The Afghan Connection

Afghanistan was a powerful catalyst in activating fundamentalist Muslim youth, inspiring if not actually training many militants. During the 1980s, thousands of volunteers from 50 countries rallied to the rebel mujahedin. Most of them worked for relief organizations or in hospitals and schools. A few thousand actually went into the field to fight. Some returned home to cause serious trouble for their rulers. Several of those arrested in the World Trade Center bombing were veterans of the Afghan campaign. The now imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman made at least three trips to Afghanistan during the war, and two of his sons reportedly fought there. But there is no hard evidence on how many volunteers there were.

In Egypt Mubarak calls the so-called Afghani veterans the main terrorist threat to the stability of his government. One of the two assailants killed in the attempt last month on the life of Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi was a veteran of the Afghan war, as were others implicated in previous attacks on government officials. Montasser al-Zayat, a Cairo lawyer who represents many of the militants arrested in the past two years, claims that 20,000 Egyptians fought alongside the mujahedin. The government's experts put the figure closer to 2,500 and say that as many as half of them have returned home. A senior Western diplomat in Cairo insists that both estimates are too high. He says 2,500 Arabs went to Afghanistan and that only about 200 Egyptians received combat training and returned to fight their government. Even so, says the diplomat, "it only takes a few to create the myth." In Algeria several hundred Arab veterans, known locally as "el-Afghanis," are fighting in the ranks of the Islamic Salvation Front. In Tunisia returnees from the battles against the Soviet army are supporting An-Nahda.

During the war in Afghanistan, two main organizations provided a pipeline for volunteers, funding and relief workers. One was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and the other was the World Muslim League, supported by Saudi Arabia. Linked to them were smaller groups of activists and influential individuals, including charismatic recruiter Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian-born Palestinian who brought in hundreds of zealous volunteers, and his New York-based agent, Mustafa Shalabi, who ran the Alkifar Refugee Center in Brooklyn, known as "the Jihad office." Both Azzam and Shalabi were murdered in 1991. Another key figure was Saudi financier Osama bin Laden, who fought with the mujahedin himself and brought many others to the cause. Arab governments under attack by extremists often claim that the returned Afghan veterans are being directed by a central office in Afghanistan and financed by Iran. Such suspicions have not been proved.