How the Afghan jihad went global

“Yesterday, and only yesterday, I decided to go to Afghanistan. I have decided to visit the place, receive training and come back to conclude my education.” — the diaries of Abu Zubaydah, Jan. 6, 1991

When Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah wrote of his intent to travel to Afghanistan to “train in jihad for Allah’s cause,” the Soviet army had already retreated. He arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, alongside thousands of other Arabs still seeking to rout the communist enemy and the central government in Kabul that it had sponsored. His destination in Afghanistan was Khaldan, one of many training camps for mujahedeen who were fighting the Afghan regime of President Mohammed Najibullah.

In his diaries, Abu Zubaydah frequently describes battle scenes, injuries to fighters and commanders of various nationalities. His writings provide insight into the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, including the factions that formed after the Soviet withdrawal, and the direction the fighters would take in the years that followed.

The question of what to do in the post-Soviet world was paramount among the fighters still in Afghanistan. One important line of thought came from the writings of Palestinian scholar and mujahid Abdullah Azzam, who in April 1988 wrote of the need for a “pioneering vanguard” of Muslim warriors who would form the base, or “qaeda,” of an Islamic society spanning the reaches of the long-lost Islamic empire that once stretched from the Philippines to Somalia, Eritrea and Spain.

A mentor to Osama bin Laden, Azzam was also a founder of the armed Palestinian group Hamas and the Pakistani organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. His vision of 'holy warriors' was a precursor to the groups declaring loyalty to Al-Qaeda or bearing its moniker now roaming everywhere from the plains of western Africa to the jungles of Malaysia.

The movement, which in Afghanistan was led by warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mohammad Yunus Khalis, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Azzam, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — all of whom are identified in Zubaydah’s diaries — has spread beyond a fight to free Muslims. Today, attacks on targets ranging from marathon runners in Boston to shoppers in a mall in Nairobi are routinely linked by analysts with the Al-Qaeda idea. 

In his diaries, Abu Zubaydah discusses meeting like-minded men in Peshawar guesthouses which served as transit points for the aspiring mujahedeen moving on to war in Afghanistan.

At the House of Martyrs, a place that, he writes in his diaries, he eventually ends up running, Abu Zubaydah finds “the spiritual atmosphere here is good. The youth and the elderly have given their souls to almighty God, they traded off life and everything in it for jihad.”

Some, he writes in 1991, arrive to train for a short period and go back to their homes “just to be prepared,” while others “are here for jihad and until God decides for something to be done.”

The mujahedeen are an international group. Abu Zubaydah arrives in Peshawar with four other Palestinians. They’re joined by six men from Somalia and six from the Comoros. At Khaldan, the first camp he trains in, he meets Algerian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Sudanese, Yemeni and Sri Lankan fighters. Similarly, militants in Syria today come from around the world.

Before long, Zubaydah meets his first American, whom he calls Asadallah, or Abdel al-Rahman Abd al-Sur, who has a younger brother named Sayfullah.

“He is a man in his thirties who came here … from their homeland in order to perform jihad for Allah’s cause,” Abu Zubaydah writes in one volume.

“One time, I was talking to him about martyrdom for Allah’s cause he said: ‘I don’t want to become a martyr here in Afghanistan.’ He said it in English. I told him surprisingly: ‘Why?’ He said calmly and in Arabic: ‘In Palestine, my brother. In Jerusalem.’ He continued in English: ‘Martyrdom there is considered twice.’ ”

For the most part, Abu Zubaydah is firm in his beliefs about the nature of the enemy that the mujahedeen are facing. After Kabul and the Najibullah government fell in 1992 and the Taliban took over in 1996, more Afghans arrived in the training camps. While most of them are “fit to be a soldier or a warrior,” he finds them still in the anti-communist mind-set and not embracing the outward-facing position he at this point has assumed.

“Most of them … know their enemy to be the communists, but they do not know the enmity of the brother, which is America, or the idea of democracy,” Abu Zubaydah writes. “Some of them love America as a symbol of freedom, and this is the most awful thing.”

There is also fighting among the warlords, he describes. In one entry he says Hekmatyar has “allied himself with (Afghan general Abdul Rashid) Dostum, commander of the Uzbek militia, working with Hikmatyar became an advantage, not (a) shameful deed.”

In 1992 he talks about traveling to the Farouk camp for an explosives training session. Established in 1989 by bin Laden and Zawahiri near Khost in Afghanistan, Farouk was devoted to training young men who were zealous, fit and healthy and dedicated to “shouldering together the duty of jihad.”

In his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright recounts Azzam’s difficulty in persuading bin Laden to steer young fighters departing from the dwindling conflict in Afghanistan against the Soviets toward other fronts like Israel. Azzam wanted the mujahedeen to continue to fight non-Muslims. He issued a fatwa barring money meant for the Afghan resistance from being used for training those planning to attack civilians abroad, Wright says, adding that Azzam had preached that the intentional killing of civilians, especially women and children, was against Islam. His main rival for influence over bin Laden, Egyptian doctor Zawahiri, was more interested “in stirring revolution within Islamic countries, especially Egypt,” according to Wright.

The basis and justification for this line of attack for Zawahiri and other hard-line disciples was “takfir,” or excommunication. It was the blanket permit that claimed to give cause for Muslims to kill other Muslims. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian whose writings in jail under President Gamal Abdel Nasser served as inspiration for Zawahiri, accused secular Muslims of embracing Western values at the cost of Muslim ideals. His radicalized view of American attitudes toward race fed his anger.

“The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy,” Qutb wrote. “The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives.” His concerns about modernity convinced Qutb that Muslims enamored of the West and its values couldn’t be true to Islam. He became a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose vision he propagated: an Islamic government ruling Egypt with Sharia at its core.

Qutb was hanged in 1966 for his role in a plot to overthrow the Egyptian government and assassinate its leaders. Before his execution, he reportedly told one of his followers, “Although, I am not intending my own destruction, but we must intend firmness in our stance, knowing that the firmness in stance can bring about destruction.”

Most critically, Qutb’s justification for targeting other Muslims who opposed his extremist position enabled others to adopt the same reasoning. Muslims who didn’t agree with them were considered apostates and infidels and therefore no different from non-Muslims and permissible to kill. It was part of the reasoning that justified the Afghan civil war, where Muslim fought Muslim. 

Qutb’s words resounded with Zawahiri, whose influence over bin Laden steadily grew. As the Taliban cemented its hold in Afghanistan and slowly began implementing Islamic rule, the mujahedeen needed a new war. Bin Laden and Zawahiri chose to turn their gaze outward, toward the West.

Azzam was cut out of bin Laden’s inner circle by late 1988, opposed by both the Egyptians and the Saudis, who wanted their own agendas to dominate any new project that bin Laden would fund. Azzam threw his lot in with the Tajik warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, who held off the Soviets and later the Taliban from his province in northern Afghanistan. Azzam was eventually assassinated along with two of his sons in a bombing in Peshawar in 1989. Massoud was also later assassinated, most likely by Al-Qaeda, two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In his diaries, Abu Zubaydah writes, “the brothers in al-Qaeda organization decided to get rid of this traitor,” described elsewhere in the diary as “a thorn right in the throat” of the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar.

“So two of the best brothers were sent as journalists,” to pretend to interview Massoud, Abu Zubaydah writes, “and blew themselves up … so thank God.”