Yassine El Guendouzi, a researcher in the field of terrorism and radicalization at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University.
Foreign Fighters Experience in Afghanistan
In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to defend its Communist proxy government in Kabul against a growing insurgency. As the Soviet presence in Afghanistan turned into a prolonged occupation, Peshawar, Pakistan, became a hub for organizing and mobilizing fighters across the border into Afghanistan. Facilitators such as Palestinian Islamist activist Abdullah Azzam, who had been publishing recruitment and teaching literature in Islamabad, moved to Peshawar to provide support and assistance to what became known as the Mujahideen movement.[1] The long paramilitary experience and extensive networks Azzam had gained from his Islamic education in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria gave him ideological and practical influence to mobilize foreign fighters against the Soviets.
Initially, the purpose of establishing al-Qaeda in 1988 in Afghanistan was to fight the Communists. At the time, al-Qaeda was a tiny organization of Arabs within a massive Afghan insurgency. By this point, the insurgency was dominated by Islamist groups collectively known as the Mujahideen, which had been created by Pakistan before the Soviet invasion and has received money and weapons from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its “Operation Cyclone” from the mid-1980s, channelled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The U.S., correctly, saw what the Soviets had done as a blatant act of aggression intended to spread Communist ideology, and intended to support the Afghans resisting this.[2] The ISI manipulated this process.
In Pakistan, a campaign was launched to encourage foreigners to travel to Afghanistan to join the jihad. The foreign fighters were from forty-three countries and the number who participated in the Afghan war between 1982 and 1992 reached 35,000.[3] Many of the Arab volunteers who travelled to Afghanistan with the help of Islamic charities based in the Arabian Peninsula considered themselves humanitarian workers, and often tried to keep out of sight and help Afghan refugees who were staying in Peshawar and Pakistan, after fleeing conflict zones.
At the same time, a significant number of Arabs joined in with the jihad against the Afghan Marxist regime and some of them later joined al-Qaeda. The Arabs in Afghanistan had a lot of external support from Muslims enraged by the Soviet conquest of the country. For instance, the Services Bureau (Maktab al-Khidamat) set up by Azzam was provided with nearly $600 million per year from the government of Saudi Arabia and wealthy individuals in the Kingdom, most infamously Osama bin Laden, who eventually went to Afghanistan himself.[4] Azzam and Bin Laden established the Services Bureau in Peshawar in 1984 and by 1986 had a network of offices fundraising and recruiting in the United States, the most prominent of which was the Kifah refugee center at the Al-Faruq Mosque on Atlantic Street in Brooklyn.[5]
After the departure of Soviet forces in February 1989 and especially after the collapse of the Communist government in Kabul in April 1992, most Arabs left Afghanistan: they had been there to fight a foreign occupier and the imposition of an alien, atheistic ideology on Afghanistan; that was now gone. The organization of Afghanistan’s affairs after Communism was for Afghans; there was little justification for foreigners to remain behind. The Mujahideen had also fallen into civil war among themselves, demoralizing the Arabs about their sense of mission. Some of them returned to their countries of origin, where they either demobilized or joined local entities that—in Algeria and Egypt, most notably—then launched Islamist revolts against the states in the 1990s.
A smaller subset of the “Afghan Arabs” turned global, wanting to expand the scope of their operations to include Islamic jihad in places like Israel and Kashmir. There were a number of these small groups, but by the mid-1990s they had all been overshadowed and/or drawn into al-Qaeda’s orbit. The nucleus of “Afghan Arabs” who created al-Qaeda would conduct or inspire terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, and many other conflict zones.[6] At the end of this road was the atrocity of 11 September 2001, which led to the downfall of the Taliban regime that had sheltered al-Qaeda.
The spread of al-Qaeda’s network and its ideology was a fact of life when civil war erupted in Syria in 2011. Appalled by the scenes of atrocities from a Syrian regime dominated by Alawis against a mostly Sunni Muslim rebellion, volunteers from various countries in the Middle East and North Africa felt compelled to come to the aid of their “Muslim brothers”. Many, perhaps most, of the fighters in this first wave were not Islamic extremists, and joined with the more nationalist “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) rebel groups. But as the violence intensified, and Iran overtly intervened through its sectarian Hezbollah militia at Qusayr in 2013, the situation was radicalized, and the initially small presence of al-Qaeda-linked groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic State (ISIS), burgeoned.[7]
The Future of Foreign Fighters in Ukraine: A Recurrence of the Afghan Experience?
