The Guidebook Of Jihad

By Roland Jacquard

As the Sept. 11 catastrophe made tragically clear, the fanatic groups behind such terrorism will no longer content themselves with conventional, low-tech forms of attack. They aim to go further and hit harder by using biological and chemical weapons and no doubt bombs packed with radioactive material, not to mention cyberterrorism. To carry out their strikes, these groups have recruited and trained two types of terrorists. The first is psychologically and intellectually weak and is used to stage such "classic" attacks as car bombings, hijackings and kidnappings. Recruits who fit a second, stronger profile are referred to as God's Brigade by those returning from Afghan training camps and are destined for operations like suicide attacks or bioterrorism.

Members of the brigade have a guidebook--the 11-volume, Arabic-language Encyclopedia of Jihad. Its 6,000 pages, prefaced by lavish praise of Osama bin Laden, detail the practices of terror and urban-guerrilla warfare. There is even a CD-ROM version. The tome includes instruction in using various arms as well as Semtex--one of the most popular explosives among terrorists--and TNT. Graphics help explain how to rig an envelope with C4 explosive and how to turn an apartment-building door, a radio, a cigarette pack, a television set or a couch into a deadly, booby-trapped device. One of the most secret volumes of the collection, published in extremely small numbers, deals with biological and chemical terrorism.

According to a London representative of Egyptian Refaei Ahmed Taha, head of the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya group responsible for the 1997 terrorist attacks in Luxor, Egypt, the leaders of al-Qaeda last spring heatedly debated whether to begin using biological and chemical weapons. Taha, his associate confides, opposed such deployment, arguing that these uncontrollable weapons would immediately mobilize international opinion against Islamist militants. That, he maintained, would transform their reputation from defenders of fundamentalist Islam and the Arab cause--an image al-Qaeda has cultivated by championing martyred children in Palestine and Iraq--to executioners and criminals against humanity. The debate, according to the London source, was won by the executioner wing.

For years, European antiterror investigators have had evidence that fanatics were preparing new forms of terrorism. In May 1997, an Algerian extremist in London was arrested in possession of a scientific work on botulism. During the 1998 dismantling of a militant Islamist network in Belgium, police found on one of the leaders a document detailing the military applications of botulism toxin in aerosol form. The bin Laden operatives arrested in Brussels after Sept. 11 were known associates of some of those apprehended in the 1998 raid.

Algerians who trained in Afghanistan and were later arrested in the U.S. and France have indicated during their interrogations that instruction in biological and chemical weapons has become part of the Afghanistan camp regime. An Afghan veteran of bin Laden camps has told French intelligence services that experimental deployments of such weapons were carried out not only on animals but also on humans; when volunteers for the tests thinned, he said, others were forced into the role. This source thought that several people died in the Tora Bora camp near Jalalabad after the experiments.

While being interrogated, captured al-Qaeda operatives said other trials have been performed in the Khalid bin Waleed kamikaze training camp in Khost, Afghanistan. The principal training facility, they said, is situated in Darunta, near Jalalabad, and is operated by the Egyptian Midhat Mursi, alias Abu Khabab. Mursi is said to have assembled specialized commando units, drawn largely from militants of the Islamic Movement in Uzbekistan. An Egyptian source close to the bin Laden network says Mursi operatives managed to stash dangerous substances in Asia and perhaps in the U.S. and Europe as well. Chemical terrorism is also a priority for al-Qaeda. During the Bosnia war, bin Laden agents actively recruited engineers and lab technicians who had worked in a Sarajevo factory producing chemical arms.

The intended use of such weapons is made clear in the Encyclopedia of Jihad. The book details how to exploit building air-conditioning systems in biological and chemical attacks. Operatives are urged to "poison drug and medical supplies" and to use syringes to contaminate food supplies. Phone taps on suspected al-Qaeda terrorists frequently turned up the phrase "hitting the FBI" in contexts that didn't seem consistent with the police agency; finally authorities realized that the abbreviation stood for the "food and beverage industry."

The objective in deploying these weapons is to traumatize civilian populations in order to put governments under unprecedented, unsustainable pressure capable of bringing them down. Is that an unrealistic goal? Almost certainly, but its irrationality is perfectly in line with the madness driving bin Laden and his terrorist associates.

Roland Jacquard is the author of In the Name of Bin Laden and head of the Paris-based International Observatory on Terrorism