March 20, 1995, New York Times, Terror Network Traced to Pakistan, by John F. Burns,

March 20, 1995, New York Times, Terror Network Traced to Pakistan, by John F. Burns,

Glimpsed from a taxi, there is nothing obviously sinister about the University of Dawat and Jihad. Like much of the sprawling Afghan refugee camp that surrounds it, the campus crouches unobtrusively behind high walls of sun-baked clay. Beyond a guardhouse, clusters of young men in Afghan tribal garb move about languidly.

The scene could be anywhere in this tense and often lawless region along the frontier with Afghanistan. There is no police presence for miles around, and no sign of any other Government authority. In the bazaars that line the road running past the university, the name of which translates roughly as "University of the Community of the Holy War," just about everybody has a hidden Kalashnikov assault rifle, and a sharp eye for anything deemed intrusive, especially Westerners.

But nothing in this atmosphere of suspicion and imminent violence compares with the university, which for years has had a reputation as a haven for Muslim militants from Arab and Asian countries. Now, top Pakistani police officials say, the campus at Babbi, 20 miles east of Peshawar, is under investigation as a possible training ground for terrorists who have struck in the Philippines, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and even, investigators now believe, in the 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center in New York that killed six people and wounded more than 1,000. Tracing the Clues Back to Peshawar

This weekend, American investigators were working behind the scenes here with Pakistan's intelligence services, scouring for links to the bombing as well as the recent attack on Americans by gunmen 12 days ago in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, shooting to death two Americans who were driving to work at the United States Consulate. Officials interviewed here said today that the questioning of six suspects captured a week ago has led to further arrests.

With its obsessive secrecy and hostility to outsiders, Al Dawat, as it is known, remains little but a name to most people in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. But what has not been so much of a secret is that Peshawar, and the wild valleys and passes of the tribal areas along the Afghan border, have emerged as one of the most active training grounds, and sanctuaries, for a new breed of international terrorists fighting a jihad -- a holy war -- against Governments and other targets they see as enemies of Islam.

Until the 1990's, Peshawar received scant notice among known terrorist training centers like Beirut, Teheran or Tripoli in the search for groups who hijack aircraft, assassinate public figures, and plant bombs.

But the two terrorist attacks involving American targets have swung the spotlight on this ancient city at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, where violence and intrigue are as much a part of the city's legacy as the towering battlements of its 19th-century fort.

Investigators, including a 50-member team from the F.B.I., are working in the knowledge that almost all the groups that have punctuated life in Karachi with drive-by shootings and mosque bombings have ties to Peshawar, either to the Arab-led terrorist underground or to gangs of gun-runners and heroin-traffickers who are based in the frontier province's tribal districts, historically ungovernable areas along the border with Afghanistan.

In the World Trade Center bombing, the clues being followed by the investigators are clearer. Beginning last weekend, Pakistani police working with officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. began a round of arrests in Peshawar that have flowed from the discovery that Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a prime suspect in the New York attack, used Peshawar as a base for several years. He was seized in a joint American-Pakistani raid in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, on Feb. 7, and deported to New York.

The arrest of Mr. Yousef in Islamabad set off a chain of events that has rocked the Peshawar underground and resulted this weekend in the issuing of a police alert for two men identified as Abdul Karim and Abdul Munim, who the officials said are Mr. Yousef's brothers.

The six men seized a week ago are being held at a jail at Adiala, outside Islamabad, on suspicion of involvement in the World Trade Center bombing and a botched attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit in January to Manila, the capital of the Philippines. They included three Arabs, an Iranian, a naturalized Pakistani born in Syria and a native-born Pakistani. Arrests Bring Fear Of Reprisal Attacks

Nervousness among American officials over the possibility of revenge killings led the top diplomat at the United States Consulate in Peshawar, Richard H. Smyth, to announce on Friday that the American Club in the city would be closed temporarily, as would the American school.

The risks for Americans seem unlikely to diminish, at least in the short run, especially if Pakistan follows through on another move that top officials here hinted at today -- closing Al Dawat University.

"It has to go," one official said, noting that the questioning of Mr. Yousef, and of others seized since, have confirmed that his links in Peshawar were mainly to an Afghan group headed by Abdul Rab Rasool Sayyaf, the university's founder. Mr. Sayyaf, a militant Muslim with strong anti-American leanings, established the school in the mid-1980's.

In many ways, Al Dawat serves as a symbol for the events that turned Peshawar into a terrorist haven. The city and the frontier province of which it is the capital have never had a law-abiding reputation, going back to the days when Britain, as the colonial power in what was then India, fought fierce battles against the Pathans who dominate both sides of the border with Afghanistan, and eventually allowed them a broad degree of autonomy.

But the uneasy balance with the border tribes that was achieved by Britain, and later Pakistan, tipped after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. The huge amounts of weapons and money that the United States and other nations poured into supporting Afghan groups established in Peshawar unleashed new levels of lawlessness on the frontier. Afghan Veterans In Search of a War

This anything-goes atmosphere encouraged large numbers of foreigners -- mainly Arabs but also Asians, Europeans and some Americans -- to volunteer to fight with the Afghan groups. According to a senior Pakistani military officer, 25,000 of these volunteers were trained with help from Pakistan's military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, during the 1980's.

Some died in Afghanistan and some went home after Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, but others remained in and around Peshawar or across the border in Afghanistan, "looking for other wars to fight," as Pakistan's Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, said in Karachi last week.

According to Western diplomats familiar with the investigations, current American estimates of the number of Arabs, Asians and others active in terrorist groups with bases here run to about 1,000. Of these, some are believed to have taken sanctuary inside Afghanistan, with Afghan armed groups that have Muslim fundamentalist leanings, including Mr. Sayyaf's.

Others are said to have taken refuge in what are known here as the "inaccessible" areas of the frontier, meaning regions where no Pakistani laws apply. But many, according to diplomats and police officials, still live in and around Peshawar, using as cover some of the 18 Arab educational and relief organizations that registered with the Pakistani authorities during the Afghan war, among them Al Dawat University. Muslims Taught To Hate the West

Another senior diplomat said Pakistani officials had been aware for years that at Al Dawat and other training centers, youths were being taught Muslims had a duty to join in an international brotherhood that could avenge the humiliations Muslims are said to have suffered at the hands of the West.

According to the diplomats, intelligence reports in recent years have suggested that militants trained here have taken part in almost every conflict in which Muslims have been involved. The diplomats said Muslims trained here have fought in places including Mindanao, the largest of the Philippine islands, where Mr. Yousef is said to have had links with a Muslim insurgency; the Indian-held portion of the state of Kashmir, where 500,000 Indian troops and police officers are tied down by a Muslim revolt; Tajikistan; Bosnia; and several countries in North Africa that face Muslim rebellions, including Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.

Like previous Pakistani Governments, Ms. Bhutto's has responded to Western pressures cautiously, fearing a backlash from powerful Muslim groups within Pakistan.

But many senior Pakistani officials resent Western pressures, saying that the terrorist groups that became established here got their start under policies that Western countries eagerly supported, as long as the target was the Soviet Union.

"Don't forget, the whole world opened its arms to these people," one senior official said. "They were welcomed here as fighters for a noble cause, with no questions asked. They came in here by the dozens, and nobody thought to ask them: when the Afghan jihad is over, are you going to get involved in terrorism in Pakistan? Are you going to bomb the World Trade Center?"

"The Afghan war was a holy war for everybody, including the Americans, and nobody bothered to think beyond it," the official said.