Two defectors from Iraqi intelligence said Wednesday that they had worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995.
They said the training in the camp, south of Baghdad, was aimed at carrying out attacks against neighboring countries and possibly Europe and the US.
The defectors, one of whom was a lieutenant general and was once one of the most senior officers in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, said they did not know if the Islamic militants being trained at the camp, known as Salman Pak, were linked to Osama bin Laden.
They also said they had no knowledge of specific attacks carried out by the militants. But they insisted that those being trained as recently as last year were Islamic radicals from across the Middle East. An interview of the two men was set up by an Iraqi group that seeks the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein.
The defectors said they knew of a highly guarded compound within the camp where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, produced biological agents.
"There is a lot we do not know," the former general, who spoke on condition of anonymity, admitted. "We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years you see and hear things."
"These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."
The reports mesh with statements by Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a captain in the Iraqi army who emigrated to Texas in May after working as an instructor for eight years at Salman Pak, located at a bend in the Tigris River.
UN arms inspectors suspected that such activities, including simulated hijackings carried out in a Boeing 707 fuselage set up in the camp, were going on at Salman Pak before they were expelled from Iraq in 1998. But this is the first look at the workings of the camp from those who took part in its administration.
Richard Sperzel, former chief of UN biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq, said the Iraqis had always told the inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.
"But many of us had our own private suspicions," he said. "We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp."
American officials confirmed that they had met with the former lieutenant general in Turkey but said they had not learned all that much from him. They said it was unlikely that the training on the fuselage was linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings in the US.
The camp is overseen by the highest levels of Iraqi intelligence, and those who worked there were compartmentalized into distinct sections. On one side of the camp, these men said, young Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddam's Fighters, were trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage.
The other side of the camp, separated by a small lake, trees and barbed wire, was where the Islamic militants were trained. The militants spent a great deal of time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the 707. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.
RSS