The Art and Science of Killing

By age 16, Iftikar Haider had learned to fire an AK-47 assault rifle, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an antiaircraft gun in the remote mountains of Afghanistan.

Six years later, the young Pakistani man of modest means, a former cloth hawker in the bazaars of Peshawar, was ready to use his skills for real. Along with a dozen other Pakistanis, he crossed the Indian border at night, spoiling for a fight with Indian soldiers.

The rangy, intense Punjabi explains that he fought to protect Indian Muslims. “In our religious schools, we would be given this teaching: ‘You as Muslims must go on holy war,’ ” recalls Haider, now locked up in an Indian prison.

Along with Haider, 12,500 other foreigners have flocked to training camps in Afghanistan or the lands along the Pakistan-Afghan frontier over the last decade and a half to learn the art of combat, according to U.S. estimates.

From New York to Manila, some of these would-be moujahedeen, or Islamic resistance fighters, have gone on to apply the skills and contacts acquired during the Afghan War and its aftermath to blaze a trail of terror elsewhere.

Just as important, many of these foreign “Afghans” have transmitted the knowledge they acquired to a new generation of Muslim militants in countries as different as Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France and the Philippines. And Afghan camps, meanwhile, continue turning out new classes of fledgling fighters and terrorists.

“Afghanistan is a proving ground where you can take part in military activities and break your people in,” said a Russian diplomat who has spent his career in that country and in neighboring Asian nations. “It’s the ideal place for training: large quantities of weapons and wide open spaces.”

In the 1980s, the Afghan struggle against the Soviet army lured volunteers from virtually every country and community with Muslims, including the United States. “It could attract any kid between [ages] 17 and 25--or even 35,” a U.S. official recalled. “He’s sitting in a country where unemployment is endemic, with limited prospects, so he’s alienated. Or maybe he lives where people are rich. Either way, there is nothing to do, and here is a place to go, and something to do.”

Muslims of all sorts wanted to be in on the action. There were religious zealots, Rambo wannabes, budding mercenaries and professional people in search of jobs and income. Some were convicted criminals or wanted by authorities in their own countries for revolutionary activities.

The outsiders, financed and assisted by a network of support organizations, had little effect on the outcome of the war. The American and Pakistani officials running the covert aid campaign to the Afghan resistance paid little attention to them. No more than 5,000 may actually have fought. But largely out of sight of the world, in training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, something akin to a radical Islamic Foreign Legion was taking shape.

“During the jihad, everyone was welcomed in with open arms,” a U.S. diplomat in Pakistan said, discussing the Afghan conflict. “Arab NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] gave money to people; the Saudis were dishing out funds. It was great. If you were an armed anti-Communist, it didn’t matter whether you were from Bosnia or Bahrain, you were welcome.”

Devotion Becomes Zealotry

During the conflict, the religious devotion of some foreign recruits hardened to fanaticism. But many were zealots when they arrived.

“The Arab youth, highly motivated to kill or be killed and so drink the cup of Islamic martyrdom, was regarded as insensitive to the Afghan norms of warfare,” Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor at Columbia University, writes in his aptly titled history of the Afghan conflict, “War Without Winners.”

In the March 1989 battle for Jalalabad, “there were a lot of Arabs involved, but their fashion of fighting didn’t impress the Afghans,” Rais concludes. “There were rapes and pillage on a wide scale. The Arabs remained, to please the donor countries. But they were given unimportant roles after that.”

Often enough, the foreign moujahedeen were angry young men seeking a cause, in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Some had university educations but were at odds with conservative regimes in their homelands, and they burned with resentment. Others from humble backgrounds had just a smattering of education and few prospects in their native countries.

“Look at what their governments have given them,” said retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who was director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) in 1987-89, overseeing covert support for the Afghan resistance, and who now campaigns for fundamentalist causes. “Have they given them liberty? Have they given them freedom of speech, equal rights or even education? What have they given? Nothing.”

