Bin Laden, Bombs and Buddhas Documents Left in Kabul Detail Foreigners' Roles

By Keith B. Richburg Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, November 22, 2001; Page A01

KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 21 -- Documents left behind when the Taliban fled Kabul last week shed new light on Afghanistan's role over the last five years as a gathering point for radical Islamic organizations from across the globe. Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the documents show, gave the groups' volunteers basic military training, from assault weapons to homemade bombs, and provided them with an ideological underpinning of anti-American zeal.

The documents -- books, handwritten notes, leaflets, identity cards and notations scrawled on scraps of paper -- were discovered in several houses scattered around Kabul where Arab, Chechen, Uzbek and other foreign fighters lived. Most were written in Arabic, others in Russian and Chechen. Taken together, they describe in previously unknown detail the workings and names of the foreign Islamic groups that congregated in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, revealing as well an apparently influential role by the foreign militants in last March's Taliban decision to destroy celebrated Buddhist statues in Bamian province.

New militants coming here for training received, for instance, copies of a book called "Jihad Against America," containing bin Laden's speeches and statements. In it, he warns that "Muslims are in danger from Americans and Jews" and vows to drive the U.S. military from his native Saudi Arabia and neighboring Persian Gulf nations.

"They wanted to get me out of Afghanistan and Sudan," bin Laden writes in the preface to the book, whose most recent speech dates from 1998. "After disappearing for a time, I found a place for myself in Afghanistan. I have a stronghold in the Hindu Kush mountain range. I have these mountains and we can defeat the infidels here."

Dozens of copies of the paperback book were found in an al Qaeda house used by Arab volunteers in Kabul. The house and others like it offer new evidence of the way the volunteers lived and trained and the extent of their arsenal. The basement of one house was stacked with crates of French-made Crotale antitank missiles. In another basement, grenades were piled on the floor next to wooden boxes with detonator wires sticking out.

The existence of dozens of such houses around Kabul, well-known to residents, show that while the U.S. military was concentrating on attacking what the Pentagon called terrorist camps in the desert, hundreds of radicals were doing their training in homes in the middle of quiet residential neighborhoods in the Afghan capital.

The disarray of some of the houses also showed the hurried state of the foreign fighters' exit as Taliban defenders left the city the night of Nov. 12 and the early morning hours of Nov. 13. Clothes and papers were strewn about. Food was left on plates. In at least two houses were piles of black hair that looked as if it came from beards, suggesting some of the militants cropped their facial hair to disguise themselves before fleeing.

Most revealing from the hundreds of pages of papers was the extent to which Afghanistan had become the base for a global network of radical Islamic groups stretching from the Middle East through Central Asia to the Far East.

One al Qaeda booklet, 26 thin pages bound with a yellow cover, appears to be a primer on al Qaeda and its sympathizers. One page lists various militant groups it says are "helping Afghanistan in their fight against the infidels." The list includes the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement; the Libyan Jihad Fighters movement; the Abu Sayyaf separatist movement from the Philippines; a group called Abu Al Hasan-Al Ansar; and what the booklet calls "Jihad militants" from Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Pakistan. Also listed, but unnamed, are "groups from Kashmir, Indonesia, Somalia, Burma, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan."

"These Arab-Afghans are helping the Afghans in their fight against the infidels, and this is their list," the booklet reads. "They are fighting for no payment." It adds, "Our aim is to make the Americans leave the Gulf."

Arab-Afghans is the name given to foreign militants in Afghanistan, dating from the 1980s when Arab volunteers -- including bin Laden -- came to Afghanistan to help in the U.S.-sponsored guerrilla war against Soviet occupation. Since that campaign ended a little more than a decade ago, bin Laden's main preoccupation has been U.S. troops who have remained in the Persian Gulf region since the 1991 war against Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

The booklet depicts al Qaeda as just one of the militant groups, and it is not even listed first. One interpretation would be that al Qaeda is not the terrorist "umbrella network" often described by U.S. officials, but one radical organization among many with a base in Afghanistan.

Some of the documents show also that the foreign Islamic groups exercised great influence with the Taliban leadership. For instance, when the Taliban demolished two ancient Buddha statues carved into a cliff last March -- an act that provoked worldwide outrage -- they might have been responding to suggestions from radical groups whose leaders found the historic monuments anti-Islamic.

One document, handwritten minutes of a meeting, describes in Arabic how a group called the Islamic Movements first met and decided to send a delegation to the Taliban to discuss the fate of the Buddha statues, which were carved into a mountainside in Bamian province. The group also wanted the Taliban to destroy Buddhist statues at the Kabul museum, according to the minutes.

The notes describe how the delegation held "different and separate meetings with Taliban authorities and Islamic scholars of the Taliban group." For the museum artifacts, the Taliban suggested "we should collect all the statues in one secure place, until a final decision is reached," according to the document. As for the Bamian monuments, it said that after the meeting "the Taliban authorities agreed the destruction of them is an Islamic act and would make the Islamic world happy."

