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| [Muslim] American Filmmaker Encounters Al-Qaeda |
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| stap |
| 08/07/02 at 03:29:28 |
| American Filmmaker Encounters Al Qaeda 'Honored Guests' Living 'Comfortably' In Pakistani Areas By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, August 4, 2002; Page A21 KARACHI, Pakistan -- The new arrival wore the clothes of a Pakistani, the turban of an Afghan and the billowing beard of an ethnic Pashtun. But the passport he slid across the front desk read "United States of America." John Christopher Turner, 52, had just returned to Karachi from the untamed regions near the Afghan border and, in checking into the Hotel Metropole, the unlikely American appeared to have brought some of the frontier's menace back with him. Within hours of Turner's arrival, other Western guests were evacuated, Pakistani police armed with machine guns were banging on his door and U.S. agents were grilling him about his encounters with the armed Arabs whom Turner said he resents hearing called "terrorists." Before being escorted to the Karachi airport and put on a plane out of Pakistan in early June, the self-described filmmaker showed investigators his recent footage of Taliban holdouts and the al Qaeda operatives who were funding them, Turner said. The Missouri native said the images were shot mostly during a May visit to Pakistan's largely lawless Baluchistan province, south of the tribal areas where Pakistani forces have been most conspicuously pursuing al Qaeda. Baluchistan, Turner said, "is where the Taliban and al Qaeda are comfortably living right now. There's nobody trying to run them off. In fact, they're honored guests." "I probably went to 10 hornets' nests," he said, "and there were always two or three al Qaeda in supervisory positions -- overseeing, I'd say; the last thing you can do is boss a Pashtun. But obviously they were conduits for money." He added, however, that he met al Qaeda operatives elsewhere in Pakistan as well. "There are madrassas [Islamic schools] right outside Karachi that are full of al Qaeda," Turner said in a telephone interview from Kansas City, where he is doing construction work and waiting for the film, titled "Hashassins," to be edited. "You go to any madrassa and the al Qaeda are out there." As described by Turner, the Pakistani-born cameraman who accompanied him and the U.S. officials he alarmed, Turner's experience was as unlikely as his appearance. Traveling with armed tribesmen into areas where Taliban and al Qaeda have found refuge, Turner told of Arab extremists living openly among their local supporters, many of whom live such isolated lives they do not know the cause of the current fighting. "They're being misrepresented," Turner said of the many Pashtuns who understand the conflict entirely as a war on Islam. "Most of the Pashtun don't know about the trade towers," referring to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. U.S. officials in Karachi said they found Turner's account credible. Pakistani intelligence agents followed the eccentric American, who speaks fluent Pashto, to the vicinity of al Qaeda safe houses in north Karachi, the officials said. "A bunch of flags were up," said Randall Bennett, the security officer for the U.S. Consulate in Karachi. "He was doing things that he shouldn't have been doing. He was going to places in Karachi where, if you or I went there, we would be killed." Turner acknowledged the concern. "The fact that I'd been with Taliban and al Qaeda, I think that upset them," he said. But his primary purpose, he said, was to collect footage updating 16mm film shot in the 1980s, when he lived among the Pashtuns who were then fighting the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and now, in some cases, are sheltering al Qaeda. The latest trip was financed by a Kansas City real estate developer, Jim Yarmo, who saw in the original "exemplary" footage the potential for a feature film. The "hundreds" of Taliban holdouts he saw in Baluchistan made no effort to hide their presence there. Baluchistan borders the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban. "They're not shy," Turner said. He said that shopkeepers in Quetta, near the Afghan border, are asked to contribute to the resistance. As for the presence of al Qaeda, "they were proud of it," Turner said. Emre Mirza, the filmmaker Turner hired to chronicle his journey, said the Arab nationals they encountered were introduced as officials of aid organizations providing relief in rural southern Afghanistan, where neither U.S. aid nor military presence was evident. "You see the Taliban flag flown openly," Mirza said, repeating assertions that the U.S.-led coalition controls only major towns and the roads connecting them. Turner said he eased his passage into the area by introducing himself to a Baluchi clan chief in Karachi, who provided the small armed escort that signaled the American was under his protection. With that largely symbolic escort, he moved freely through Baluchistan and the Gulistan region that straddles the border. Mirza said the arrangement worked surprisingly well, though as an additional precaution Turner was introduced as an Austrian. Only at one stop was the ruse penetrated, Mirza said. Arabs who themselves claimed to be representatives of a Saudi-funded aid group made clear that they knew Turner was American and warned the travelers to leave before morning, he said. "I had long, probing conversations with these al Qaeda people," Turner said. The Arabs, he said, abhorred what they regarded as the corrupting influence of Western money and morals on traditional Muslim societies and Arab governments, especially in Saudi Arabia, site of two of Islam's three holiest cities. "Their attack on the trade towers, in talking to them, was an effort to do that, to break down that economic base," he said. The argument, if not the action itself, resonated with Turner. He settled in Afghanistan in the 1970s, converting to Islam and eventually fighting the Russians alongside the mujaheddin after being captivated by a tribal culture that had changed little in hundreds of years. "They don't want their world polluted," Turner said of the Arabs. "They see us as the greedy people that we are. "I'm not saying I'm a terrorist or an al Qaeda person, but I can understand their reasoning." Turner did not keep his views from the FBI agents who interrogated him for hours June 1. He said they asked repeatedly about his passport, which was issued in 1997 in Havana by the Swiss Embassy, which oversees U.S. interests in the country Americans are forbidden to visit. "I like Fidel," he said, referring to the Cuban leader. "My main complaint about America is the materialism." Bennett, the consulate security officer, emphasized that his interest was in the safety of other Americans in Karachi. The Pakistani police had arrested Turner after hearing he wanted a room on the same floor as three American guests, visiting professors at a local business college. Another U.S. official later said the report may have been garbled: Both Turner and hotel employees said he merely asked for a room on the executive floor. By then, the professors had been moved to a more secure hotel, shown a copy of Turner's passport and warned that he may have been plotting against them. The two who could be reached for interviews offered different opinions of the perceived threat. "The only negative 'vibe' that I got was the gossip of the security people themselves," said Jay Berry, speaking from his home in Italy. "The man did not seem like a threat until the police people commented about him." But Barbara Cole, who teaches at St. Mary's College of California, was more inquisitive. Writing in her travel diary before the consulate's warning, Cole noted "a bin Laden looking fellow entering and departing the hotel, yet never being seen in the dining room. His pale but handsome and tall looks presented in Afghanistan dress including turban and beard intrigued me and I intensified my watch." Whatever the reality, Bennett called the quick U.S. response appropriate, given Turner's movements in a city that has seen three attacks on Western targets this year. "What we end up with is, there are a number of situations that might be ambiguous, and I discuss them and we take some measure and it becomes a non-incident," Bennett said. He cited the four years of effort that went into "hardening" the Karachi consulate that survived a 500-pound truck bomb without a serious injury inside the building. "We're trying to be proactive," Bennett said. "If you're reactive as a security officer, you're a failure." © 2002 The Washington Post Company |
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