For some of these foreigners, the struggle against the atheist Soviets developed the mystique of a divine cause and seems to have wrought a deep, lasting religious transformation, one that blessed violent struggle against enemies of all sorts.

In 1989, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a hospital technician from Brooklyn, N.Y., came home after being wounded in the arm and leg in Afghanistan. “This is the ultimate honor for a true Muslim,” he reportedly said. “I want to recover and go back to Afghanistan to achieve enlightenment and then die while striving.”

He took a different route, U.S. authorities say. In October, Hampton-el was convicted of involvement in a conspiracy, supposedly inspired by Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, to bomb the U.N. building, FBI headquarters in lower Manhattan and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels linking Manhattan with New Jersey. Hampton-el, described by prosecutors as proficient in bomb-making and the procurer of bomb detonators for the plot, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

During the Afghan conflict, the training offered wasn’t sophisticated--”Any retired sergeant could give it,” Gul said. But later events proved how effective it could be.

Marzoug Hamel, a native of France who heeded Afghanistan’s call, left Central Asia after receiving training in the early 1990s to fight in the Balkans, then was arrested in anti-government terrorist actions in Morocco with other Afghan trainees two summers ago.

“I went to Afghanistan after having passed by Peshawar, Pakistan,” Hamel told a court in Fez, Morocco, according to published testimony. “The training lasted several weeks in the mountains. It was hard. Upon my return, I left for the region of Sarajevo. I was equipped with a Kalashnikov [rifle] and a rocket launcher. We attacked Serbian positions to liberate Muslim villages. We were fighting against an unbearable genocide.”

Pakistani and U.S. officials say that during the anti-Soviet struggle, they did their utmost to ensure that only Afghans received weapons and military instruction in the network of camps created from scratch by the ISI for that purpose. But they couldn’t prevent leaks, they acknowledge.

“After we trained them [the Afghans], they went back and started their own training,” a retired Pakistani brigadier said. “In those camps, we don’t know who went. All I know is that there were a lot of foreign NGOs and they had people coming and going.”

Pakistani instructors taught the techniques of sabotage and urban warfare; the use of antitank guns, antiaircraft weapons and 82-millimeter mortars; how to demolish bridges, electricity pylons, and gas and oil pipelines, and to crater roads; and the laying and lifting of land mines.

Since the Soviet retreat in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul’s Communist government in April 1992, the moujahedeen training network that was built up during the war has continued to function, though at a reduced rate, sources concur.

Since 1992, U.S. officials estimate, at least 2,500 foreigners have received military instruction of some sort. European youths from Muslim backgrounds are among them, law enforcement officials in Paris say. The French note the abnormally high number of “lost” passports still being reported to their embassy in Islamabad. By replacing his passport with a fresh one in Islamabad, a young Frenchman of North African origin can go home without the Pakistani entry visa that would arouse immigration officials’ suspicions.

‘2nd Wave’ of Militants

In the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, where a Muslim secessionist rebellion has been underway since late 1989, authorities know well of this “second wave” of Islamic militants and fighters who have been schooled in Afghanistan since the Russians left.

For more than a year, Indian soldiers and paramilitary troops have faced an upsurge in Afghan mercenaries selling their services to anti-Indian Kashmiri factions, and of Kashmiris and third-country nationals who were trained in Afghanistan to fight. Others, Indian officials allege, have been trained at camps in the Pakistani-controlled area of Kashmir and in Pakistan proper.

Recently, a high-ranking police official in Srinagar, the Indian state’s summer capital, estimated that there were 1,200 non-Kashmiris under arms and holed up in the Himalayan mountains and valleys.

Of all of them, the Afghans are the toughest, the official added with grudging respect. “They are different from the Pakistanis. They tend to fight to the end,” he said.

What makes a young Muslim aspire to be a holy warrior and beckons him to travel to Afghanistan to learn something of the art and science of warfare?

