Word: mujahedin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kassem Rajavi was a tempting target. Not only was he the brother of Massoud Rajavi, leader of the largest and best-armed Iranian opposition force, the % People's Mujahedin, but he was the group's spokesman before the Geneva-based U.N. Commission on Human Rights, where he was known for his vehement denunciations of the Tehran regime. "For years he tickled the tiger," says Swiss investigating judge Roland Chatelain. "In the end the tiger...
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...
...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...
...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...
Abouhalima's training site was the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, where the major mujahedin parties had their headquarters and where more than 50 Arab relief agencies and unofficial groups had offices. The mujahedin received an estimated $3.5 billion in financial support from the CIA as well, which bankrolled training for the Muslim warriors in the use of explosives and modern weapons. Abouhalima settled in one of the many transit houses known as the House of Friends, where young Arabs were often crammed four to a room...