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By Root 1312 0

the anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan. “Freelancers,” hailing primarily from Saudi Arabia, but also from Kuwait and other Arab states, set up shop in Peshawar, looking to influence the region through an array of mechanisms, from recruiting mujahideen aspirants and training them to fight the Red Bear, to funding hard-line Salafist madrassas. Well financed, either by their families or by benefactors in their home countries, those at the helms of these groups commanded small numbers of foot soldiers, many of whom had been prisoners in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and were conveniently released early to fight (and die) for the jihad in Afghanistan—a place about which many of these ex-prisoners and general miscreants knew nothing, even its location on a world map. Afghan Arab leaders easily manipulated those of the lower ranks, who were often impoverished and uneducated (save for their extremist indoctrination), emotionally leveraging their ignorance—a standard and very effective practice for terror and insurgent ringleaders.

The most notable of these Peshawar-based “Afghan Arab” groups, the Maktab al-Khidmat al Mujahidin al-Arab, or MAK (frequently referenced as the Afghan Services Bureau), had been spawned by the teachings of the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood. Two personalities who would rise to the forefront of global extremist infamy would join MAK, which was founded by a Palestinian Islamic theorist named Abdullah Azzam: Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. But MAK played only a relatively minor role in the Soviet-Afghan War; they trained just a handful of fighters and built a few cave networks and small medical centers. It was their financing (with bin Laden’s money) of logistical efforts for mujahideen inside Afghanistan that proved to be their greatest contribution to the Soviet defeat. After the November 1989 car bomb murder of Azzam in Peshawar, bin Laden and Zawahiri guided the MAK to hyperextremist—apocalyptic—levels as the leaders of the secretive organization the world would come to know as al-Qaeda, “the Base,” a name that has been traced to the final line of the group’s seminal treatise, penned by Azzam in 1987.

With the goal of securing hard-line Salafist ideological allegiance in return for their aid, other Arab groups supported the critical logistical efforts for mujahideen in Afghanistan. While money and supplies poured into the ISI from the U.S. and Saudi governments, the transport of weapons, food, fuel, and other supplies to the mujahideen from the Pakistani border presented the ISI with monumental—and prohibitively expensive—hurdles, often exhausting their monthly expenditures. Wealthy Arab supporters of the jihad bolstered the effort, with aid given not to the ISI to funnel to the fighters, but to the party bosses in Peshawar and sometimes directly to their commanders in Afghanistan to pay for mule and horse trains to carry the vital cargo of munitions and other supplies down the final, critical logistical pathways. The majority of this help, however, went to the two most fundamentalist parties, those of Gulbadin Hekmatyar (HIG) and Mohammad Khalis’s Hezb-e-Islami-Khalis (HIK). Because HIK, which took the lion’s share of this funding, dominated the organized resistance movement in the Kunar and Pech River Valley regions for most of the war, this area experienced a strong inflow of extremist Salafist ideology.

Wealthy Arabs also financed the development and maintenance of strict fundamentalist madrassas in and around Peshawar. Chief among these in importance for the Kunar province were the so-called Panjpiri madrassas of the town of Panjpir in the Swabi district of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. The Panjpiri madrassas, principally the infamous Darul Quran Panjpir Madrassa, disseminated the hardest line of Salafist ideology. And they had many, many fresh faces to whom to preach: Swabi held claim to one of Pakistan’s largest Afghan refugee camps; many who fled the Kunar province, particularly after indiscriminate Soviet carpet-bombing campaigns throughout the Kunar and Pech valleys in