There can be no single answer. One French Muslim has told interviewers that he ended up in the camps out of outrage over the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm and France’s collaboration in routing the armed forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.

For Iftikar Haider, there were several reasons: his militant concept of Islam, his family’s traumatic history and the lack of much of a future at home.

The strapping 22-year-old Punjabi is the sole child of a poor family that fled to Gujranwala in Pakistan from India after losing its farm and most of its members in the blood bath of the Indian partition. Iftikar grew up hearing gruesome tales of Hindu and Sikh cruelty toward Muslims from his father, a low-level worker in the government Agriculture Department.

After the family moved to Peshawar, the frontier town on the other side of the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan, the boy fell under the spell of Bashir Ahmed Bhatti, a firebrand mullah. For Haider, who has only an eighth-grade education, instruction at Bhatti’s religious school, which is affiliated with a hard-line Sunni Muslim group called Markaz-ud-Daawa-Wal-Irshad (“Propagation of the Teachings”), filled the gaps in his world view with knowledge--of a kind.

In a mishmash of Punjabi, Urdu and Pushtu, sprinkled with Arabic, Haider now speaks of Shiites, Islam’s minority sect, as “sons of Jews”; of Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, as a “traitor” to Islam who abandoned the 120 million Muslims still living in India; and of the United States as the self-appointed global “village headman” doomed by its own hubris.

The mullah also instilled a burning conviction, at odds with one of Islam’s basic tenets, that force was justified to bring the impious to the only true faith. “If persuasion does not bear fruit, then we must fight,” Haider says now.

Rigorous Training

In 1990, as war still raged between Afghan Marxists and the moujahedeen, Haider, then 16, underwent his first military training session. It was organized by Bhatti, the mullah who for Haider had become his emir--literally his “commander”--and by Dawaa-Wal-Irshad’s military wing.

For nine hours, Haider and his classmates drove westward from Peshawar, then along the dusty unpaved tracks of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, stopping after 90 miles.

In a remote mountain locale, for two weeks, Haider and 50 others were taught to use firearms ranging from assault rifles to antiaircraft guns, he says. For targets, they shot at boulders or at metal sheets cut in the shape of human silhouettes.

The regimen was strict, an alloy of Koran and Kalashnikov. Pupils rose before dawn for fajr, or early morning prayers. They recited from the Koran, ate a breakfast of dried dates, then spent three hours learning to use, dismantle and reassemble weapons. After a lunch of roti, or flat unleavened bread, and chickpeas, there would be two hours of live fire, with the barren hills around the camp echoing with the rat-a-tat of AK-47s and the thud of explosions.

Back in Peshawar, Haider continued to try to eke out a living as a roaming peddler of cotton and synthetic fabrics for salwar kameez, the graceful pajama suits that are the favored garb of Pakistani men.

But his life took a fateful turn on Dec. 6, 1992. That day, a mob of Hindu zealots in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya tore down an unused mosque built on the site where, it was claimed, the Hindu god-king Ram was born. A month of communal rioting, the worst since Indian independence, erupted in which an estimated 1,200 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

Mullah Bhatti came to Haider and other young men and preached the need to go to India to safeguard the country’s Muslims. Haider was a willing recruit, recent events having revived the ghastly tales told by his father. Referring to the year of India’s Hindu-Muslim partition and Pakistan’s creation, Haider said: “Since 1947, this has haunted me. Almost our entire family was wiped out in India.”

In an Afghanistan where the moujahedeen were now warring among themselves for territory and power, he and a group of other young Pakistanis returned to the same camp for a two-week course--in Haider’s case, as a refresher, he said. The sponsor, again, was the militant Sunni group’s military wing. The aim was to hone the recruits to a keen fighting edge.

The February after the razing of the Indian mosque, Haider and a dozen other moujahedeen, laden with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and plenty of ammunition, infiltrated India. It took them only 15 minutes one night to cross the Line of Control dividing Pakistani- and Indian-administered Kashmir, Haider said. Their aim was to ambush an Indian patrol and make their way back to Pakistan.

