From the street, the safe houses look nondescript, much like any other scuffed and dust-coated buildings in this war-ruined capital.
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But behind their anonymous walls and iron gates lie clues to a sinister world few outsiders have ever seen: piles of extremist religious tracts that exhort followers to kill Westerners, stockpiles of anti-personnel mines and rockets, wall maps pinpointing American military targets in the Middle East and, pasted as stickers on doors and in books littered on floors, the guiding thoughts of Osama bin Laden.
Four days after rebels rolled into Kabul, displacing the hard-line Taliban regime, the field offices of Muslim extremist groups that have hunkered down in Afghanistan are being thrown open to the public for the first time, and their contents make for chilling viewing.
What emerges from tours of several residences, all of them looted and some of them blasted by U.S. bombs and rockets, is a rare picture of the daily operations of Islamic extremist cells–murky, cultlike organizations whose way of life is drenched in religious fanaticism and anti-American hatred.
At least two of the safe houses belonged to Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of bin Laden, the accused mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. And among the dregs left by looters was evidence of the tolerance–and cooperation–between the terrorists and the former Taliban rulers.
At one Al Qaeda hideout, where local children snooped through detritus that included anti-personnel mines, the terrorists’ inventory forms hardly were secretive. They were printed on Al Qaeda letterhead.
“We Afghans have known about these people for years, and have been shouting about it,” said Del Agha Solangi, a commander with the Northern Alliance, whose rebel troops overran Kabul on Tuesday without firing a shot.
“It is only when they spill American blood that the world cares.”
In fact, Kabul under the reign of the Taliban had been identified by Western intelligence agencies as a hive of international terrorism since the mid-1990s. The northern rebels who now control the city assert that as many as a quarter of the Taliban’s fighting men are foreigners.
But the scale of their activities is only now becoming clear.
In the past three days, about a half-dozen safe houses for “Arabs”–the local epithet for Islamic extremists from Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere–have come to light on the ragged streets of the Afghan capital. The real number doubtless runs into the scores.
Afghans take revenge
Most of the buildings have been ransacked by angry citizens who blame the radicals for helping prop up the repressive Taliban regime. At least a dozen of the foreigners have been hunted down and killed since Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance. On the morning of the rebel occupation, a mob cornered several Pakistanis in a local park and shot them.
“The Taliban gave the terrorists all the houses of opposition leaders,” said Khaled Rahman, a Northern Alliance supporter whose two-story residence in the Karte Parwan neighborhood was confiscated by the Taliban and handed to Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia.
Elaborate maps painted on the walls of the house depicted the Saudi Peninsula with every major U.S., British and French military base in the region marked with tiny flags. In another room, apparently used as a library, reams of koranic pamphlets and cassettes were strewn alongside books by bin Laden. One was titled “Declaring Jihad Against America.”
Anti-tank rockets were stacked in a back storeroom.
Saudi-born bin Laden has made no secret of his fierce hatred for the Western troops stationed in his homeland or of his dream to topple the Saudi royal family.
Another house in the same neighborhood, meanwhile, provided even stronger links to bin Laden’s terrorist network.
Preprinted weapons requisition forms marked “WAITING FOR TRANSLATION FROM ARABIC” were scattered in the dirt yard. Inside, diagrams on how to make pipe bombs and techniques for sabotaging bridges mingled with computer programming manuals and the usual mounds of religious literature. “How Good Muslims Should Behave in Crowds,” one tract read.
In one room, near a broken-open safe, lay business cards marked “4-U Enterprises–Amr H. Hamed” with an address in British Columbia, Canada. A British newspaper has identified Hamed as a suspect in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa. He is reported to have died in retaliatory U.S. missile strikes on Afghanistan that same year.
4-U Enterprises was incorporated in 1998 and appears to be a shell company operating through a rented post office box at a British Columbia convenience store, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman said.
Hamed and Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian and Islamic Jihad member linked to bin Laden, are listed as directors. Hamed opened the post office box in 1998 but allowed payments to lapse in late 1999, RCMP officials said.
Marzouk left Canada in 1998 and was extradited later to Egypt, where he is serving a 15-year jail sentence for terrorism activities.
Troubling evidence
Even more troubling evidence of terrorist activity lay outside, in a steel shipping container.
The container held packing material and stencils for crates that read “Afghan Dry Apricots,” “Watermelon Seeds” and “Pistachios.” Explosives, including a rocket, were stored in a nearby room. The materials suggest that the terrorists were sending weapons abroad using bogus labeling.
Like all the other such houses found so far in Kabul, nothing set this one apart. Outside its high wall, an impoverished street vendor hawked plastic sandals. Kabul’s rattletrap cars and buses roared past unawares. Yet a disturbing whiff of hatred still lingered in the building, which must have been rustic even before neighbors stripped it of furniture.
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A leaflet left amid the remains of the looting showed a man firing an assault rifle. The caption declared, “This is the medicine for the treatment of unbelievers.”
“These places were probably the bases for bin Laden’s military volunteers,” said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on Al Qaeda at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Cordesman noted that bin Laden’s administrative centers were in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where he and his Taliban allies now appear to be making their last stand against the onslaught of popular uprisings and opposition militias.
Isolated at the end of the world, Kabul’s monastic safe houses, overflowing with hate literature, had all the trappings of terrorist outposts, he said.
“The men in those houses lived in a simplified world of total belief,” he said. “That’s why it works. It’s a cult as much as a movement.”
Yet not all the terrorist planning in Kabul appears to be simple.
Weapons manuals, lab
Manuals describing how to assemble nuclear weapons reportedly were found at an office of Al Qaeda in the city. A house containing a ramshackle medical lab also has led to speculation that bin Laden was experimenting with biological weapons. Neither report could be verified.
The security threat presented by Kabul’s terrorist cells was made clear by a direct U.S. missile strike against the house with the laboratory. The nighttime air strike, which neighbors said took place only a few days before the city fell, reportedly injured several Al Qaeda members.
On the south side of the city, far larger bombing runs destroyed a training center for holy warriors from the Jamiat-ul-Majahedeen, a radical Pakistan-based Islamic organization fighting in Kashmir. Local residents who were picking through the ruins for scraps of wood claimed that more than 100 Pakistani volunteers died in the attack three weeks ago.
Among the mounds of rubble were computer printouts in English describing how to wage holy war in the West. “In some states of the USA . . . it is perfectly legal for members of the public to own certain types of firearms,” one page said.
Advising trainees to join American gun clubs to sharpen shooting skills, the manual added, “Find one, book your place, go there, learn, and keep it to yourself. . . . You are going there to train for jihad, not call people to Islam.”