'Foreign Legion' of Muslims Taliban's toughest fighters
Estimated 12,000 from around world on Afghan front lines
Stewart Bell
National Post
DASHT-E QALA, AFGHANISTAN - At night on the front, when the shelling subsides and the temperature drops, the Northern Alliance soldiers leave their trenches to eat rice and beans and lay their sleeping bags in caves dug out of the hillsides. They switch on their radios and listen to the Taliban across the valley talking among themselves.
But often the Taliban radio chatter is in languages the rebels don't recognize -- Arabic, Urdu or Russian.
"I talk with them, but suddenly they start using their own language and I cannot understand," said a teenage rebel at the hilltop command post at Puza Pulkhumry, a heavy machine gun slung over his shoulder and a walkie-talkie in his hand.
The troops opposite are the Taliban "Foreign Legion" -- Muslims from surrounding Central Asian countries fighting what they believe is a holy war in defence of their radical religious beliefs.
About one-quarter of the soldiers protecting the ruling Taliban regime are non-Afghans. Most are Pakistani. But there are also brigades of Saudis, Chechens and Islamic guerrillas from western China and the neighbouring former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Filipinos and Indonesians are said to have joined the Taliban ranks, and a British citizen of Pakistani origin was captured by the Northern Alliance rebels. Pakistanis are among the prisoners of war being held in the military jail in Khojabhuddin, about 25 kilometres from the combat zone.
"They are the people of Osama bin Laden," complained Mullah Nazamudeen, a Muslim priest from the village of Imamsahib, overrun by the Taliban last year. He now lives in a crowded refugee camp where people sleep in tents made of sticks and yellow plastic bags that once contained food aid dropped by U.S. planes.
After the Taliban captured his village, Mr. Nazamudeen said, they burned homes, shot children and raped and killed women. He was beaten with a cable for telling his followers to resist the Taliban, but escaped with several women widowed in the killing spree. "A lot" of the invaders were Pakistanis and Arabs, he said. "They want to get Afghanistan."
U.S. B-52s returned to the skies over the front lines yesterday, targeting troops commanded by Juma Namangani, leader of an Islamic terrorist group from neighbouring Uzbekistan. His front-line bunkers are said to be manned by 2,000 Pakistanis and Arabs.
"The positions the Americans bombed, they are all foreign Taliban," said Baryali Khan, vice-minister of defence for the Northern Alliance. Foreign militants began converging in Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, who seized the country in 1979. Viewing Moscow's actions as an attack on Islam, the outsiders helped native mujahedeen guerrillas fight what they considered a jihad, or holy war.
Thousands of idealistic young Muslims from such countries as Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia fought alongside the Afghan mujahedeen and succeeded in expelling the Russians by 1989.
Many of the foreigners returned home to ignite radical Islamic terrorist movements in their own countries.
The foreign presence began to grow again in 1995, when the fundamentalist Taliban seized power in Kabul, making up what is sometimes called the "jihadi foreign legion." There are now 8,000 to 12,000 foreign combatants protecting the Taliban. The Taliban have an estimated 40,000 to 45,000 troops altogether.
"Today's foreign combatants are more numerous than before," according to a report published by Jane's World Armies. "They are also better organized, and in many cases better equipped with heavier weaponry ... Operating at the centre of a global network of radical Islamists, they are evidently ideologically more focused than their counterparts in the 1980s."
About 5,000 to 7,000 of the Taliban troops are Pakistanis, many of them ethnic Pashtuns, like the Taliban leadership.
They include youths recruited from religious schools in Pakistan and volunteers from militant Pakistani groups such as the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen.
The U.S.-led campaign to unseat the Taliban for safeguarding bin Laden, whose organization is blamed for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, may have swelled those numbers.
Thousands of armed Pakistanis were stopped at the border recently as they tried to enter Afghanistan to join the Taliban army.
Arabs account for up to 3,000 members of the Taliban armed forces, and that figure is said to have grown in recent months. Most are loyal to, and financed by, bin Laden, a Saudi. "Generally, Arab units are deployed in an infantry role armed with nothing heavier than rocket-propelled grenades, PK machine guns and mortars," the Jane's report said. "They are, however, widely recognized as currently the most aggressive and committed fighters in Taliban ranks."
Afghanistan has granted sanctuary not only to bin Laden but to virtually every radical Islamic terrorist movement in the world. There is at least one unit of Chechens -- veterans of the war against Russian forces in Chechnya -- said to be fighting near Mazar-e Sharif.
Northern Alliance rebels here like to point out that the United States is a newcomer to the war on terrorism declared in September by George W. Bush, the U.S. President. The rebels have been fighting terrorists in the Afghan hills for more than five years.
Because of their devotion to the cause, the foreigners often occupy the front-line Taliban positions. They are considered less likely than the Afghans to defect to the rebels and are frequently employed as battle police, ensuring that the less fanatical native Afghans do not desert.
But the tactic of employing foreign soldiers may yet backfire.
Rebel commanders said native Afghans within the Taliban have vowed that, once the Northern Alliance attacks, they will attack the Pakistanis and Arabs from the rear and defect to the rebels.
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