Arabs (89 page)

The origins of the Soviet-Afghan war date to the 1973 military coup that toppled the monarchy of King Zahir Shah and brought a left-leaning government to power. The republican regime of President Mohammed Daoud Khan was in turn toppled
by a violent Communist coup in April 1978. The Communists declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a single-party state allied to the Soviet Union, bent on rapid social and economic reforms. The new Afghan government was openly hostile to Islam and promoted state atheism, provoking widespread opposition within the largely religious Afghan population.

With Soviet backing, the Communist regime instigated a reign of terror against all opponents, arresting and executing thousands of political prisoners. However, the ruling Communists were themselves split by factionalism and succumbed to in-fighting. After a spate of assassinations, the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, sending an invasion force of 25,000 men to secure the capital city of Kabul and to install its Afghan ally Babrak Karmal as president.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provoked international condemnation, but no country was in a position to intervene directly to force a Soviet withdrawal. It fell to the Afghan resistance movements to repel the Red Army, and the Islamist parties led the fight. They received extensive covert assistance from the United States, which saw the conflict strictly in Cold War terms, in which the anticommunism of the Islamist fighters made them natural allies against the Soviets. The United States provided the Afghan resistance with military supplies and sophisticated hand-fired antiaircraft missiles through Pakistan. During the Carter administration, the United States gave some $200 million in aid to the Afghan resistance. Ronald Reagan stepped up American support, providing $250 million in assistance in 1985 alone.
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The government of Pakistan served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Afghan resistance and aided with intelligence and training facilities for the Afghan mujahidin (literally, “holy warriors,” Islamic guerrillas). The Islamic world provided significant financial assistance and, starting in 1983, began to recruit volunteers to fight in the Afghan jihad.

Abdullah ‘Azzam led the call to recruit Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan, and Abdullah Anas was one of the first to respond. The two men met by chance while on pilgrimage in Mecca in 1983. Among the millions who gathered for the rituals of the pilgrimage, Anas recognized the distinctive face of Abdullah ’Azzam, with his long beard and broad face, and went up to introduce himself.

“I read the fatwa that you and a group of clerics published on the duty of jihad in Afghanistan, and I am convinced by it, but I don’t know how to get to Afghanistan,” Anas said.

“It is very simple,” ’Azzam replied. “This is my telephone number in Islamabad. I will return to Pakistan at the end of the Hajj. If you get there, call me and I will take you to our Afghan colleagues in Peshawar.”
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Within two weeks, Anas was on a plane to Islamabad. Never having been outside the Arab world, the young Algerian was disoriented in Pakistan. He went straight to a public telephone and was relieved when ‘Azzam answered and invited him over for
dinner. “He received me with a human warmth that touched me,” Anas recalled. Welcoming Anas into his home, ’Azzam introduced him to his other dinner guests. “His house was full of the students he taught in the International Islamic University in Islamabad. He asked me to stay with him until he went to Peshawar because I would not be able to meet with the Afghan colleagues if I went to Peshawar on my own.”

Anas spent three days as a guest in ‘Azzam’s home. It was the beginning of a profound friendship and political partnership, sealed when Anas later married ’Azzam’s daughter. While at ‘Azzam’s home, Anas got to meet the first of the Arab men to respond to ’Azzam’s call to volunteer for the Afghan jihad. There were no more than a dozen Arab volunteers in the Afghan jihad when Anas arrived in 1983. Before their departure for Peshawar, ’Azzam introduce Anas to another Arab volunteer.

“I present you Brother Osama bin Ladin,” ’Azzam said by way of introduction. “He is one of the Saudi youths who love the Afghan jihad.”

“He struck me as very shy, a man of few words,” Anas recollected. “Shaykh Abdullah explained that Osama visited him from time to time in Islamabad.” Anas did not get to know bin Ladin well, as they served in different parts of Afghanistan. But he never forgot that first encounter.
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While still in Pakistan, Anas was sent with two other Arab volunteers to a training camp. Having done his national service in Algeria, he was already proficient with a Kalashnikov submachine gun. After two months, the volunteers were given their first opportunity to enter Afghanistan.

