A teenage boy who wounded two U.S. soldiers in a grenade attack last month in Kabul told interrogators he received combat training at a terrorist camp in eastern Afghanistan as recently as December.
The account gives new weight to reports that militants have reactivated camps in a region where U.S. forces are most heavily concentrated in their fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants. His statement also sheds light on the recruiting tactics of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord opposed to the U.S. presence and suspected of forging ties with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The 17-year-old attacker said he was drugged when he threw the grenade into an unmarked Russian jeep at a busy intersection in downtown Kabul on Dec. 17, wounding two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their Afghan translator. The attack was the first direct assault on U.S. forces in the capital since the U.S. military campaign began in Afghanistan.
In the young man’s account, gleaned from documents obtained by the Tribune and interviews with Afghan and Western officials, Hekmatyar’s group recruited him from a mosque in Miram Shah, a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border.
Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister, is considered one of the most dangerous opponents of President Hamid Karzai and his U.S.-backed government. His group, Hezb-e-Islami, has opened training camps in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province, where the militants have a loyal following, intelligence officials say.
While Western officials say the camps are informal–perhaps little more than groups of men meeting in wooded clearings to exchange information about weapons or training–and are operating in a province patrolled by hundreds of U.S. Special Forces soldiers.
“The U.S. military is out there and U.S. allies are out there,” a Western diplomat said. “But this is a country the size of Texas, and it’s riven and divided. It has always had all kinds of splinter groups and movements and divided loyalties, and the reality now is the same.”
Afghan officials believe Hekmatyar is using the camps to raise a guerrilla army. Recruits are trained to use light and heavy weapons and explosives and taught to organize ambushes, according to an Afghan intelligence official.
“Currently there are not a lot [of people], not more than several hundred, but [Hekmatyar] has access to money, he receives assistance from the outside world, from like-minded parties in Pakistan, so there is a potential for him to become a more serious threat,” the official said.
While fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar received aid from the CIA, Pakistani intelligence and other sources. But after the Soviets left in 1989, Hekmatyar alienated many of his mujahedeen comrades and fueled the civil war that helped give rise to the Taliban. He has supporters in Pakistan and Iran.
The United States sees Hekmatyar as enough of a threat that the CIA tried to kill him last May with a missile fired from a Predator drone aircraft. He narrowly escaped.
Inconsistencies seen in story
Authorities say inconsistencies remain in the young man’s account of his training with Hekmatyar’s group and his attack on the U.S. soldiers. But interviews with officials in the Afghan capital support the broad outlines of his story.
The teenager initially told investigators that his name was Amir Khan and that he was from Khost province, a former Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan. But after several days in U.S. custody at Bagram air base near Kabul, he changed his story, saying his name was Mohammed Jawad and that he was from Miram Shah, about a 90-minute drive from the Afghan border in Pakistan’s mountainous and unpoliced North West Frontier province, according to documents. The information was confirmed by U.S. military officials.
In recent months, he had started attending a mosque in Miram Shah, where he had heard that well-known mullahs, or Islamic religious leaders, came to preach. Jawad was recruited from the mosque to attend the training camp. He learned to use hand grenades. He memorized a few basic English phrases. He was given an injection and ordered to take a pill that he believed was meant to reduce his anxiety about killing, he told investigators. He said his trainers promised him about $200 in Pakistani rupees on completion of the attack, telling him it would be enough to buy his own house.
While most Afghan investigators believe the youth is from Afghanistan, a senior Afghan intelligence official who tracked down his relatives said the family is “complicated,” with members living in both Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, including Miram Shah.
Jawad told authorities that his father died when he was very young. As a child, he managed the family grocery store in Miram Shah, selling rice, oil, cigarettes and candy.
“He was in Pakistan most recently. He has spent many, many years there,” the official said. “But he was born in Khost.”
Already, Hekmatyar is believed to have forged alliances with former Taliban leaders who are regrouping in Pakistan’s tribal belt along the Afghan border. Pakistan’s tribal areas are inhabited by Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as the Taliban, and many support the former Afghan regime.
“Every problem that we have seen–the many security problems in the past one year since the establishment of the interim administration and the loya jirga until now–has been in one way or another linked to the Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami or Al Qaeda,” the intelligence official said.
Grenades, money and pills
After a brief stint at the camp, Jawad told investigators that he came to Kabul with at least one other trainee. On the day of the attack, two trainers gave Jawad and his companion grenades, a pistol, money and pills.
According to documents, Jawad was given two pills and told to take one immediately. He told investigators that he did not take the first pill because he was afraid it might kill him, but he did take the second one. The drug made him feel powerful, he said, and he lost track of time. The last thing he remembers was getting the signal to throw the grenade, he told authorities.
Afghan police who arrested Jawad said he did not appear to be drugged. Clean-shaven and dressed in a white shalwar kameez, he looked “like an angel,” according to a Western investigator. He spoke clearly and passionately, saying his only regret was that an Afghan had been injured in the attack.
“He was saying all the time that he wanted everybody to do jihad against all . . . non-Muslims, especially Americans,” said Najibullah Samsor, chief of police for the part of the city where the attack occurred. “I haven’t seen anyone as emotional as that boy. His mind had been washed by those people.”
One U.S. soldier was wounded in the leg, and the other suffered an eye injury. They were sent to a hospital in Germany. U.S. military officials would not release their names or current locations, at the soldiers’ request.
