Afghan Conflict Gave Lift to Radical Wing of Islam

At 2:15 p.m. on Sept. 14, aboard the Croatian Airways flight from Amsterdam, a stout, round-faced man with a bushy beard and dreams of Islamic holy war in his head touched down in this Balkan city.

In his 39 years, Talaat Fouad Kassem’s extraordinary life had taken him from the poor south of his native Egypt to the anti-Communist struggle in Afghanistan, then to Europe. From the Croatian capital, where a trade fair was underway, he intended to journey overland to Bosnia-Herzegovina, there to link up with fellow Muslims fighting the Bosnian Serbs.

But something happened to Kassem on the way. “He made one trip too many,” a key U.S. official said.

After arriving in Zagreb, Kassem disappeared. Croatian officials claim to have no idea where he went. But U.S. sources say Kassem was spirited back to Egypt, where, as a founder of the radical Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group, he had been sentenced to hang in 1992 for trying to topple the regime and replace it with an Islamic state.

One of the four most wanted men in his homeland, Kassem is, or was, a leading Muslim zealot and revolutionary. He preached the violent overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government, characterizing it as a neocolonial stooge of the United States. Over the years, his most effective weapons were his words and his ability to justify violence and terror in the name of Islam.

“The first and greatest enemy is America, the second is capitalism,” followers in Denmark--where Kassem sought and obtained political asylum after being sentenced to hang in his home country--remember him saying. One Muslim resident of Copenhagen called him “a preacher . . . a great man.”

Vicars of Holy War

Such agitators, strategists and thinkers--vicars of Islamic holy war--were the necessary complement to the thousands of Muslims who set off in the early 1980s intending to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and to those who followed later, seeking military knowledge they could use elsewhere.

For the ideologues from Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and other countries, the Afghan conflict yielded, simultaneously, valuable experience in the arts of war and propaganda, a base to work from, useful contacts in Islamic communities throughout the world and an illustration of their violent credo at work.

“Practically, militarily, in intelligence gathering and in the spread of our message, we learned a lot” in Afghanistan, Kassem told Hisham Mubarak in an interview to be published in a forthcoming book, “Political Islam: Essays From Middle East Report.”

Afghanistan was also a welcome sanctuary for Muslim radicals from Egypt under threat of persecution or death at home, and it also met their “need for military training,” Kassem said. He was already on a radical path when he arrived at the Afghan resistance’s headquarters-in-exile in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1989. “Intellectually, there was no influence [on me],” he told Mubarak.

But it was different for other Muslims. The firsthand experience of this holy war, fought against the Soviet occupiers in 1979-89, had a profound, lasting effect on them.

“The Afghan jihad was a kind of personal vindication for us as Muslims, a kind of self-discovery, that they could be one, as one Muslim people, and that they could replicate . . . their past achievements,” said Tarik Jan, senior research fellow at the Islamabad-based Institute of Policy Studies, which is affiliated with Pakistan’s largest fundamentalist party.

In Afghanistan, Jan said, “people tasted jihad, and internalized it.”

For Muslims in other countries fighting what they held to be imperialism or oppression, the Afghan conflict showed the enormous power of religion as a motivator and mobilizer of the masses.

‘Faith Gives Rise to Morale’

Even Chechen independence leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev, a former Soviet bomber pilot and a product of decades of Marxist-Leninist atheist indoctrination, admitted to being persuaded by the Afghan example to make his cause as much a religious as a national one.

“Finally, I have arrived at a conclusion: It was the spirit, the morale of the Afghan people that made them strong. And it is faith that gives rise to high morale,” Dudayev said in an interview before his death at the hands of Russian troops this spring. “It is on the fundamental principles of Islam that the faith has been born that is capable of resisting any military might.”

In the ‘80s, young people throughout the Islamic world were galvanized by the spectacle of the Afghan moujahedeen--or “holy warriors”--taking on a superpower. In Algeria, men came home from the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, filled with the longing to fight in Afghanistan. Arabs from all countries were recruited for the conflict while visiting the holy places.

