Word: mujahedin
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...anyone who has been clinging to the notion that America can win this war the easy way, the fate of Abdul Haq should serve as a powerful antidote. Few knew how to fight in the rugged Afghan steppes and summits better than Haq, a legendary mujahedin guerrilla who lost his right foot to a land mine while helping rout the Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords...
About 100 of the very best serve as bin Laden's personal security detail. Most are veterans of battles against regimes in their homelands or the mujahedin war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Primarily led by Egyptian and Saudi revolutionaries, Brigade 055 (the unit began as a Soviet-era Afghan-government outfit) also includes volunteers from Chechnya, Pakistan, Bosnia, China and Uzbekistan...
Haji Zaman spent years fighting as a mujahedin commander during the anti-Soviet war. But when the Taliban came to power, he scurried into exile in France. Now fortunes are shifting again, and Zaman has come back to the frontier city of Peshawar, Pakistan, to join others looking to grab power after the Taliban falls. Sitting in the shady, walled garden of his villa last week, Zaman said, "We don't need meetings and more meetings. Now we need practical action...
...topple the Taliban. But if Zaman's recent experience is any example, significant action is still a distant dream for those who hope to install the broad-based, multiethnic alternative everyone professes to want. It didn't take the death last week of Abdul Haq--America's favorite ex-mujahedin--to convince observers that the political campaign was a mess. Last week the evidence was all too clear in the relative safety of Peshawar...
...Qaeda had its origins in the long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah-the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam...