Bin Laden's terror camps cover it all

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's training camps, prime targets of the U.S.-British military strikes, mix religious instruction with terrorist disciplines, from guns and explosives to hijacking and assassination.

Instructors train students in math so they can calculate how much of an explosive it takes to destroy a building, according to terrorist trial testimony. Others teach fighters the arts of surveillance and kidnapping. Still others train them to use weapons, from bare hands and knives to belt-fed machine guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 people from some 50 countries have trained at the camps since 1996, said one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said some of the camps were pummeled by airstrikes that began Sunday, though bin Laden himself -- thought to be hiding in Afghanistan -- wasn't targeted yet.

Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said Monday he believed U.S. intelligence could locate bin Laden.

"I am confident we will able to locate and take as a prisoner, or through death, bin Laden," said Graham, who received a classified briefing from the CIA on Monday.

To get to bin Laden's camps, trainees fly into neighboring Pakistan, disguise themselves as Afghans and travel overland into Afghanistan, according to recent testimony of people trained in the country.

Most, but not all, trainees have ties to Islamic extremist groups, although other groups, including the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are also believed to have trained fighters there.

Some camps focus on specific kinds of training. Courses last from a few weeks to a few months.

"Think of Boy Scout camp with automatic weapons," said John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst with GlobalSecurity.Org.

The number of camps in Afghanistan is unclear. The United States has tied roughly two dozen camps in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, although British officials recently talked of 12 camps, and said terrorist training had taken place in at least four of them. Analysts say the discrepancy may be in what constitutes a camp -- whether four camps close together count as one or four.

At the camps, no one uses his real name. Groups from the same country stick together at one camp, according to testimony from one former trainee. After initial training, some students were sent to fight alongside the Taliban in its war with the northern alliance.

Most of the training facilities are near Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad -- targets of the U.S. military strikes. A few are remnants of camps built with CIA support in the 1980s; Afghan mujahedeen used them as bases to fight the Soviet occupation.

B-52s dropped dozens of 500-pound gravity bombs on al-Qaida camps in eastern Afghanistan, according to another official.

The gravity bombs create a wide, indiscriminate swath of destruction, with little fear of civilian casualties. This could serve to demoralize any al-Qaida supporters who remained near the camps, Pike said.