Darunta's origins reach back well before al-Qaeda existed as an organization. The camp complex dates to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when it was reportedly run by Hezb-e-Islami, one of the major mujahideen factions fighting the Soviet-backed government. For years, it functioned as one of many training facilities scattered across the Afghan frontier, part of a war effort supported in part by the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence services. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and Afghanistan descended into civil war, the camps changed hands repeatedly as various factions vied for control. By the late 1990s, with the Taliban consolidating power and al-Qaeda establishing a growing presence in Afghanistan, Darunta became associated with a new and more alarming mission.

In August 2002, CNN aired footage it claimed to have acquired showing al-Qaeda operatives testing chemical agents on dogs at the Darunta complex. The grainy videotapes showed animals convulsing and dying after exposure to what appeared to be nerve agents or toxic chemicals. The footage electrified a public already shaken by the September 11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed. Reports linked the camp's chemical weapons program to Midhat Mursi, an Egyptian explosives expert whom some sources identified as the camp's director and whom the U.S. government placed on its most-wanted list with a bounty of up to five million dollars. Whether the experiments at Darunta ever progressed beyond crude testing on animals remains debated, but the tapes cemented the camp's reputation as a place where mass-casualty ambitions were being pursued.

Darunta was not a single facility. According to Hekmat Karzai, writing in a paper published through the Pentagon, the site comprised a complex of four camps located roughly eight miles from Jalalabad. The Guardian placed it farther out, at fifteen miles from the city, just north of the village of Darunta across the dam. Documents from Guantanamo Bay detainees added another layer of confusion by stating that the Khalden training camp, itself a well-known facility, was also located within the Darunta area. The overlapping geography and shifting allegiances of Afghan militant groups made clear categorization nearly impossible. In 1999, CIA intelligence pinpointed Osama bin Laden's presence at the Darunta complex, and that intelligence enabled Northern Alliance forces to bombard the site.

Was Darunta an al-Qaeda camp? The answer depended on whom you asked. During his Administrative Review Board hearing at Guantanamo Bay, detainee Abdul Bin Mohammed Bin Abess Ourgy acknowledged attending Darunta but insisted it was not affiliated with al-Qaeda. He argued that the camp predated al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan, had been run by Hezb-e-Islami, and was actually one of several non-al-Qaeda camps that the Taliban later shut down at al-Qaeda's request. Other Guantanamo detainees made similar claims about the nearby Khalden camp, asserting that it too operated independently of bin Laden's network and was closed in 2000 at his urging. These disputes mattered enormously to the men detained at Guantanamo, for whom the distinction between attending an al-Qaeda camp and attending any Afghan training camp could mean the difference between indefinite detention and release.

After U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in late 2001, Darunta was among the sites targeted by American bombardment. Surveillance photographs taken after the strikes showed a landscape of collapsed structures and cratered earth. The physical camp was destroyed, but the questions it raised endured. Darunta became a case study in the difficulty of mapping neat organizational charts onto the fluid, fractured world of Afghan militancy, where fighters moved between factions, camps served multiple groups, and the line between an al-Qaeda affiliate and an independent jihadist training operation was often a matter of perspective. For the families of those detained on the basis of Darunta connections, and for intelligence analysts trying to understand the networks they were fighting, those distinctions were anything but academic.