'Afghan Arabs' Said to Lead Taliban's Fight
"The Arabs are the best fighters they have," said Anwar Sher, a retired
Pakistani general with longstanding influence on Pakistan's intelligence
officers and Afghan military commanders. "A group of 30 of them can
engage a battalion of 1,000. They will kill 100 before they take a loss."
"The Arab fighters cannot be bought," he said. "Most of the Taliban
commanders can."
By TIM WEINER
From The New York Times
November 10, 2001
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 9 —
Foreign fighters allied with Osama bin
Laden and trained in Afghan camps are
spearheading the Taliban's resistance to
American and allied attacks, according to
military and intelligence officials in Pakistan
and the United States.
The "Afghan Arabs," as the foreigners are
called, are proving crucial to the survival of
the Taliban, whose leaders are former
religious students with limited military
expertise. The American and Pakistani
officials say the foreigners taking leading
roles in military and internal security and —
unlike their Afghan cohorts — cannot be
bribed into defecting or swayed to
surrender.
"The Arabs are the best fighters they have," said Anwar Sher, a retired
Pakistani general with longstanding influence on Pakistan's intelligence
officers and Afghan military commanders. "A group of 30 of them can
engage a battalion of 1,000. They will kill 100 before they take a loss."
"The Arab fighters cannot be bought," he said. "Most of the Taliban
commanders can."
The discipline and expertise of the Afghan Arabs — estimated to number in
the low thousands altogether — have compelled the Taliban to give them
tasks including the dusk-to-dawn defense of cities, counterintelligence work
against American allies trying to build resistance forces against the Taliban
and, according to several Pakistani intelligence officials, the planning and
execution of commando raids against any American forces that might be
based in Afghanistan.
Some of the foreign fighters have taken frontline positions to defend Kabul,
the Afghan capital, and Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is
headquarters for the Taliban. Others are mobilizing against the Northern
Alliance forces trying to take and hold the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the officials
said.
They also have taken command positions in the former Afghan Army's 055
Brigade, which has tanks, armored personnel carriers and well-organized
commando troops — one of the few Taliban military assets that resembles
an army.
Aid workers now in Pakistan also identify the Afghan Arabs as the men who
have attacked United Nations operations and offices in Kandahar, the
eastern city of Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and other towns. The foreign
fighters assaulted Afghans working for the United Nations, stole Land
Cruisers and trucks and took hundreds of tons of wheat flour destined for
destitute Afghans, the aid workers said.
One Afghan working for a United Nations relief agency described being spat
on and threatened by several armed Arabs outside the main United Nations
compound in Kabul hours after the first American bombing raids began Oct.
8.
"The Arabs are the ones you have to worry about most," he said. "They will
kill you in a moment if they see any sign that you are resisting."
The core commanders of the Taliban also depend in part on help from some
old enemies from the Soviet occupation. Their ranks now include former
Afghan Army and Air Force officers who sided with the Soviets, and former
members of the Khad, the Afghan intelligence service that colluded with the
KGB, Pakistani intelligence officials say.
"Ex-Communists, ex-Khad — everyone is in there, anyone who grew a
beard qualified," said Naseerullah Babar, a former Pakistani interior minister
and retired Army general who supported the Taliban in their rise to power.
But the Taliban have placed their greatest trust in the Afghan Arabs, the
foreign fighters from Islamic nations who first began gathering in the 1980's
to help repel the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, according to American and
Pakistani officials.
"The Arabs first came here, encouraged by everyone, including the United
States," in the 1980's, said General Sher, who had a hand in creating the
Afghan rebel force that forced the Soviets to withdraw in 1989 after a
decade of tenuous occupation that cost at least 14,000 Soviet soldiers' lives.
The Pakistanis also helped shape the Taliban, who rose from the political
chaos the former rebels created in the 1990's as they split into opposing
factions and continued fighting.
Most of the Arabs stayed on in Afghanistan, General Sher said. "Some got
married. Many were not wanted in their own countries. Many have gathered
around Osama bin Laden. He has been pumped up by them, especially those
who joined him from Egypt. And he in turn has provided a lot of support for
the Taliban — 400 double-cabin vehicles to improve their mobility, money
when they needed it."
While Mr. bin Laden has no formal military training, American and Pakistani
officials say he and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a leader of the
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, have now integrated their mainly Arab fighters into
the Taliban's military leadership to the point where the two are becoming
indistinguishable to American military strategists.
"The bin Laden-Zawahiri influence on the Taliban is pretty profound," said a
Western diplomat closely following the war in Afghanistan. "Unless they have
i.d. cards, it's really hard to say who's who."
The Afghan Arabs now fighting in Afghanistan come from at least a dozen
nations, not all of them Arabic, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria,
Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and from the ranks of Chechen rebels.
The best estimates of Western intelligence put their numbers at 5,000 or
more, "but these numbers are very difficult to pin down at the best of times,"
the Western diplomat said.
Though many of the Afghan Arabs first came here to Peshawar and over the
Khyber Pass to Afghanistan in the 1980's, many others came after the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989, when the rebels' victory over a superpower — the first
clear-cut military victory by an Islamic force over an infidel invader since the
early 17th century — gave Afghanistan an aura for would-be holy warriors
all over the world. That aura drew new recruits to the Afghan camps.
Veterans of the war also returned to their homelands in the 1990's, to try to
undermine or overthrow their own governments, and to attract new members
in radicalized mosques that functioned as a shadow consulates for the bin
Laden organization.
Then many returned, along with new recruits, to train alongside Mr. bin
Laden after he came back to Afghanistan in 1996. He brought a close circle
of followers with him, and attracted many new adherents from Algeria to the
Philippines in the late 1990's.
Some of the Afghan Arabs have been at least loosely allied with Mr. bin
Laden ever since he established his operations to support the Afghan rebels
in the mid-1980's. The most experienced among them have more
on-the-ground military experience in Afghanistan than some in the Taliban's
ranks who were teenagers, growing up in refugee camps in Pakistan, during
the Soviet war.
That factor adds to the respect shown them by the relatively inexperienced
Taliban military leadership.
"By any definition, the Taliban are no army," General Sher said. "An army
has a government to defend, a command structure, training and a proper
organization. What they have is weapons, a certain amount of know-how,
and the help of these very well-motivated Arabs."
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