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OTHER STORIES RELATED TO COVER Terror Techniques

When the India Today team arrived in Rishkhor, three AK 47-toting government boy soldiers, no older than 22, led it around. One room served as a food store stocking cans of Pepsi and Rose Petal luxury tissues made in Lahore. Around this compound lay the jehad factory's flotsam—tiny carpets of dust-caked papers, most of them in Urdu and Arabic, but none in the locally spoken Dari and only a few in Pushto. Scattered in the compound around a busted anti-aircraft gun today are papers, hundreds of them, like fragments of the camp's library: pages from London's A to Z street map, a bio-chemistry textbook, a US gun magazine, pages from the Koran, dozens of photocopied notes and manuals, the monthly Al-Muslim magazine published from Karachi. There was also a request to the ammo depot for fresh stocks of arms and ammunition and notebooks extensively detailing war fighting techniques.

IN LINE OF FIRE: Al Qaida men learn how to operate a Soviet SA-7 missile at the Al-Faruq camp; (below) a ruined office building at Rishkhor

Students were also given lessons on Indian political parties with notes describing the Bajrang Dal as a "party of thugs".

Rishkhor's students were all foreigners, most of them drawn from the hardline Deobandi madarsas of Pakistan. Apparently, not all adapted well to the Afghan weather. A notebook dated June 26, 1999, lists 48 Pakistani occupants—hailing from cities like Karachi and Bahawalpur—laid up in the camp's sick bay with complaints ranging from fever to stomach ailments.

Today, the camp is empty, its buildings bombed-out hollow shells. This could be the epicentre of an earthquake, yet strangely Rishkhor's rural idyll seems to be reclaiming its turf from the destruction unleashed on it. Village youth cheekily drive donkeys laden with firewood through the ruins and fat-tailed goats munch the grass spiked with live anti-aircraft shells and ferrous remains of dead battle tanks. A forlorn letter, written in Pushto, blows in the wind. "I'm in the jehad. I'm happy here," it says. Maulavi Izzatullah Wakif of the madarsa of Chauhar-Asiya was writing to his family in Pakistan. Wakif's contentment was rudely shattered by precision laser-guided US bombs that spun out of the October night skies and turned Rishkhor into a death zone.

In its heyday, the camp was divided into two sections: one made up of a dozen, single-storey, yellow-and-white buildings surrounded by 10-ft-high brick walls. The second, a row of C-shaped barracks and dozens of houses ringed with conifers. Today, six bomb craters, some 12 ft deep, mark the spot where Rishkhor took its body blow. It was among these ruins that the Taliban hanged mujahideen leader Abdul Haq, captured trying to foment a Pashtoon insurrection. Verses from the Koran are inscribed on the walls of several buildings, with one calling for the liberation of Kashmir. A small hill-with an unmarked stone memorial at the centre-which served as an assembly area, is now littered with a dozen Taliban heavy-artillery guns, prayer mats and armoured personnel carriers.

CAPTIVES OF IDEOLOGY: Khalid (left) with other Taliban prisoners of war at Barak Jail; (below) Al Qaida's young recruits

The universities of terror may be shut down but the world's biggest worry now is where its students choose to use their lessons.

Three years ago, this five-acre camp housed the Afghan Army's 7th Infantry Division. In 1998, the Taliban handed it over to bin Laden after the first US cruise missile strikes against his camps. In no time, Rishkhor turned into a fortress, the dusty road leading to it heavily guarded with barriers and machine guns. The lookout posts on hills further isolated it from the public.

The camp was run by bin Laden's deputy Qari Saifullah who occupied an Italian-style mansion with its own swimming pool on a small hill behind the camp. The barracks were divided into various sections. Rooms served as offices with filing cabinets, electronic equipment repair sections and ammunition depots, some still littered with belted, light machine-gun rounds, live grenades and rockets. While the Taliban enforced their medievalism in Afghanistan and farmers cultivated wheat and barley in the scenic valley, the camp was raising its own lethal crop: 500-1,000 recruits were trained at a time in courses lasting up to six weeks.

It was a simple, spartan lifestyle: recruits woke up at dawn, said their prayers and did exercises which included push-ups, jogging and running up hillsides. After breakfast they began their training which lasted until noon. The course was divided, in a macabre replica of all conventional science courses, into theory and practicals. Students squatted in open compounds scribbling in Urdu and Arabic on regular ruled notebooks as teachers taught their sciences-not the workings of the solar system or the fragile biology of a flower, but analyses of all major infantry weapons, from AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to surface-to-air missiles, and the very elementary physics and chemistry used to work them.

Bin Laden is said to have visited Rishkhor several times in the past few years but locals say they never saw him. "We were never allowed anywhere near the camp when he visited," says Mohammed Haya, a wizened old villager.

Who were the recruits who attended these camps? The answer lies deep in the Panjshir Valley, in the mud-walled Barak Jail ringed by steep ridges of the Hindu Kush. The jail holds nearly 100 Taliban fighters, including Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens and even an Uighur from China's Xinjiang province. All sport turbans and regulation long beards. Among many, like Salahuddin Khalid, 27, a Pakistani from Chagai trained in camps in southern Afghanistan, the flame of jehad still flickers. Khalid, whose beard and thick-rimmed spectacles lend him the air of an Islamic scholar, agrees the war in Afghanistan is over. But he has already begun looking east. He smiles at his Indian visitors, "Hame aur bhi jang ladni hai. Iske baad hum Kashmir jaayenge. (We have to fight more battles. After this we will go to Kashmir.)"

The universities of terror may have been smashed, but Rishkhor's alumni have proved to be adept and apt pupils. Where they choose to use the lessons learnt must now be the biggest worry of the civilised world.

-with Mohammad Waqas