Mujahideen

The mujahideen were a loose alliance of Afghan traditionalists who in the late 1970s rebelled against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. The mujahideen overthrew the government in 1992 before being largely conquered themselves by the Taliban a few years later.

The mujahideen emerged in 1978, after the leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in a military coup. The PDPA allied itself with the Soviet Union and quickly began reshaping Afghan society along Marxist lines. The effort quickly provoked a backlash, as tribal leaders saw their authority threatened and many Muslims saw an effort to destroy Islam. By the end of 1978, rebellion had broken out, and by summer 1979, the mujahideen controlled much of the countryside.

In late December 1979, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan to defend the PDPA government. Although the Soviets initially tried to broker a compromise, the invasion threw more popular support behind the mujahideen. Roughly 6 million Afghans fled to the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Iran; once there, they established bases of operation from which to attack Soviet forces. The invasion also prompted countries hostile to the Soviet Union—including the United States, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Egypt—to support the mujahideen with arms and training. The United States alone spent more than $2 billion on weapons and supplies for the muja-hideen during the 1980s.

The mujahideen consisted of dozens of factions that had little in common besides wanting to rid Afghanistan of the Soviets and the PDPA government. Afghans of different ethnic groups and with different approaches to Islam found themselves in different factions, and each faction found different foreign backers. Among the various factions were Islamic fundamentalist groups, who were soon joined by fundamentalists from other countries. The Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden joined the mujahideen in the late 1970s or early 1980s. In the mid-1980s he helped found an organization that recruited thousands of people from around the world to come to Afghanistan and fight; this organization would ultimately become al Qaeda (“the Base”). By the end of the decade, Afghanistan was home to terrorist training camps for al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.

By the late 1980s, the war in Afghanistan had become extremely unpopular in the Soviet Union. In 1988, the Soviet Union, United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan reached an agreement ending all foreign intervention in Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union withdrew its forces the next year. The muja-hideen did not stop fighting, however. The 1988 agreement left the PDPA government in power, and both the United States and Soviet Union continued to send arms. In 1992 the mujahideen lay siege to the capital of Kabul, overthrowing the PDPA in April.

Following the overthrow of the PDPA, many of the foreign mujahideen returned to their home countries, establishing or joining Islamic terrorist groups. The Afghan mujahideen promptly began fighting among themselves, further decimating a country ravaged by decades of war. Two years after the fall of the PDPA, a new group, the Taliban, emerged, promising to rid the country of [Page 405]the mujahideen. The Taliban quickly swept through the country, seizing Kabul from a mujahideen faction in 1996.

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