Associated Press correspondent Kathy Gannon conducted a range of interviews, including one with a cameraman for al-Qaeda, for a rare look at how the terror group makes and distributes its videos.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) – The bitter winter winds were howling through the Afghan mountains when, cameraman Qari Mohammed Yusuf says, a courier brought a summons from al-Qaeda’s No 2: “The emir wants to send a message.”

The emir, meaning prince or commander, was Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. He wanted to send a message to the world that he had safely survived a US attempt to kill him.

So Yusuf, following the courier’s directions, says he travelled to al-Zawahri’s Afghan hide-out last January and shot the tape that would become another contribution to al-Qaeda’s PR in the propaganda battles that are a critical component of its terror campaign.

Al-Zawahri was wearing crisp white robes and turban. “Everything was ready,” the cameraman, a dark-skinned man in his mid-30s with a long, scruffy beard, recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

“There was just myself and the emir,” said Yusuf. “I used a small Sony camera. It lasted just half an hour. They chose the place. They fix it and then they just say to me to come, and my job is only to record it. These are their rules, and no one asks any questions.”

The video aired on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV network, on January 30, less than three weeks after the US airstrike on a building just across the border in eastern Pakistan that targetted al-Zawahri but instead killed 13 villagers.

Pakistan said four al-Qaeda militants were also killed in the attack, but their identities were never proven.

In the video, a combative al-Zawahri taunted US president George W Bush: “Bush, do you know where I am? I am in the midst of the Muslim masses, enjoying what Allah has bestowed upon me of their support, hospitality, protection and participation in waging jihad against you until we defeat you.”

Yusuf, an Afghan, said he is one of a half-dozen cameramen used by al-Zawahri, depending on who is physically closest at the time. Most are Arabs, and not all are known to each other, he said.

From their mountain hide-outs in Afghanistan or Pakistan’s remote tribal regions, bin Laden and al-Zawahri provide raw material that become sophisticated multimedia presentations to encourage supporters, recruit fighters, raise money and threaten the West.

Their sophistication and quality contradict Bush administration claims that bin Laden presides over a debilitated organisation, says Bruce Hoffman, counter-terrorism expert and director of the Rand Corporation’s Washington office.

“The active communications and active recruitment is proof positive of their resilience and the fact that they are not on the run,” Hoffman said. “Even though we are given an image here in the United States of them on the retreat, an image of a movement that has been weakened, in fact that is not true and their ability to communicate is almost the oxygen with which they can breathe.”

“The mini-cam and the editing suite have become essential weapons of terror, as the gun and bomb, and just as routinely used.”

For the past five years or so, al-Qaeda has used its own media production company, As-Sahab, Arabic for cloud, listed as producer on al-Qaeda videos or compact discs.

Ahmad Zaidan, an Al-Jazeera correspondent in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, said couriers have delivered to him two messages from bin Laden and two from al-Zawahri – but none since November 2004. He said Internet access now allows al-Qaeda to post its messages directly on a militant Web site or send them electronically to a TV network.

In another advance, the messages now use graphics sequences and English translations.

“The al-Qaeda media machine is astonishingly effective and it has definitely gone into a major upswing over the last nine months or so,” said Evan Kohlmann, an international terrorism consultant. “The sophistication is also quite compelling.”

As of Wednesday, As-Sahab had released eight videos in June, including two from al-Zawahri – its highest monthly production level ever, according to IntelCenter, an US-based contractor that provides counterterrorism intelligence services to the US government.

Yusuf said As-Sahab puts together its videos in a minivan that was turned into a mobile studio by al-Qaeda technicians and blends easily into Pakistani traffic.

The courier network often draws on ties that hark back decades to the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Pakistan-based Islamic insurgency it provoked.

If more complex editing and mixing are needed, couriers may take the video to Peshawar or Lahore, where, Kohlmann noted, al-Qaeda’s electronic signals can also better mix into the urban airwaves.

The final product is posted online, and distributed in bazaars.

“We make the movie on a small cassette, which we shift to the computer and edit,” Yusuf said.

“We make it into a CD or a cassette and then we take it from place to place. We do the editing, but we do not use the satellite where we film. The cassettes are sent to the city area to special places and we give them to these people.”

The distribution network appears to have no chain of command. Distribution falls to a variety of hands, including members of Pakistan’s best-organised religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which once had close links with Afghanistan’s outlawed Hezb-e-Islami party and its leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

AP correspondent Amir Shah in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.