Baptism of Fire

At Mendhar, 12 miles inside Indian lines, the intruders received their baptism of fire. In a battle with an Indian patrol, two of Haider’s comrades-in-arms were killed, comforted in their last moments by their belief that honored places as holy warriors awaited them in Islam’s paradise.

Haider’s fate was less glorious: He was captured.

He doesn’t know what happened to the others.

The young fighter is now confined, along with 360 other Muslim militants, Kashmiri and foreign, at the high-walled prison in Kot Bhalwal outside Jammu in southern Kashmir.

Even in captivity, prison superintendent Yog Raj Sharma said, it is the Afghans who have been the example to others. Two years ago, two Afghan prisoners persuaded a score of Kashmiris to help them dig an escape tunnel, using as shovels the firewood that jailers give prisoners for cooking. They were 10 feet from freedom when their tunnel was discovered.

Haider is alert, clear-eyed, unremorseful--and fully ready to take part in Islam’s next battle. As he sat in a prison office, attired in a spotless white pajama suit for a meeting with an American reporter, he sounded like an Islamic fundamentalist version of righteous Tom Joad, protagonist of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“My religion says that whosoever is an oppressor must be combated,” Haider said. “Even if he is a Muslim, like [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak or [Libyan leader] Moammar Kadafi, we should fight them. Wherever there is oppression, Markaz-ud-Daawa-Wal-Irshad will be fighting for the oppressed.”

For the time being, Haider is fighting nobody. His case could drag through Indian courts for years. As an accused violator of India’s Public Safety Act, he has a legal right to 17 rupees’--or about 50 cents’--worth of lentils, rice, onions, vegetables and other food a day. Prison life hasn’t visibly fazed him; his faith--inculcated in Pakistan, given teeth in Afghanistan and put to the test in Kashmir--is simple but unshakable.

What are his plans once he is let out of prison?

“Obviously, I will go home,” he answers. “And then whatever my emir tells me to do, I will do.”

Times staff writers Robin Wright and Robert L. Jackson in Washington and David Lamb in Cairo contributed to this report.

* Tuesday: One of the Afghan War’s most troublesome legacies was an organizational skeleton meant to dispatch humanitarian relief but used as well to recruit, arm and deploy Muslim militants.

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Conflict in Kashmir

The predominantly Muslim region of Kashmir is administered in two sections: the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Pakistani-controlled Azad Kashmir. The division was the result of a U.N.-brokered cease-fire in 1949 that ended a two-year Muslim revolt against India’s Hindu state government.

The region has been a source of tension between India and Pakistan ever since, and serious fighting broke out in 1965 and again in 1971.

Kashmir is a scenic region of lofty, rugged mountains, including sections of the Himalayan and Karakorum ranges. Rivers, such as the Indus, run through narrow but heavily populated valleys. The economy is boosted by tourism and the production of handicrafts, particularly woolen cloth and shawls.

Since early 1990, there have been sporadic clashes between Indian and Pakistani troops along the border dividing the region. At least 20,000 people have died in the conflict since 1989.

* Land: Less than half the size of California

* Capital: Jammu and Kashmir has two capitals: Jammu, the winter capital, and Srinigar, the summer capital; Azad Kashmir’s capital is Muzaffarabad

* Population: 6 million in Jammu and Kashmir and about 3.5 million in Azad Kashmir

* Economy: About 80% of the people are farmers; main crops include rice, corn, wheat and barley

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Nations in which terrorist activities or insurgencies tied to Afghan-trained Muslim radicals have occurred

United States

Morocco

Algeria

Egypt

Yemen

Saudi Arabia

France

Croatia

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Russia

India

Tajikistan

Pakistan

Afghanistan

SOURCE: Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Ed.; Times staff and wire reports