Before they set off from their camp in Pakistan to join the Afghan mujahidin, ‘Azzam explained to his Arab protégés that the Afghan resistance was divided into seven factions. The largest were the Pashtun-dominated Hezb-e Islami (the Islamic Party) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Jamiat-e Islami (the Islamic Society) headed by the Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani. ’Azzam warned the Arab volunteers to avoid taking sides in Afghan factionalism and to see themselves as “guests of the entire Afghan people.”

Yet as the Arabs volunteered for service in the different Afghan provinces, they came under the command of specific parties and inevitably gave their loyalty to the men with whom they served. Anas volunteered to serve in the northern province of Mazar-e Sharif, under the command of Rabbani’s men of the Jamiat-e Islami. The handful of Arab volunteers set off with their Afghan commanders in the depth of winter, crossing territory under Soviet control, in a caravan of 300 armed men, all on foot. The perilous journey took forty days.

Once he reached Mazar-e Sharif, Anas was discouraged by his first experiences of the Afghan jihad. The local commander in Mazar had just died in a suicide operation against the Soviets, and three of his subordinates were vying with one another to control the resistance forces in the strategic town. Anas recognized he was out of
his depth. “We were young men with no information, training or money,” Anas wrote of himself and the two other Arabs who were with him on the journey. “I realized that participation in the jihad required a much higher standard [of preparation] than we had reached.”

Within a month of his arrival in Mazar, Anas decided to leave the “explosive situation” and return to Peshawar as soon as possible. His first impression of Afghanistan was that its problems were too big to be solved by a handful of well-intentioned volunteers. “Inevitably the Islamic world would have to be called upon to assume its responsibility. The Afghan problem is bigger than five Arab men, or twenty-five Arabs or fifty Arabs.” He believed it was essential to brief Abdullah ’Azzam of the political situation inside Afghanistan “so that he could present the situation to the Arab and Islamic worlds, and request more assistance for the Afghan problem.”
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The frontier town of Peshawar had undergone significant changes over the months Anas had spent in Afghanistan. There were now many more Arab volunteers, their numbers swelling from a dozen, when Anas first arrived, to seventy or eighty by the beginning of 1985. Abdullah ‘Azzam had created a reception facility for the growing number of Arabs who were responding to his call. “While you were away,” ’Azzam explained to Anas, “Osama bin Ladin and I established the Services Office [Maktab al-khadamat] with a group of brothers. We established the Office to organize Arab participation in the Afghan Jihad.”
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’Azzam saw the Services Office as an independent center where Arab volunteers could meet and train without the risk of getting caught up in the political divisions of the Afghans. The Services Office had three objectives: to provide aid, to assist in reform, and to promote Islam. The office began to open schools and institutes inside Afghanistan, as well as among the swelling Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It provided aid to orphans and widows of the conflict. At the same time, it engaged in active propaganda to attract new recruits to the Afghan jihad.

As part of its propaganda effort, the Services Office published a popular magazine, distributed across the Arab world, called
al-Jihad
. The pages of
al-Jihad
were replete with stories of heroism and sacrifice intended to inspire Muslims young and old. Leading Islamist thinkers contributed articles. Zaynab al-Ghazali, who had been imprisoned by Nasser for her Islamist activities in the 1960s, gave an interview to
al-Jihad
while on a visit to Pakistan. Now in her seventies, al-Ghazali had lost none of her zeal for the Islamist cause. “The time I spent in prison is not equal to one moment in the field of jihad in Afghanistan,” she told her interviewer. “I wish I could live with the women fighters in Afghanistan, and I ask God to give victory to the mujahidin and to forgive us [i.e., the international community of Islam] our shortcomings in bringing justice to Afghanistan.”
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Al-Ghazali idealized the Afghan
jihad as “a return to the age of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, a return to the era of the rightly guided Caliphs.”

The magazine
al-Jihad
reinforced this heroic narrative of the Afghan war against the Soviets, publishing accounts of miracles reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad’s times. Among them were articles describing a group of mujahidin that killed 700 Soviets, losing only seven of their own men to martyrdom; a young man who single-handedly shot down five Soviet aircraft; even flocks of heavenly birds that created an avian curtain shielding mujahidin from the enemy. The magazine sought to convince readers of divine intervention, in which God rewarded faith with victory against impossible odds.

