Interview with Sabah Khodada, Who Worked at Salman Pak

Friday March 14, 2003 08:33

by Bernard

Sabah Khodada was a captain in the Iraqi army from 1982 to 1992. He worked at what he describes as a highly secret terrorist training camp at Salman Pak (see Khodada‘s hand-drawn map of the camp), an area south of Baghdad. In this translated interview, conducted in association with The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2001, Khodada describes what went on at Salman Pak, including details on training hijackers. He emigrated to the U.S. in May 2001

Question: You say that this is a secret camp. But what was it like? Was it something you drove by and could see on the highway? Did you need special clearance to go there? How would you describe this place, this location?

Answer: If you‘re driving on those farm roads, you could probably see the edges of the camp, but you wouldn‘t realize this is a special camp. The camp is huge. And the locations for the training are far from anybody can see them from the outside. But even when we have visitors, even at the level of a minister, or even higher than a minister in the Iraqi government, they will have to drive around the camp or be driven in the camp inside very specific type of a vehicle. They will sit on the back seat, for example, of this vehicle and they would have ... in addition to the shaded windows, they will have to pull down curtains and they snap those curtains on the bottom, to make sure nobody can see anything outside this vehicle while they‘re driven around.

Question: This is even government officials [who] are not allowed to see this kind of training?

Answer: Yes. At the very highest level, they cannot see this training.

Question: What kind of training went on, and who was being trained?

Answer: Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism.

Question: The people being trained were Iraqis in one group, and non-Iraqis, or foreign nationals, in another?

Answer: Non-Iraqis were trained separately from us. There were strict orders not to meet with them and not to talk to them. And even when they conduct their training, their training has to occur at times different from the times when we conduct the Iraqis our own training.

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Comments (5 of 5)

Planted propaganda story

by Damien

Fri Mar 14, 2003 10:10

This looks to me to be part of the US misinformation campaign.

Or...

by Avi H.

Fri Mar 14, 2003 10:33

Or maybe it's true. Or maybe it's planted and true.

Blah Blah

by CCC

Fri Mar 14, 2003 11:06

Blah,terrorism,blah Iraq,blah murder,blah blah.Blah,weapons of mass destruction,blah blah rape.Bullshit.Oil,Money.Oil,Money.

They are all at it

by Andrew

Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:58

This story could be made up. Or it could be true.

But we already know that at the School of the Americas at Benning, Georgia, in the US that the US army has been training other military in assassination of trade union and political activists and sabotage technigues for years. We know that in the 1980's the US trained and funded the Contras (Nicaragua) who targeted medical clinics and schools.
(More on the SOA at http://www.soaw.org/new/)

So if it's true it proves that Saddam is just as bad as Bush, Clinton et al in being willing to target foreign civilians for domestic political ends. That's hardly news. What is news is that articles like this NEVER mention US military involvement in terrorist training. Or indeed the fact that Bin Laden was not armed and trained by Iraq but rather by the US during its proxy war in Afghanisatn against the russians.

If Bush want to get those who trained bin Laden he should start be arresting Regan and his cabinet, the US military and CIA officers who trained bin Laden and the US corporations which helped fund that training. Of course many of those same people are the ones backing him so don't hold your breath.

SOA, Interesting

by Bigfoot

Sat Mar 15, 2003 03:36

Interesting, but that was all Cold War era stuff.
It's a whole new ball game now, full spectrum dominance is the order of the day.

Anyone being trained there now?

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Interview with Sabah Khodada, Who Worked at Salman Pak

Comments (5 of 5)