Myths spread among the believers of miracles on the battlefield in Afghanistan--of clouds of birds suddenly appearing to drive away strafing Soviet MIGs.

For many, Afghanistan not only revived the mystique of holy war and set an example to be followed--it also gave a decided boost to fanaticism.

“Jihad is important to Islam, but it is not everything; it is not the sum of the religion,” said Sohail Mahmood, professor of political science at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. “The prophet never said, ‘Leave your families and conquer the world.’ My neighbor leaves his wife and children to fight in Kashmir. What kind of religion is this?”

Holy war--probably Islam’s most controversial tenet and the one most feared by outsiders--is mentioned in the Koran, but it has rarely been invoked during Islam’s 13 1/2 centuries of existence. Traditionally, theologians have defined it as an armed action intended to extend Islam or defend it.

The Rules of Jihad

According to the Sunnah--the spoken and acted example of the prophet Muhammad and a work that is a crucial complement to the Koran--a jihad must end when order is restored. And it is impossible to undertake such a holy war against fellow Muslims.

However, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Islam has no single authority to interpret its scriptures and traditions and apply them to contemporary problems. So what constitutes a legitimate cause for a jihad can be debated.

In the view of more mainstream Muslims, fundamentalists such as Kassem have now hijacked a holy doctrine and are hypocritically exploiting it for their own ends.

“In the garb of jihad, you get the most reactionary elements, even the criminals of all societies,” Pakistani Sen. Abdur Rahim Khan Mandokhel said.

In Algeria, in part because of fallout from Afghanistan, the theologically unthinkable has come about--a holy war proclaimed against fellow Muslims.

When Algerian “Afghans” returned home, they greatly reinforced an interpretation of their faith known as “Hijara oua Takfir”--”Exile or Expiation.”

This revisionist movement, propounded by the most extreme followers of Egyptian fundamentalist cleric Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in prison during the term of Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1966, maintains that the modern nation-state is “kafir,” or impious, and that citizens who obey its tyrannical leaders are equally kafir. A jihad can, therefore, be waged against the whole lot, even in a country like Algeria that is 99% Muslim.

“It has never been seen before in Islam that a Muslim force has declared a jihad against another Muslim force,” Algerian sociologist Mahfoud Bennoune said.

For the apologists of violent struggle like Kassem, who said he obtained “direction” from Qutb’s writings, such warfare is the duty of a true Muslim.

In the maiden issue of an Islamic Group publication that Kassem supervised in Peshawar, the cover story was headlined, “Terror is a means to confront God’s enemies.”

Kassem also claimed personal credit for the orders to kill foreign tourists in his homeland and, in 1992, to assassinate Farag Foda, a prominent intellectual who wrote extensively against Islamic extremists.

While in Peshawar, Kassem helped set up a court that handed down death sentences against Egyptian leaders and well-known anti-fundamentalists.

In 1990, when Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman was deported from Egypt to Sudan, from where he eventually made his way to the United States, Kassem became the Islamic Group’s effective leader.

(Abdel Rahman, who has also called for violent struggle against Egypt’s government and the murder of President Mubarak on religious grounds, was sentenced to life in prison by a Manhattan federal court in January after being convicted of being part of a plot to wage a “war of urban terrorism” against the United States. Described as “spiritual leader” of the plotters, the cleric also played a part in the Afghan conflict: Both his sons fought in Afghanistan, he raised money in Egypt for the moujahedeen, and he visited Pakistan at least twice, in 1988 and 1990.)

As for Kassem, his life was altered in 1981, when he was an engineering student at a university in Minya in southern Egypt.

Though head of the student union and a member of an Islamic youth society, he was, at the time, a relatively minor figure.

Sadat Assassination

That changed decisively, though, in September of that year, when Anwar Sadat, then Egypt’s president, ordered the arrest of 1,500 Islamic activists, Kassem among them. It was the biggest sweep in modern Egyptian history.

