Steve Coll
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 2 Sep
Steve Coll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's he's early into satellite television communication.
And the CIA trying to track him.
and trying to figure out where all of his nodes are and where his how how his network works, they they form Alex Station not only to target him, but to try to figure out how he's connecting to other militant groups in far-frong places using communications technology and other means.
Well, I think, you know, he's he's trying to make the best of it by accounts of his family members uh who were around when he made this journey from Khartoum to Jalalabad in a chartered uh jet with that portion of his family that chose to go with him.
Two of his wives and uh number of his sons and daughters flew with him, and you can imagine them just kind of packing this.
um airplane with limited uh weight allowances with all of their possessions that they're going to take to a to a broken city, Jalalabad, that's in the middle of a civil conflict involving the Taliban and other Mujahideen forces.
They don't um they they know that they'll be welcomed at the airport, but beyond that, I don't think they have much uh sense of how they're going to get along.
and uh where they're gonna hunker down and how he's gonna organize things.
Um and in fact I think those first six months uh after they arrived in nineteen ninety six, um, you know, were challenging.
He basically went up the mountain to uh the Torabora area, the areas
um of eastern Afghanistan that he was familiar with and where he had built bases uh during the anti Soviet war.
But um, Anita, as you forecasted, uh, he made the wise call to try to get an introduction to the new power in Afghanistan, who is Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban.
He's down in Kandahar.
And at some point, um late in 1996, he and Mullah Muhammad Omar connect, and then a new uh world is opened up to him.
He's welcomed by the Taliban as a
a great international jihad hero and he's given access to Kandahar.
And by the end of ninety six, he's moved his family down there and they've tried to replicate something like what they had in Sudan.
It's very difficult.
It's not as comfortable, but at least they have stability.
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