afghan war deprived al-Qaida and other Islamic
militant groups of their main operating base,
making it far more difficult to plan and organize
large-scale attacks like Sept. 11. But as
followers poured out of Afghanistan under heavy
U.S. bombardment, they created a diaspora of
destruction the world is today struggling to
contain.

Militants who trained in Afghanistan have returned
to Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia,
Morocco, Chechnya and countries throughout Europe
and the Middle East, possibly including Iraq,
authorities say. The United States and Canada have
also arrested men allegedly trained in the Afghan
camps.

If anything, the decentralization has made it
harder for intelligence services to track down the
extremists, said Pillar, the U.S. analyst: "It´s
harder to follow a bunch of different groups
coming at you from different directions."

Some 3,500 men passed through Rishkhor, a
sprawling complex of shattered barracks and dusty
training fields about 10 miles south of the Afghan
capital, Kabul, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, the
Taliban´s former deputy Interior Minister, told
AP.

The camp was run by a Pakistani - Qari Saifullah
Akhtar - and taught traditional combat skills in
order to feed foreign troops into the Taliban
army, but terrorist training also went on here.

Khaksar said that, as a senior Taliban official,
he attended an al-Qaida demonstration at the camp
in early 2001 in which terrorist trainees -
including Middle Easterners, Pakistanis, Chechens
and others - showed off kidnapping and
assassination techniques. U.S. warplanes bombed
the camp into ruin on the first night of the
Afghan war.

"It was one of the biggest camps and they were
extremely well trained," said Khaksar, who
secretly contacted the United States in 1999 to
seek American help in stopping the Taliban, and
renounced the religious movement after their
collapse. "Now these men have all returned to
their homes. It is a grave risk for the security
of the world."

At Rishkhor, a field and workout course once used
for al-Qaida drilling has been cleaned up and
retooled for training by Afghan soldiers, many of
whom have taken up residence in the bombed out
buildings that once housed thousands of militants.

Abdul Fatah, 48, who cooked at the camp when
al-Qaida was in control and cooks today for the
Afghan troops, describes the day in early October
2001 when the terrorists made a quick exodus from
the camp, ahead of the U.S. warplanes.

"They got a call from someone who said there was
going to be bombing and just like that they all
left. By the time the bombs fell I was the only
one here," he said. "I guess they are all still
out there somewhere."

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