The next month, Sadat was dead, gunned down by a small cell of Islamic extremists during a military parade in revenge for everything from making peace with Israel and allying Egypt with the United States to repressing Egyptians.

Though Kassem was in detention at the time, he was nonetheless charged with conspiring to kill Sadat--along with more than 300 others, including Abdel Rahman.

At the mass trial of Sadat’s accused murderers, where defendants were seated in a courtroom cage, Kassem was sentenced in March 1982 to seven years in prison. He escaped in 1989 and fled to Pakistan to join the network of Arab organizations supporting the Afghan jihad.

Kassem was one of the founders of the Islamic Group and one of the nine members of its majlis al shura, or executive board.

In Peshawar, the Wild West-like Pakistani border town that served as the command post of the Afghan resistance, he soon became his group’s effective spokesman and most visible leader.

Kassem set up Al Murabitoun (The Defenders), the Islamic Group’s first official publication.

For four years, he traveled in and out of Afghanistan, visiting camps that were training Egyptians for operations back home.

From its organizational base in Pakistan, the group, financed at least in part by Saudi supporters, waged deadly attacks on Egyptian police, politicians, intellectuals, and, eventually, foreign tourists.

Egyptian authorities assert that Kassem also plotted to kill Sadat’s successor, Mubarak.

At a trial in Alexandria in 1992, Kassem was sentenced to death in absentia, along with several other Afghan-trained Egyptians, for trying to overthrow the government.

Cairo put ever-tougher pressure on Pakistan to deport him. But Kassem managed to stay one step ahead.

When he went to Copenhagen to give a speech, he asked for political asylum. Egypt pressed the Danes for extradition, but because of the death sentence hovering over him, he was allowed to stay.

For a Muslim revolutionary, though, Scandinavia was too far from the action. Under the name of Ibrahim Jakob Ezit, Kassem applied for and received a Croatian visa from this Balkan country’s embassy in Brussels.

Ostensibly, he was going to Bosnia to write a book. But in Zagreb, he would be able to again plug into the Afghan vets’ network of fighters and relief organizations, which at the time were channeling moujahedeen, money and humanitarian assistance to the Bosnian Muslims.

Kassem never made it.

Suspect Disappears

The evening after his arrival in Zagreb, members of a Croatian army unit dressed like police burst into the apartment of a Zagreb resident who was working as Kassem’s interpreter and demanded to know where the stranger with the beard was, the interpreter said later.

Kassem, sleeping in a nearby apartment, was found and bundled off. With extraordinary dispatch, he was hauled before a magistrate who judged him guilty of breaking Croatia’s Law on the Movement and Sojourn of Foreigners.

He was fined $30 and ordered expelled within 24 hours.

According to a U.S. official, American intelligence had spotted Kassem and tipped off the Egyptians. He then “disappeared.”

Asked for news about Kassem, a police spokesman in Cairo said recently: “There is no information.”

But he is widely assumed, even by the FBI, to be undergoing interrogation and torture in Egypt.

“Either way, he’s a dead man,” a key U.S. source said.

The month after Kassem’s disappearance, in the Croatian port city of Rijeka, a car carrying plastic explosives blew up in front of the central police station, shattering windows on the ground floor and killing the driver.

Kassem’s comrades claimed responsibility.

“Croats, let Abu Talaat free before it is too late,” the Islamic Group demanded in a news release, threatening more “streams of blood.”

For Kassem’s comrades in arms, his apparent abduction was more than a crime--it was an insult to the faith.

“You did a misdeed to Islam embodied in my husband,” Amany Mahran, his wife and mother of their six children--including the youngest boy, Jihad--protested in an open letter to Croatian authorities from the family home in Copenhagen.

In Bosnia, another vicar of Islamic holy war, Sheik Enver Shaban, an Egyptian like Kassem who was serving as spiritual leader to the Bosnian moujahedeen, had been hoping to welcome his countryman.

