The making of an al Qaeda fighter: Spin Ghul’s journey from the streets of Saudi Arabia to jihadi training camps

By Jake Tapper, CNN

Spin Ghul’s desire for jihad started when he was a child in Saudi Arabia, where his parents had remained after traveling from Niger on holy pilgrimage. From his elementary school days, he was determined to become a religious soldier, especially after learning about the Soviet-Afghan War, and how the Islamist holy warriors — the mujahideen — were helping defeat the USSR in the bloody battle.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, many mujahideen joined Chechen rebels to fight for independence, Chechnya being a majority-Muslim autonomous republic. The First Chechen War lasted from 1994 until the Chechens recaptured their capital city of Grozny in August 1996, prompting Russia to agree to a ceasefire. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, Chechen fighters, and Chechen civilians were killed. In September 1999, the Second Chechen War broke out after four apartment blocks in Russia were bombed, which Russia blamed on separatist militants. Fueled with money and fighters from Arab countries, backed to a much greater extent than the first time around, this war lasted for a full decade and included Vladimir Putin’s bloody siege of Grozny.

This was the battle Spin Ghul had wanted to join, and it would eventually set him on a path toward being part of an al Qaeda ambush against American servicemembers in Afghanistan in 2003, leading an effort to blow up the US embassy in Nigeria, and becoming the very first foreign terrorist ever tried in a US criminal court for killing US troops in a war zone.

This account is based on legal documents from his 2017 trial, including a transcript of his 2011 confession before an Italian court, and multiple interviews with those involved in his case.

Ghul’s early life had been bleak. The world of peasants — undocumented, essentially indentured servants — was even worse in Saudi Arabia for Black people. In 2000, a friend of his, Amran, who knew Spin Ghul liked military magazines, gave him one he’d picked up. The magazine had photographs of airplanes as well as a picture of the Pentagon.

Spin Ghul took the magazine and asked his friend, “Where can we steal an airplane and go hit the Pentagon with it?”

Amran took the magazine back from Spin Ghul. He didn’t give his friend an answer. He didn’t say yes or no. This wasn’t just a random comment, after all. Amran worked for the Saudi government, in an office run by a man named Suleiman.

Suleiman was something of a neighborhood jihadi legend. He’d fought the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and claimed to know Osama bin Laden. When Spin Ghul met him, Suleiman was still very much involved in jihad, albeit in a different role. Suleiman recruited and sent would-be fighters to sites of jihadi conflict: Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Not that Spin Ghul had to be recruited for jihad. He was already committed to it. The magazine sparked the moment of action and set the plans into motion, but the desire was already there.

Suleiman introduced Spin Ghul to a man named Mahir in the city of Taif, Saudi Arabia. Using his birth name, Adnan Ibrahim Harun Adam, and a Niger passport, Spin Ghul received a visa in Riyadh, and then he and Mahir, a fixer and coordinator, flew together from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Doha, Qatar, then on to Karachi, Pakistan, and finally Quetta.

From Pakistan, they drove a small car across the Afghanistan border. Mahir served as a liaison between Spin Ghul and members of al Qaeda. They didn’t talk much on their trip. Spin Ghul didn’t talk about his hopes for jihad or his plans until they arrived in Afghanistan and Spin Ghul joined a group of other wannabe jihadis who were hooked up with al Qaeda operatives. Spin Ghul was shuttled to an al Qaeda safe house near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in August 2001, where he and the new recruits awaited their next assignment.

Day-to-day operations were run by three al Qaeda operatives: Abdul Fida al-Yemeni, Usaid al-Yemeni, and Abu Zubair al-Haleidi. At the safe house, jihadis would communicate with operatives out in the field and with informants from throughout the area.

Of the three, Spin Ghul found Abdul Fida al-Yemeni to be the friendliest. Abdul Fida al-Yemeni had been in Afghanistan for a while already, having trained at the notorious al Farouq training camp.

He told Spin Ghul that he’d met “the Sheikh,” the legendary Osama bin Laden, and the Sheikh had discussed a plan to attack America using airplanes. A few days later, they were all sitting around the safe house in September 2001 when they heard their friends happily shouting on the radio. They were celebrating, ululating, crying “Allahu Akbar,” because al Qaeda operatives had succeeded in hijacking four US commercial airplanes and flying them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of innocent American civilians. Spin Ghul’s friends and fellow jihadis told them on the radio that they would record the news and bring the videotapes to show them the scenes of carnage.

