He later explained that he had traveled towards Afghanistan, after using his father's contacts in the Muslim Brotherhood to purchase a forged Syrian passport, to attend a Jalalabad camp run by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a commander in the Northern Alliance. However, he contracted malaria and remained in a guest house called "Bait al-Ansar" in Peshawar for a year before attending Sayyaf's camp, where'd he trained on an AK-47 with a group named "Ittihad-i-Islami". He made three subsequent trips into Afghanistan to stay at the camps under Sayyaf's leadership, using his savings to finance the third trip.