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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
John Walker Lindh's fellow warriors at a Pakistan terrorist training camp talk about his fears of being punished by the U.S. and why he was too "soft" to fight on the front lines.
Oct 3, 2002 | On Friday, John Philip Walker Lindh is scheduled to appear at a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., for a sentencing hearing likely to mark the end of his strange odyssey. The judge presiding over his case is expected to hand down a 20-year prison term in step with a plea agreement arranged by Lindh's attorneys with U.S. prosecutors in mid-July.
And it should come as no shock to Lindh, who himself long saw something like this coming even before he was caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan last year, according to one of Lindh's former peers at a school for would-be jihad fighters in a rural Pakistani outpost.
"He said he was sure he would be punished when he returned to America," said an 18-year-old who goes by the nom de guerre "Talha." He is a Pakistani fighter with the underground Islamic militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, or "Movement of Holy Warriors," which Lindh briefly joined in the summer of 2001 before signing on with the Taliban.
Talha, speaking through a translator, said he knew Lindh by his two aliases, Abdul Hamid and Suleyman al-Faris, when the two trained together at one of the group's guerrilla camps in Mansehra, a small mountain town in northern Pakistan sitting just west of Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region bordering India.
Training with at Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in the summer of 2001 was Lindh's first real effort at jihad, or Islamic holy war. Lindh had spent roughly six months studying the Quran at a hardscrabble madrassa in Bannu, a small Pakistani village near the Afghan border, before first volunteering to fight Indian forces controlling areas of disputed Kashmir. He signed up with little ado at Harkat-ul-Mujahideen's then legal recruitment office in Peshawar, about 80 miles northeast of Bannu. There, the group's recruiters questioned him during several days of interviews before sending him off to basic training in Mansehra, according to court documents detailing Lindh's own admissions to federal investigators. It was a routine procedure for thousands of Mujahedin volunteers both foreign and native.
That started his affiliation with Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which emerged as a force in the Kashmir insurgency in 1994 and quickly grew to become one of the largest and most feared of Pakistan's many militant organizations. By 1997, the group had earned a ranking on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and taken on an especially dark reputation for its alleged involvement in several bloody kidnappings, including the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in the early weeks of 2002. In that case, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen is believed to be involved along with another militant group named Jaish-e-Mohammed, or "Army of Mohammed."
Throughout the late 1990s, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen worked closely with the Taliban, according to Talha, Hamid and others in the group, as well as Taliban documents recovered in Kabul after the Taliban lost power. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and its sympathizers effectively ran an underground jihadi railroad that stretched from Kabul and Kandahar to Shrinagar, the city in Indian Kashmir used by militants from Pakistan as the main staging ground for their Islamic insurgency against New Delhi. Harkat militants and holy war volunteers from sister organizations like Jaish-e-Mohammed traveled a network of madrassas and training camps that stretched through India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the group's work with the Taliban at times overlapped with terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden, who of course Lindh would eventually meet.
Talha, whose splotchy black beard seemed to be falling off rather than growing in, remembered Lindh fondly as we sat last spring in a cramped Mansehra guesthouse near the camp, which was closed by Pakistani authorities after Sept. 11. "Our instructor introduced [Lindh] on his third day at lunch," he said. Thumbing grimy pink plastic prayer beads, Talha at times sounded wistful as he spoke about Lindh.
"When we were sitting at lunch or dinner we would all try to sit next to him," Talha said, describing how the light-skinned American drew the curiosity of his fellow jihadis.
