Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [235]
The majority of Afghan mujaheddin were suspicious of the Arab volunteers, whom they called Ikhwanis, meaning the Muslim Brothers, or Wahhabis after the puritanical Islamism that rejected more mystical Sufi traditions, saints and shrines. The reason a frontier town like Peshawar was becoming physically Arabised was because that is where the Arabs hung out while not doing any fighting. They would have done the Afghan cause more good by donating the cost of their air tickets. The first Arab presence in Afghanistan consisted of volunteers despatched on humanitarian missions by a wide array of Islamic non-governmental organisations. Since many professionals, such as doctors, were stalwarts of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was how Ayman al-Zawahiri ended up in Peshawar, where he rapidly realised that Afghanistan might be an ‘incubator’ for the deliverance of his Nilotic homeland from the man he called Pharaoh.
Another Muslim Brother to wash up in Peshawar was a Palestinian called Abdullah Azzam. He had broken with the PLO over Black September, arguing that it should fight Jews rather than Jordanians, which did not spare him from being deported to Saudi Arabia where he taught sharia law at the university of Jeddah. In 1984 he moved to Pakistan, helping to co-ordinate Islamic relief operations from a camp near the Khyber Pass. The Saudis trusted him sufficiently to found a Bureau of Services, designed to monitor the increasing number of Gulf Arabs arriving in Afghanistan to perform, or wage, jihad. Azzam was largely responsible for the romanticised death cult that gained ground among the foreign fighters, since his eulogies to the ‘martyrs’ were generously filled with perfumed corpses and heavenly virgins. He started a magazine called Al-Jihad, and wrote an influential book endorsed by the kingdom’s leading cleric, whose generic thrust was that defence of Islamic territory was an individual obligation upon all Muslims rather akin to rescuing a child drowning in the sea. Ominously, the war in Afghanistan was merely the start of it, as Palestine, Burma, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, South Yemen, Soviet Central Asia and Andalusia, that is two-thirds of modern Spain, were waiting to be delivered too. A wealthy former student, Osama bin Laden, proposed to pay the Bureau’s US$2,500 monthly operating costs, while offering expenses of US$300 a month to any Arab that Azzam could lure to Afghanistan in an Islamist cover-version of the International Brigades of the 1930s that had fought Fascism in Spain. Among those whom Azzam inspired (they had met at Mecca in 1987) to follow him was Abu Hamza al-Masri, a hefty Egyptian illegal immigrant to Britain who, having decided Britain was a ‘toilet’ after working as a bouncer at Soho strip clubs, had got consuming religion. In 1993 Hamza went to Afghanistan where, too bulky to romp easily up and down mountains, he concentrated on bomb making. One such session resulted in the loss of an eye and his hands being blown off, the most plausible reason given for his trademark prosthetic hook.24
Afghanistan has always been one of the places that rich Gulf Arabs frequent—to camp and hunt with falcons—on their globalised caravanserai which takes them via the indigent pretty girls of Ethiopia to Annabel’s and the tarts of Mayfair and Monaco. Broadly speaking, the Arabs come to wage jihad were a mixture of fantasists, who simply had themselves photographed with an AK-47 in front of menacing rocks, and the sort of men who would pitch white tents so as to attract the lethal attentions of Soviet aircraft. They actually wanted to die so as to precipitate the sounds and smells of paradise. Bin Laden himself exhibited many