Abdullah Anas was a pragmatist, however, and he’d been on the ground in Afghanistan. There were no miracles in his own dry-eyed account of the war. He returned to Mazar-e Sharif in 1985, where he served under the commander of Jamiat-e Islami forces in the northern Panjshir Valley region, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was a born leader, a charismatic guerrilla commander in the mold of Che Guevara. He regularly withdrew with his forces to the forbidding terrain of the Hindu Kush, creating bases in the deep mountain caves where he could withstand weeks of punishing bombardment, only to emerge from the rubble to inflict heavy casualties on Soviet forces. Yet his men suffered too. On one occasion, Massoud was retreating through a narrow valley with one of his units when they were surprised by Soviet rocket fire. “In less than five minutes, more than ten of our men fell as martyrs,” Anas recalled. “It was an unimaginable sight.”
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Anas described another battle, in which Massoud led 300 of his men (including fifteen Arab volunteers) to victory over the Soviets. The engagement lasted a full day and night, and Massoud suffered eighteen dead (including four Arabs) and many more wounded.
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The Afghan mujahidin and their Arab supporters fought a desperate and ultimately successful battle against superior forces. A decade of occupation had proven very costly to the Soviet Union in men and materiel. At least 15,000 Red Army soldiers died in Afghanistan, and 50,000 were wounded in action. The Afghan resistance managed to shoot down over 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters with antiaircraft missiles provided by the United States. By the end of 1988, the Soviets came to recognize that they could not impose their will on Afghanistan with an invasion army of 100,000 men. The Kremlin decided to cut its losses and withdraw. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet units withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet this great victory of Muslim arms over a nuclear superpower was ultimately a disappointment for the men who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan.

The Afghan resistance’s victory over the Soviets did not lead to the ultimate Islamist objective—the creation of an Islamic state. Once the Soviet enemy was outside their frontiers, the Afghan factions turned against each other in a power struggle that quickly degenerated into civil war. Despite Abdullah ’Azzam’s best efforts, many
Arab volunteers divided along Afghan factional lines, taking sides with the party they knew. Others chose to leave Afghanistan. The violent turf battles between rival warlords did not constitute jihad, and they had no wish to fight fellow Muslims.

The Arab volunteers did not make much of an impact in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. In retrospect, Abdullah Anas declared that the Arab contribution to the Afghan war amounted to no more than “a drop in the ocean.” The group of volunteers who came to be known as the “Afghan Arabs” probably never exceeded a maximum of two thousand men, and of those, “only a very small proportion entered Afghanistan and took part in the fighting with the mujahidin,” Anas claimed. The remainder stayed in Peshawar and volunteered their services “as doctors and drivers, cooks and accountants and engineers.”
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Yet the Afghan jihad had an enduring influence over the Arab world. Many of those who answered the call to jihad returned to their native lands intent on realizing the ideal Islamic order that had eluded them in Afghanistan. Anas estimated some 300 Algerian volunteers served in Afghanistan; many of them would return home to play an active part in a new Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (more commonly known by the French acronym, the FIS). Others gathered around Osama bin Ladin, who established a rival institution to Abdullah ’Azzam’s Services Office. Bin Ladin called his new organization “the Base,” but it has come to be better known by its Arabic name, al-Qaida. Some of the Arabs who served with Anas in the Panjshir Valley chose to remain in Pakistan and became founding members of al-Qaida.

The man who inspired the Arab Afghans was himself laid to rest in Pakistan. Abdullah ‘Azzam was killed on November 24, 1989, with two of his sons when a car bomb detonated as they approached a mosque in Peshawar for Friday prayers. There have been many theories, none conclusive, about who might have ordered the killing of Abdullah ’Azzam: rival Afghan factions; the circle of Osama bin Ladin; even the Israelis, who saw ’Azzam as the spiritual leader of a new Palestinian Islamist movement called Hamas.