A few days later, they were loaded into a large truck and driven to a training camp a few hours outside Kandahar. It was the last time Spin Ghul saw Abdul Fida al-Yemeni, who would eventually be arrested by Pakistani security forces, and sent to Guantánamo Bay. It wasn’t clear what the plan was for Spin Ghul, though his impression was that he was going to be training in preparation either for American soldiers coming to Afghanistan or for an al Qaeda attack on an American ship, similar to the attack on the USS Cole, a suicide bombing in Yemen in 2000 that had killed seventeen American sailors.

One day, a Toyota truck pulled into the training camp, driven by a man with a limp who was a top al Qaeda official. Other jihadis came and went. Senior al Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libi was there, as was Osama bin Laden’s spiritual adviser Khallad al-Kuwaiti, long before either man was captured and sent to the detainee center at Guantánamo Bay. Spin Ghul had difficulty discerning who was with al Qaeda and who were just run-of-the-mill jihadis.

Making these recruits jihadi warriors was, of course, the plan. The truck, Spin Ghul was pleased to discover, was headed for the infamous al Farouq training camp.

Abdul Bara al-Suri was the al Qaeda operative who initiated the training of new recruits, explaining the rules and laws of the camp. Al-Mohajiri, a Yemeni man, supervised their day-to-day training, taught with new zeal because of the September 11 attack on the US. For a month or so, Spin Ghul and his fellow recruits were instructed on how to use weapons, mostly Soviet ones, Kalashnikov rifles and RPGs. They were also trained in small arms and Uzi submachine guns. They learned how to operate what was called a “Pika,” a PK light machine gun. They were shown how to use grenades.

Realizing that his new path could quickly lead to death, Spin Ghul approached an al Qaeda leader named Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi and told him that he wanted to leave a wasiyya. For most Muslims, a wasiyya is their last will and testament. To Islamist terrorists, it often takes the form of a video message recorded in the event that they are killed, to be shown to their families and offering one last opportunity to preach their zealotry and damn their enemies from beyond the grave. It was the first time Spin Ghul ever recorded a video, and when he finished, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi gave it to Abu Faraj al-Libi to send to Spin Ghul’s family should he become a “martyr.”

By the time Spin Ghul began training at al Farouq in the fall of 2001, alumni of this al Qaeda training ground included Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-‘Owhali, both convicted in 2001 for assisting in the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Saeed al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Nami, two of the four men who hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which took off from Newark Airport and crash-landed in Pennsylvania; Wail al-Shehri and Waleed al-Shehri, two of the four men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, which took off from Boston’s Logan Airport and was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; and “Australian Taliban” David Hicks.

Recruits began by learning how to integrate into military life. Then they moved to training in mostly Russian-made weapons, available either because they were relics from the war that had ended in 1989 or were more easily trafficked because of proximity — Kalashnikovs, of course, but also AK-74 assault rifles and other variants, self-loading SKS carbines, RPD and RPK light machine guns, and more.

From there, Spin Ghul and his classmates went to a new camp with more seasoned trained fighters. After passing through Kandahar, they were put into a car and driven to a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan, then to the Malik training camp, where they were taught to use mines and mortars. Then they were taken to a camp called “Maskar 9” or “Camp Nine,” where they were instructed in how to take advantage of terrain and geography, as well as how to detonate TNT and other explosives.

At Maskar 9, Abdul Wakil al-Masri was the commander. Indeed, he was the commander of all al Qaeda forces in the north. It was at Camp Nine where Adnan Harun Adam became “Spin Ghul,” or “White Rose.” A young Pashto cook gave him the name as an homage to a fallen Black fighter, a Somali killed during the war against the Soviets, to whom they’d given the name as an ironic twist on his dark skin. Al Qaeda was not without racism against non-Arab fighters.

Less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the US began retaliating against al Qaeda and the Taliban-run government of Afghanistan for sheltering them. The American bombing campaign began on October 7, 2001, in Afghanistan, and that’s when al Qaeda leaders divided the jihadis in Camp Nine into two groups. Spin Ghul and his group of jihadis moved into a safe house in a small town called Angoor Ada, the site of a border crossing between Pakistan’s Waziristan region and Afghanistan.

Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi would run this safe house. Day-to-day operations were run by an al Qaeda operative named Abdul Faras, who also taught military tactics. Another group of jihadis had already reconned the area, found a new US Army base, and attacked it with weapons and explosives. Spin Ghul heard about this battle and was ready to join the fight.

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