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| Afghanistan |
| Abu Zubaydah |
| 2001-09-27 |
| Michael Dobbs Washington Post The operations chief. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1973, Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) represents the new generation of terrorism organizers around bin Laden. Some time after the East African embassy bombings, he appears to have replaced Atef as the primary contact for recruits and as the organizer of overseas operations. A detailed description of Abu Zubaydah's role was provided by Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack in Los Angeles to coincide with the millennium celebrations in December 1999. In court testimony in a case related to the millennium plot in July, Ressam described Abu Zubaydah as "the person in charge" of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. "He receives young men from all countries. He accepts you or rejects you," he said. After Ressam graduated from the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan at the end of 1998, he checked in again with Abu Zubaydah en route to Canada. Ressam testified that Abu Zubaydah asked him to acquire Canadian passports for other terrorists to enable them "to carry out operations in the U.S." A Jordanian military court last year sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for allegedly coordinating a plot to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the time of the millennium celebrations. According to U.S. and Jordanian officials, his contacts in Jordan included Khalil Deek, a naturalized U.S. citizen who allegedly was one of the organizers of the millennium plot. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |