Located four miles south of Kandahar International Airport in the heart of the Taliban’s spiritual homeland, Tarnak Farm was a compound made of about 80 concrete and mud-brick buildings surrounded by a 10-foot-high wall. After he was expelled from Sudan in early 1996, Osama Bin Laden set up a major Al Qaeda station here to train his agents in terrorist operations and guerilla tactics. The famous recruiting videotape of Qaeda members running through an obstacle course was shot here, and the camp was targeted by U.S. armed forces in 1998 with a barrage of cruise missiles fired at a gathering of senior Qaeda leaders.

In the first months of the war on terror, American forces pounded Tarnak Farm with air strikes, destroying many of the buildings, and they swept in with ground forces after the terrorists fled in November 2001. The U.S. Marines took over the camp in December, seizing intelligence material, and soon Tarnak Farm became a training facility for coalition armed forces.

Navy SEAL Matthew J. Bourgeois, 35, was fatally wounded during training here in March 2002, and in April, it was the site of an accidental friendly fire incident in which an American F-16 fighter accidentally bombed Canadian forces, killing four and injuring eight.