The jihadist phenomenon with the “Afghan Arabs” was not a transient phenomenon. It did not end with the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan. The Arab fighters who came from around the world gained combat experience and forged networks that became a source of concern in their home countries and later in the world, as these wandering extremists joined the war in Bosnia as Yugoslavia collapsed, and thereafter spread to Chechnya, Algeria, and many other places in the Middle East region.
The war in Ukraine could constitutes ground zero for the recurrence of a similar experience to what happened in Afghanistan. There is an established far-Right presence in the country and with the new dynamics after the Russian invasion there is much talk of foreign individuals from all over the world joining the Ukrainian government’s resistance efforts. Kyiv has even announced the formation of an international legion.[8]
Dozens of Americans, Canadians, and other foreigners are already trying to take up arms. It is estimated that more than 17,000 foreign fighters from different countries have joined one or other of the armed parties in the conflict in Ukraine.[9] The war in Ukraine differs from jihadi conflicts, but it raises some issues when considering the role of any future foreign fighters. This claim corresponds to a wider trend in the academic debate, with scholars increasingly shifting their attention away from jihadism towards such an alleged extreme-Right-wing wave of terrorism.[10] In Ukraine, this argument has a firmer footing than elsewhere.
The Ukraine crisis has sparked a wave of activism among European far-Right militia leaders, who have resorted to collecting money and recruiting fighters online, through Paypal and various cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron). On 25 February, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, far-Right militias in France and Finland urged their supporters to take part in the fight to defend Ukraine. Still, it is important to get the scale of this problem correct: the presence of the extreme-Right is limited to specific organizations, most notably the Popular Front and the Radical Party, neither of which has a single seat in the Ukrainian Parliament.[11]
The Azov Battalion, which falls under the Ukrainian National Guard and its political wing, the National Legion party, are the most visible manifestation of the far-Right problem in Ukraine. Azov is a formal part of the state security apparatus and has contributed to the training of civilians to take up arms against Russia. The leader of the Azov battalion’s political wing called for a “full mobilization” of the group, and directed volunteers toward online recruitment resources. SITE Administrator Rita Katz reported in late February that many neo-Nazi and far-Right nationalist groups across Europe and North America have expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in fighting against the Russians so that they may gain combat experience. There is a fear that once these extremists have acquired this training, they will take it back home to Western states, where it will be put to use in terrorist attacks and efforts to provoke civil conflict as part of the far-Right’s apocalyptic belief in the need to destroy civilization before their racialized project can be realized.[12]
European Eye on Radicalization aims to publish a diversity of perspectives and as such does not endorse the opinions expressed by contributors. The views expressed in this article represent the author alone.
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References
[1] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Foreign Terrorist Fighters A Guide to Judicial Training Institutes in MENA Countries, 1st Edition, Vienna, 2021.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, Wikipedia, March 9, 2022 https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B8%D9%8A%D9%85_%D8%A7%D9%8 4%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A9
[4] International Crisis Group Working to Prevent Conflict Worldwide, On 9/11 in Jordan:
Dealing with Islamic Jihadism. Report N43. 2005
[5] Ibid.
[6] Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Bram Peeters, Fickle Foreign Fighters? A Cross-Case Analysis of Seven Muslim Foreign Fighter Mobilisations (1980-2015). ICCT Research Paper, 2015.
[7] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Foreign Terrorist Fighters A Guide to Judicial Training Institutes in MENA Countries, 1st Edition, Vienna, 2021.
[8] Ukraine’s Government Opens Website To Recruit Foreigners To ‘International Legion’, Radio Free Europe Journal, March 05, 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-recruiting- foreign-fighters/31737766.html
[9] Gijs Weijenberg & Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn, The Forgotten Front: Dutch Fighters in Ukraine, Research paper, 2021, https://icct.nl/publication/the-forgotten-front-dutch-fighters- in-ukraine/
[10] Ibid.
[11] Far-Right Militias in Europe Plan to Confront Russian Forces, Planet concerns, 2022, https://planetconcerns.com/far-right-militias-in-europe-plan-to-confront-russian-forces/
[12] Annelies Pauwels, Contemporary manifestations of violent right-wing extremism in the EU: An overview of P/CVE practices, Radicalisation Awareness Network, Research paper, 2021.
