Afghan Arabs
Afghan Arabs (also known as Arab-Afghans; Arabic: أفغان عرب, romanized: Afghān ʻArab) are Arab and other Muslim Islamist mujahideen who came to Afghanistan during and following the Soviet–Afghan War to aid the war efforts of native Muslims in the DRA.[1] Despite being called "Afghan" they were not from Afghanistan nor legally citizens of Afghanistan.
For the Arab migration or invasion of Afghanistan prior to the Soviet–Afghan War, see History of Arabs in Afghanistan.Estimates of the volunteers number are 8,000[2] to 35,000.[3][4] The late Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the first Arab journalist from a major Arabic media organization to cover the Afghan jihad, estimated their numbers to be at around 10,000.[5] Within the Muslim Arab world they achieved near hero-status for their association with the defeat of the Soviet Union, and on returning home had considerable significance waging jihad against their own and other governments. Their name notwithstanding, none were Afghans and some were not Arabs, but Turkic or Malay, among others. In the West, the arguably most famous among their ranks was Osama bin Laden.
Algeria[edit]
Several veterans of jihad in Afghanistan were important in the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria or GIA—one of two insurgent groups fighting the government in the Algerian Civil War after the army intervened to prevent the leading Islamist party from winning elections scheduled for January 1992. Sief Allah Djafar, aka Djafar al-Afghani, spent two years in Afghanistan and in 1993 became "amir" of the GIA.[44] Providing doctrinal justifications for the GIA and a "steady stream of pro-GIA publicity" for Muslims outside Algeria (until June 1996 when GIA atrocities became too much) were two other Afghan veterans, Abu Mousab (a Spanish Syrian) and Abu Qatada (a Palestinian).[44]
The GIA slogan—"no agreement, no truce, no dialogue"—echoed that of Abdullah Azzam. The group was committed to overthrowing the "impious" Algerian government and worked to prevent any compromise between them and the Islamist FIS party.[45]
Under Djafar, the GIA broadened its attacks to include civilians who refused to live by their prohibitions, and then foreigners living in Algeria.[46] By the end of 1993 26 foreigners had been killed.[47] In November 1993 it kidnapped and executed Sheik Mohamed Bouslimani "a popular figure who was prominent" in the moderate Islamist Algerian Hamas party who refused "to issue a fatwa endorsing the GIA's tactics."[47] Djafar was killed February 26, 1994,[44] but GIA continued to escalate violence, massacring whole villages of peasants for their alleged apostasy from Islam manifested by their failure to support GIA's jihad. Though the "undisputed principal Islamist force" in Algeria in 1994,[48] by 1996, militants were deserting "in droves", alienated by its execution of civilians and Islamists leaders and believing it to be infiltrated by government agents.[49] By the end of the 1990s the group was spent, somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 lives had been lost, and the once broad and enthusiastic support by voters for the anti-government Islamism was replaced "with a deep fear of instability". Algeria was one of the few in the Arab world not to participate in the Arab Spring.[50]
Egypt[edit]
In Egypt, "fundamentalists fighting the government in the 1990s included "several hundred 'Afghan' guerrillas".[35] The main group was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Shawky al-Istambouli—brother of the army lieutenant who led the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Al-Istambouli established a base in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, during the war.[35] (The Islamist terror group al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya still had about 200 men there in 1994.)[35] A former army colonel and "prominent fundamentalist" who fled Egypt after the Sadat assassination, Ibrahim el-Mekkawi, maintained training camps and other bases near the Afghan-Pakistan border and directed the Islamic campaign in Egypt from Pakistan according to authorities in Cairo.[35]
Egypt's institutions had more political strength and religious credibility than Algeria's, and hundreds rather than thousands were killed in the terror campaign before it was crushed in 1997–8.[51] Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya militants harassed and murdered members of the Coptic Christian minority, and by 1992 had broadened their targets to police and tourists, causing serious harm to Egypt's economy. Violence in Egypt reached its peak in the November 1997 Luxor massacre of 60 people most of whom were tourists.[51]
Taliban era[edit]
In the mid- and late-1990s, the Afghan Arabs, in the form of the Wahhabi-oriented Al-Qaeda, became more influential in Afghanistan helping and influencing the Taliban. Several hundred Arab-Afghans participated in the 1997 and 1998 Taliban offensives in the north and helped the Taliban carry out the massacres of the Shia Hazaras there. Several hundred more Arab-Afghans, based in the Rishkor army garrison outside Kabul, fought on the Kabul front against General Ahmad Shah Massoud. At the same time the Taliban's ideology changed. Until the "Taliban's contact with the Arab-Afghans and their [the Taliban's] pan-Islamic ideology was non-existent." [52]
By 1996 and 1998, al Qaeda felt comfortable enough in the sanctuary given them to issue a declaration of war against Americans and later a fatwa to kill Americans and their allies. "The Arab-Afghans had come full circle. From being mere appendages of the Afghan jihad and the Cold War in the 1980s they had taken centre stage for the Afghans, neighbouring countries and the west in the 1990s."[53] This was followed by al Qaeda 1998 American embassy bombings in African countries and the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, America invaded Afghanistan, deposing the Taliban, ending the heyday of the Afghan Arabs. During the American campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001, many coherent units of Arab fighters were destroyed by JDAMs. Some Arab fighters have been held by Afghan tribesman for ransom paid by Americans.[54]
Characteristics[edit]
Helpfulness to the Afghan mujahideen[edit]
Perhaps the major contribution of the more serious Afghan Arab volunteers was humanitarian aid —- the setting up of hospitals around Peshawar and Quetta and providing funds for supply caravans to travel to the interior of the country. Abdullah Anas, himself one of the most famous of these Afghan-Arabs fighters, said that "90 percent were teachers, cooks, accountants, doctors [over the border in Pakistan]."[5] The effectiveness of the Afghan Arabs in Afghanistan as a fighting force has been scoffed at, called a "curious sideshow to the real fighting,"[55] Estimates are there were about 2000 Arab Afghans fighting "at any one time", compared with about a 250,000 Afghan fighters and 125,000 Soviet troops.[56]
Marc Sageman, a Foreign Service Officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, and worked closely with Afghanistan's Mujahideen, says
Chechnya:
Yugoslav wars:
Iraqi conflict: