In Search of the Lost Orient by Olivier Roy

Author:Olivier Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Chapter 14

JIHAD

Did you meet foreign jihadists who went to fight in Afghanistan?

Yes. They were both Salafists (partisans of a normative and literalist Islam) and jihadists (people for whom jihad was an individual religious duty, something that is refuted by the doctors of law). They were mostly Arabs, but one also saw Turks, Kurds, a few African Americans, and other converted Westerners. They had the honesty of real fanatics—they weren’t interested in seizing money, but rather tombs, which were accused of being part of a mortuary cult contrary to Islam, and foreigners.

We met our first “Arabs” in 1985. Generally, I walked a bit in front of the mujahideen group with which we were traveling. It was easy for me since my bag was usually being carried by a horse or by a young person in the group. As we were coming back from Panjshir via Nuristan, I came to the top of a pass from where I could see barreling toward us from the other direction a column of about four hundred men wearing Afghan berets, boots and military fatigues, and baggy beige pants. Each also had a brand-new Kalashnikov and a sleeping bag of a surprising blue color. They marched toward us in a column, each with the regulation space between the one in front and behind, like a real military unit—in other words, not all like Afghans who in general march in disorderly fashion. They filed past me without saying a word when all of a sudden one of them who saw me go by turned around and called out in French, “Hey, what are you doing here? Go back home, you kafir (infidel)!” He was Algerian. Relations were and would remain afterward very tense between the Westerners and the “Arabs” (who in some cases could be converted Westerners). In fact, they ordered the local Afghans to choose between them and us. Every precaution was thus taken to avoid meeting up with them.

But that story had an epilogue twenty years later in 2006 in London. At a conference about deradicalization, I found myself on a panel next to a tall, bearded, muscular Algerian. He said to me in Persian (he had forgotten his French), “I know you. We met somewhere in Afghanistan.” We tried to piece together our itineraries, but we weren’t absolutely certain we’d met before because I just couldn’t recall his face. But he swore he cussed out a Frenchman on a mountain pass while he was heading north in 1985. His name was Abdullah Anas, and he was the nephew of Abdullah Azzam, the founder of the movement that would become al-Qaeda. When Azzam was killed in 1989, the nephew ought to have become his successor, but he was edged out by Bin Laden. He eventually returned to Algeria and with other militants founded the Front islamique du salut (FIS, or Islamic Salvation Front). When that movement was put down by the army, he returned to Afghanistan to his friend Massoud. He took part in the capture of Kabul in May 1992.

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