No Chechens in AfghanistanFighters Were Lured to Afghanistan by Islam, Holy War, or the Promise
of Escape
By CARLOTTA GALL
SHIBARGHAN, Afghanistan, Dec. 29 — Over the coming weeks, as
American
investigators question hundreds of foreign and Afghan Taliban
prisoners here, they will be trying to find out how militant Islamic
movements around the world fit into a network that created
international terrorists.
They will find quite a mix of people among the foreign prisoners who
came to fight for the Taliban or for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda
movement. Their individual stories indicate that it was not so much a
grand design that brought them together as the simple and broad
appeal that Afghanistan under the Taliban and militant Islam held for
young Muslims around the world.
A majority of the 3,500 prisoners being held in the prison at
Shibarghan are young men, in their 20's and early 30's. Apart from
the Pakistanis, who arrived in large groups, they came in ones and
twos, on individual journeys to study Islam and fight the jihad, or
holy war.
More than 2,000 of the prisoners are Afghans, of whom only the
commanders will probably be of interest to the United States. More
than 700 are Pakistani, with smaller numbers from other countries of
the Islamic world: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan, Morocco, Iraq,
the Muslim republics of Russia, and the countries of Central Asia.
Despite assertions by the Afghans that there were many people from
Russia's separatist Chechnya region fighting for the Taliban, there
is not one Chechen among the prisoners.
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