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Afghanistan
Suspect Says He Trained in Afghanistan
2003-01-16
An Afghan suspected of wounding two U.S. servicemen in a Kabul grenade attack last month admitted receiving terror training at a camp inside Afghanistan, the country's interior minister said Thursday. However, Interior Minister Taj Mohammed Wardak said the suspect did not identify his alleged instructors or say whether they were Afghan or foreign. The training occurred late last year, the suspect allegedly said. But the admission by suspect Amir Mohammad, believed to be in his teens, seems to indicate that fugitive Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists continue operating training camps despite efforts by U.S.-led coalition forces and their Afghan allies to hunt them down and eliminate them. The suspect's claim also supports last month's United Nations report saying small, often mobile training camps operate in Afghanistan's mountainous border regions.
The big camps they used to have attracted, er, attention.
Mohammed is accused of throwing a grenade into a jeep carrying two U.S. Special Forces soldiers driving through the capital city Dec. 17. Mohammed, who is from Khost in eastern Afghanistan, told Wardak that he and about a dozen other men trained for a week at a base six miles from the southern Afghan border with Pakistan. About a dozen teachers taught the students how to use guns and bombs in attack, Wardak said he was told. "They taught him that if you are a good Muslim and if you love your home and your country, you should bomb the Americans," Wardak told The Associated Press.
After the training ended, the graduates visited the southern Afghanistan graves of Taliban and al-Qaida members killed in a 2001 battle with U.S. forces as the hardline Islamic regime was collapsing, Wardak said. They prayed for success in attacks on Americans.
I heard that this had become some kind of a shrine.
Five students then traveled to Kabul, with Mohammad saying he went to the central market looking for Americans to target.
"Gonna bang me sum Merkens!"
Wardak said the suspect was being detained by Afghan authorities but American officers have taken him away for brief periods of questioning.
"Thump, smack. OK, we're done for today."
Posted by:Steve

#8  Mine the shrines, put up signs saying "Take a shortcut to paradise, pray here."
Posted by: Tresho   2003-01-17 02:13:58  

#7  Immediately after the Bush government pressured the Northern Alliance to sign an armistice agreement with the Kandahar Taliban, local jihadis used the protections of that Magna Carta to the end of establishing shrines to Arab terrorists, who were buried in Kandahar's "Loya Wala" graveyard. During WW2 the allies adopted an "unconditional surrender" policy so that Nazi remnants would lose all power once the war ended. It is pure folly to indulge jihadism, in a country whose former leaders facilitated the murder of over 3,000 Americans.
Posted by: Anonymous   2003-01-16 20:33:29  

#6  We need to booby-trap them. Emphasis on booby.
Posted by: Anonymous   2003-01-16 19:18:20  

#5  We need to stake out these shrines.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2003-01-16 15:37:52  

#4  I think we do. In fact, I think it's our duty to the entire Muslim world to make lots of them!
Posted by: Fred   2003-01-16 14:18:21  

#3  We need to make more shrines like this?
Posted by: Steve   2003-01-16 13:55:46  

#2  After the training ended, the graduates visited the southern Afghanistan graves of Taliban and al-Qaida members killed in a 2001 battle with U.S. forces as the hardline Islamic regime was collapsing, Wardak said. They prayed for success in attacks on Americans.

I heard that this had become some kind of a shrine.


Do I really have to state the obvious here?
Posted by: Patrick Phillips   2003-01-16 13:11:24  

#1  When trying to envision a small mobile terror training camp, I keep thinking of the Chevy that our local Sniper, John Muhammed used to train his "ward."

But a Caprice is not quite right. I think you'd need a little more ground clearance with the roads being the way they are in the back woods of Afganistan.
Posted by: JAB   2003-01-16 12:57:46  

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