"Even though the meeting decided the two statues in Bamian were on the side of a mountain and had thousands of years of history dating from the 9th century, they are only pieces of stone and mud, and we don't care," the minutes read. It said the group read aloud a plea from the Italian ambassador to Pakistan that the Buddhas be spared, but rejected his appeal, deciding "it is only a piece of rock."

The meeting between the Islamic groups and the Taliban occurred a few days before the Taliban began destroying the Buddhas. Diplomats and international preservationists wondered why the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, had earlier said the Buddhas at Bamian should be viewed with respect and as a source of tourism, and then abruptly changed his mind and said they should be destroyed.

If the reading of the new document is correct, it would suggest the decision to blast the statues was not made by the Taliban alone, but that the radical Islamic groups that had gained a foothold in Afghanistan were pushing for it, if they were not the main instigators.

If the Taliban was responding to the Arabs and other foreign militants in Afghanistan, it would suggest a complex relationship between the country's then-rulers and the various foreign groups based here. Those foreign forces could have helped push the Taliban in more radical directions in its interpretation of Islam.

Another handwritten document, which appears to be a class notebook from a new Arab trainee, describes the role of al Qaeda among the various militant groups as providing the military training to recruits once they arrived in Afghanistan. "Al Qaeda is doing military education and an introduction to different kinds of weapons for the supporters of Afghanistan, and also military training," says one notation in the spiral notebook.

It says al Qaeda "has mostly trained people in light weapons," and it lists as examples AK-47 assault rifles, antitank rockets, rocket-propelled grenades and pistols.

The text in several spiral notebooks shows how al Qaeda instructed recruits in the various types of weapons and bombs, beginning with assault rifles and ending with instructions for making explosives.

"The most important lesson is assembling and disassembling the weapon properly, which is the need of any well-informed militant group," the notebook reads. Also important, it says, is the knowledge of "making light explosives from gunpowder, and knowing how to use them."

"On top of this," it says, "they should know non-verbal communications, code words, symbols and other kinds of communications used in hard times by our militants."

For recruits to Afghanistan's mountainous terrain, the document continues, "Militants should know how to cross peaks which are not easy to climb. A militant crossing a mountain should put his full body weight on his two feet evenly and walk slowly."

From the notebooks, the terrorism students here apparently received extensive lessons in various types of explosives, including hand grenades, dynamite, chemical bombs, C3 and C4 plastic explosives and nitroglycerin. The author of the notebook includes several crude sketches showing where the various types of explosives should be placed against buildings to cause the maximum impact.

The lesson on the final page of a spiral notebook is on "atomic explosions" and includes a short scientific explanation on how the movement of electrons causes an atomic blast.

"One atomic explosion can produce the equivalent of 200 metric tons of TNT," the handwritten notes read. "The atomic explosion causes intense heat, pressure and other side effects. Up to 50 kilometers away, it can cause blindness in people."

The notes contain no instructions for producing an atomic device. The name on the notebook cover was Abdul Rahmin, described only as a recruit from Oman.

Various other documents shed light on the structure of radical groups in Afghanistan and the extent to which they operated along hierarchical military lines, with defined units and commanders. Members coming to fight this year in Kabul were given cardboard identity cards for the "Kabul Front" that listed their name, origin and birth date. One card discovered in an al Qaeda house was from a Yemeni, Abu Mahaz, born in 1983.

Another document uncovered here tells fighters going to the front lines the procedures to follow for changing location or even quitting and returning home. "If you want to change positions at the front line, you should have the written permission of the commander of your base," reads one document. "Whenever you want to go to Kabul, you should be careful and have the written permission of your commander."

The same document says foreign fighters who decide to "leave the country and the jihad permanently" should remember to return their weapons and materials to their commander.

Among the documents are many pages that appear to have been downloaded from the Internet, including newspaper articles in Arabic. One Arabic-language article details how in 1999, bin Laden received Russian antiaircraft rockets from Bulgaria and how the rockets were smuggled through Pakistan with help from "Albanian separatists who are fighting in southern Serbia." The unsigned article claims that the transaction caused a political crisis in Bulgaria.

While the various militant groups could have come here with their own domestic agendas, from places as far apart as Egypt and Chechnya and Burma, once in Afghanistan they received a heavy dose of bin Laden's anti-American view of the world. The book "Jihad Against America" has on its front a map of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with American flags pinpointing the location of the U.S. military. The same image, the map of the gulf with the American flags, was painted on the wall of one of the al Qaeda houses here in Kabul. Copies of the book were found in Arabic and Bengali.

In the book, bin Laden writes that "Americans and Jews" are "shedding Muslims' blood every day, looting their property." He links the various causes of all the militant groups, saying, "Blood is being shed in Tajikistan, Burma, the Philippines, Uganda, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, Bosnia. . . . These countries have become slaughterhouses for Muslims."

"Their aim is to resume the crusade against us," bin Laden writes. "Under the name of protecting human rights, they are attacking Muslims."

Bin Laden warns, "I want to eliminate all these problems created by the Americans and the Jews."

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2001