Word: islamists
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...Taliban hosts, because its airspace and military bases are essential to any effort to strike inside Afghanistan, and its intelligence may be required to actually find Bin Laden. But the government of the nuclear-armed Muslim nation is under tremendous domestic political pressure from its own sizable Islamist constituency to rescind its somewhat reluctant decision to support the U.S. campaign, and there are real concerns over whether General Parvez Musharraf's military government would ultimately survive the domestic political turmoil a full-blown war would almost certainly unleash...
...Taliban welcomed him as a hero of the anti-Soviet 'jihad' and a man who commanded both means and military expertise. Although their priorities were somewhat at odds - Bin Laden was waging a global ?jihad' against America; the Taliban was trying to build their Mediaeval Islamist state - the relationship between them became extremely close. One of Bin Laden's wives is the daughter of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and many of the Taliban's best troops have been trained in Bin Laden camps and are fiercely loyal to the Saudi terrorist. Harboring Bin Laden has frustrated the Taliban's efforts...
...odds. Pakistan had been a key U.S. regional ally in the Cold War, particularly during the Reagan administration's proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Its territory provided the staging ground and its intelligence service the conduit for billions of dollars of U.S. covert aid funneled to Islamist fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama Bin Laden, who were waging 'jihad' against the Soviet invaders...
...Soviet invasion. That made him a key player in an effort backed by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to funnel aid, equipment, training and volunteers to the Afghan mujahedeen. Many of the "Arab Afghans," as the volunteers became known, had been radical Islamist dissidents in their home countries, and their pro-Western governments were only too happy to ship them off to fight the Russians. But the 'jihad' experience forged unprecedented bonds among the world's radical Islamists, turning them in spirit and in direct combat experience into a single army of 'holy' warriors...
...with funds raised throughout the Arab world to maintain his "Al Qaida" ("The Base") organization, which began sending fighters to Bosnia, Chechnya and to Muslim insurgencies all over East Asia. Bin Laden also extended his reach by turning his camps into a terrorism college providing highly specialized training to Islamist fighters from all over the world...