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130 ~ TALIBANfight with the Mujaheddin. In the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood,the Saudi-based World Muslim League and Palestinian Islamic radicalsorganized the recruits and put them into contact with the Pakistanis. TheISI and Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami set up reception committees to welcome,house and train the arriving militants and then encouraged themto join the Mujaheddin groups, usually the Hizb-e-Islami. The funds forthis enterprise came directly from Saudi Intelligence. French scholar OlivierRoy describes it as 'a joint venture between the Saudis, the MuslimBrotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami, put together by the ISI'. 2Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamiccountries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia andthe Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the AfghanMujaheddin. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came tostudy in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia's military governmentbegan to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually morethan 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistanand Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.In camps near Peshawar and in Afghanistan, these radicals met eachother for the first time and studied, trained and fought together. It wasthe first opportunity for most of them to leam about Islamic movementsin other countries and they forged tactical and ideological links thatwould serve them well in the future. The camps became virtual universitiesfor future Islamic radicalism. None of the intelligence agenciesinvolved wanted to consider the consequences of bringing together thousandsof Islamic radicals from all over the world. 'What was more importantin the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the SovietEmpire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe andthe end of the Cold War?' said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US NationalSecurity Adviser. 3 American citizens only woke up to the consequenceswhen Afghanistan-trained Islamic militants blew up the World TradeCentre in New York in 1993, killing six people and injuring 1,000.'The war,' wrote Samuel Huntington, 'left behind an uneasy coaliticof Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters,training camps and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks ipersonal and organization relationships, a substantial amount of militaryequipment including 300 to 500 unaccounted-for Stinger missiles, and,most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over whhad been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories.' 4Most of these radicals speculated that if the Afghan jihad had defeatedone superpower, the Soviet Union, could they not also defeat the othersuperpower, the US and their own regimes? The logic of this argumentwas based on the simple premise that the Afghan jihad alone had broughtGLOBAL JIHAD: THE ARAB-AFGHANS AND OSAMA BIN LADEN ~ 131the Soviet state to its knees. The multiple internal reasons which led tothe collapse of the Soviet system, of which the jihad was only one, wereconveniently ignored. So while the USA saw the collapse of the Sovietstate as the failure of the communist system, many Muslims saw it solelyas a victory for Islam. For militants this belief was inspiring and deeplyevocative of the Muslim sweep across the world in the seventh andeighth centuries. A new Islamic Ummah, they argued, could be forged bythe sacrifices and blood of a new generation of martyrs and more suchvictories.Amongst these thousands of foreign recruits was a young Saudi studentOsama Bin Laden, the son of a Yemeni construction magnate MohammedBin Laden who was a close friend of the late King Faisal and whosecompany had become fabulously wealthy on the contracts to renovateand expand the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. The ISI had longwanted Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of htakhbarat, the Saudi IntelligenceService, to provide a Royal Prince to lead the Saudi contingent inorder to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad.Only poorer Saudis, students, taxi-drivers and Bedouin tribesmen had sofar arrived to fight. But no pampered Saudi Prince was ready to rough itout in the Afghan mountains. Bin Laden, although not a royal, was closeenough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudicontingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General Gul were to becomefirm friends and allies in a common cause.The centre for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of the World MuslimLeague and the Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar which was run byAbdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian whom Bin Laden had first metat university in Jeddah and revered as his leader. Azam and his two sonswere assassinated by a bomb blast in Peshawar in 1989. During the 1980sAzam had forged close links with Hikmetyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, theAfghan Islamic scholar, whom the Saudis had sent to Peshawar to promoteWahabbism. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab al Khidmator Services Centre which he created in 1984 to service the newrecruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations fromSaudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim Leagueand private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channelledthrough the Makhtab. A decade later the Makhtab would emerge at thecentre of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the WorldTrade Centre bombing and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in1998.Until he arrived in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's life had hardly beenmarked by anything extraordinary. He was bom around 1957, the 17thof 57 children sired by his Yemeni father and a Saudi mother, one ofMohammed Bin Laden's many wives. Bin Laden studied for a Masters