here's an excerpt re Mujahedeen from a site about the history of Afghanistan
rte.ie
There was a tendency in the 1980s to view the Mujahedeen as a homogenous group, but of course that was not the case. Is that a fair interpretation?
The forces that fought the Russians and the Afghan army were made up of seven different guerrilla groups, of whom five were run by the Pakistanis. They were mainly Sunni Muslims, because most Afghans are Sunni Muslims. Two are run by the Iranians, who are the Shi'ites, who are about twenty or thirty per cent of the Afghan population. And there was always this rivalry between the Pakistanis and the Iranians. The Pakistanis thought the Iranian people weren't really fighting and Khomeni used to denounce the Pakistani groups. He said they were American Muslims, he called them "Islami-American", they are just American mercenaries - they are not really fighting for the emancipation of Afghanistan. So, between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, there was rivalry, but also between the Sunni groups themselves. And some were much more intent on monopolising power than others. You had a Mujahedeen leader like Gulbadin Hikmatyar, controlled and run by the Pakistanis for many years, and this is a man who made his name in the sixties throwing acid in the face of women students at Kabul University. This was his first great publicity stunt. And in a way he was true to type. He ran a very vicious campaign. He killed the leaders of other groups; he tried to monopolise relations with the Americans and, say, he was more effective. So when, in 1992, the Communist Government finally fell, long after the Soviets had withdrawn support by the way, they survived for three years after the Soviets had left much to everyone's surprise, when they fell in 1992, the Mujahedeen groups weren't able to form a stable government and a whole new round of fighting began. |
