Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
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...
...Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria and An-Nahda (Renaissance) in Tunisia are predominantly home grown. But the target governments, which have responded with repression, tend to charge that the violent onslaughts against them are inspired by Islamic centers abroad, engaged in a conspiracy of subversion. They most often cite Afghanistan, Iran and Sudan as the instigators and paymasters, and claim that the cadres in their local terrorist organizations can all be traced back to Afghanistan, where the 14-year war against Soviet invaders spawned an army of fanatics...
...where could he be sent? Egypt has put in only a quarter-hearted request for extradition; Mubarak would vastly prefer to have Abdel Rahman in a U.S. prison than on trial in Egypt, fluttering terrorists' hearts. The sheik's lawyers have talked about having him go voluntarily to Afghanistan, but no one wants to see him free in that hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. Mohammad Mehdi, head of an Arab-American organization, predicts that "the sheik is going to be our guest in America for many years." Fine by Washington, as long as his guesthouse has bars on the windows...