Inside a Taliban terrorism class

Stepped up attacks in Afghanistan may be a sign of well-trained graduates searching for soft targets. By his own reckoning, Ahmed Gul was a pretty good student of terrorism. During Taliban times, he learned to lay mines, plant bombs, kidnap enemies, fire Chinese rockets – and to blend into the general population as, say, a simple Afghan farmer. Mr. Gul is one of 425 members of the class of 1998 at the Mechanical High School here who took what the Taliban called the “Khas Turesti Course,” or Special Course in Terrorism. Students who finished the class were usually deployed immediately to combat their chief foe at the time, Ahmad Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance. “The main purpose of the course was to make a strong group of terrorists within the framework of Islam,” says Gul, who asked that his name be changed. “The people who had been working with the Taliban from the beginning, they chose the students for the Special Course in Terrorism. We students had to be more religious than others.” Kept secret by Afghan officials until recently, the terrorism course in Khost is a sign of how far the former regime was willing to go in fighting what it considered to be enemies of Islam. The Taliban delved deeply and enthusiastically into terrorism – offering training in everything from Hamas-style marketplace bombings to kidnapping and assassination. Now, perhaps hundreds of terrorist alumni may be practicing their skills against US and allied forces – even against foreign aid workers – across vast, unstable portions of southern Afghanistan. Full Story