User:Geo Swan/Abu Burhan al-Suri

Abu Burhan al-Suri was a Syrian military officer. In 1986, after he had retired from the Syrian military, during the Soviet occupation, he traveled to Pakistan, and set up a military training program at the Sadda training camp, in Pakistan's Federally administered tribal areas. When that camp was shutdown in 1988, due to pressure from the Government of Pakistan, he made sure the replacement camp, the Khaldan training camp, also had a competently run, effective military training program.

According to Mustafa Hamid, one of the first "Afghan-Arabs", although these camps were just two among many Afghan training camps set up to train those fighting against Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers, they stood out due to al-Suri's training documents. Hamid wrote that al-Suri wrote training manuals for each of the courses offered at the camps.

In a letter to his father, Osama bin Laden wrote that al-Suri had loaned him money to pay for his wedding celebration, and asked his father to re-imburse him.

The camps were run by al Midikhmat, the group run by Palestinian Dr Abdullah Azzam, who is said to have first been Osama bin Laden's mentor, and then his rival.

The Khaldan camp, like all the other Afghan training camps, had been funded indirectly by America's Central Intelligence Agency. Following the Soviet Union's departure from Afghanistan CIA funding evaporated, but the Khaldan camp found other funding, and continued to be run. It continued to run long after its parent organization folded, in the years after its founder's assassination.

Al-Suri passed direction of the Khaldan camp to Ibn Shaykh al-Libi in 1992.

Documents prepared by OARDEC, in Guantanamo, assert that al-Suri continued to have some contact with the individuals who had led Khaldan as late as 2000.

Security risks quoted a 2014 document from a group of volunteers in Syria from the Maldives, who quoted a recent statement from Burhan.