http://www.boston.com/dailynews/003/world/Newfound_camp_reveals_training:.shtml

Newfound camp reveals training materials, including graded exams, of al-Qaida terrorists

By Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, 1/3/2002 17:06

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) In an al-Qaida training camp in the heart of former Taliban territory, where tunnels link a warren of caves, items left behind after a search by U.S. forces included graded terrorist exams, a book by Osama bin Laden declaring an anti-American jihad and instructions on making bombs.

What remains of the camp lies off a highway that stretches past the charred hulks of burned-out tankers and a battered grain silo 60 miles west of Kandahar all apparently hit by U.S.-led airstrikes when the Taliban held the southern Afghan city.

Sandbagged guardposts were the first signs of the camp, located on a dust-clogged road that zigzagged across the desolate flatlands toward charcoal-gray foothills several miles away.

Coalition bombs had flattened the few structures. Twisted girders in one corner marked the site where the main building once stood. It had been hit by one bomb, and a crater from another was nearby. Poles painted red and white appeared to have been used to demarcate a training area.

Dug into the hillside were a half-dozen caves, all linked by narrow, dark tunnels. With mud floors, the caves were 50 to 60 feet deep and not high enough to stand up straight. It appeared they had been used as bomb shelters.

Inside were papers and bags that had held flour and a cooking oil bottle, but there was no signs cooking fires had been built.

At the mouth of one cave was a blood-soaked stocking. Several pieces of clothing lay nearby camouflage pants and jacket, a partially burned running shoe.

The initials USMC, spelled out with white stones on the mountainside, were evidence of the search two days earlier by the U.S. Marine Corps based at Kandahar airport.

The camp had clearly been a place of instruction. Naqibullah, a former Taliban foot soldier now loyal to the new administration in Kandahar, said dozens of al-Qaida members traveled back and forth between the camp and Kandahar, the spiritual headquarters of the Taliban.

Mohammed Karim, who lives in the nearby village of Haji Akhtar Mohammed, said many Arabs had worked there.

''They left after the bombardment,'' he said, prodding his donkey on a footpath. ''They didn't speak to us and we didn't speak to them.''

Inside the caves were a variety of handwritten materials in Arabic. Translations revealed chemical formulas for creating explosives of varying strengths.

What appeared to be a notebook of one al-Qaida assassin was written in small, painstaking English and included a step-by-step approach to shooting someone.

Small hand-drawn images showed where to aim bullets, through the head and the heart.

Among the papers were terrorist exams that had been graded.

In one cave was a paperback book entitled the ''Call to Jihad (holy war),'' by Osama bin Laden, to force the United States to leave his native Saudi Arabia, where two of Islam's holiest sites are located.

Bin Laden, wanted by the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, launched his al-Qaida movement in the early 1990s to force U.S. soldiers out of Saudi Arabia.

A veteran of the U.S.-backed 1980s Afghan war against the former Soviet Union, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, originally allowed into the country by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was then president.

He later became close to the Taliban and its leader Mullah Mohammed Omar after the Taliban took control of Kabul in September 1996.

His money and his warriors helped sustain Omar's war effort until the United States launched airstrikes against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 when the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden.

''He betrayed Afghanistan for one man,'' said Mir Wais, a former Taliban soldier.

At the al-Qaida training camp, they obviously felt differently.

A tribute to Omar was written in one notebook, calling him a great warrior and vowing to protect him.

Of the al-Qaida trainees at the camp, the poem said: ''We are your tigers here in the black mountain.''

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2002