“Surely, they hate Islam more than communism,” Shaban said scathingly of the West after Kassem’s disappearance.

While still in Denmark, Kassem said in an interview that the Islamic Group was keeping fighters in reserve in Afghanistan to be sent to Egypt “when the time is ripe.” Others, he said, had already gone there.

The Egyptian radical, who admitted to learning much as a result of the Afghan conflict, said the Islamic Group was “making ongoing preparations for a military coup” and trying to mobilize the masses to support it against potential foreign intervention.

Voicing his faith in “holy struggle,” Kassem talked about the policy of violent revolution on religious grounds adopted by the Islamic Group. He was speaking of a specific incident, but his words might well be those of any of the thousands of Islamic militants and fighters who have passed through Afghanistan and since gone on to wreak havoc elsewhere:

“The only way to express yourself in this world is through force, the only language that is understood.”

Dahlburg reported from Zagreb, Wright from Washington. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Shalazhi, Chechnya, and John Daniszewski in Cairo also contributed to this report.

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ISLAM

Islam is Arabic for “submission.” Muslim means “one who submits [to God].” There are about 1 billion Muslims, making Islam the world’s second most common religion, next to Christianity. Some facts about the faith:

HISTORY

Islam was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century. He began preaching in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, about AD 610. In 622, under threat of murder, he fled to Medina. Muslims date their lunar calendar from this year.

Muhammad and his followers later returned to convert Mecca to Islam and established a mosque there. They began an ambitious expansion that reached throughout the Middle East, North Africa and into Western Europe.

After Muhammad died, Abu Bakr became the caliph, or successor, and continued to expand the Muslim empire. In Western Europe, the spread was blocked by Charles Martel, who defeated the Muslims at the Battle of Poitiers, also called the Battle of Tours, in 732. Muhammad’s companions preserved his teachings and later compiled them into the Koran (meaning “recitations”), the faith’s holy book. Muslims consider the Koran to be God’s revelations to Mohammed.

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BELIEFS

The Five Pillars of Islam are the key duties required of Muslims. They are:

* Shahadah. Affirming there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.

* Salah. Praying five times each day.

* Zakah. Giving alms.

* Sawm. Fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

* Hajj. Making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

Muslims believe in the absolute unity and power of a just and merciful God, creator of the universe, who wants people to repent and purify themselves so that they can attain paradise after death. Muhammad is viewed as the last of the prophets, with Jesus and the Old Testament prophets as his predecessors.

The Koran forbids lying, stealing, adultery, murder, usury, games of chance and the consumption of pork and alcohol, among other strictures. The faith draws no distinction between the religious and temporal aspects of life. Thus, a Muslim state is by definition religious.

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ORGANIZATION

Islam has no offical clergy, no pope and no religious hierarchy; leadership varies by locality. Some major divisions in the faith:

* Sunni. Represent 85% to 95% of Muslims. Full name is ahl as-sunnah wa-l-ijma, or “people of the Sunnah [the custom of the prophet] and the consensus.”

* Shiites. Represent about 10% of Muslims. Derived from shi-at Ali, or “the party of Ali.” Unlike the Sunni, Shiites believe that a son-in-law of Muhammad named Ali ibn Abi Talib inherited spiritual leadership of the faith and passed it on to his descendants. There are also complex differences in theology.

* Sufism. Not a branch but a mystical movement within Islam. Adherents seek direct personal experience with God.

SOURCES: Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Britannica, World Book Encyclopedia.

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Resources

Still curious about Islam or Afghanistan? Here’s a sampler of books, community resources and Web sites:

Books:

* “Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan,” by Olivier Roy. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

* “Retreat From Kabul: How Diplomacy Got the Russians Out of Afghanistan,” by Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison. Oxford University Press, 1995.

* “Political Islam: Essays From Middle East Report,” edited by Joel Beinin and Joe Stork. University of California Press, 1995.

Community resources:

* Islamic Center of Southern California, 434 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles 90020. (213) 384-5783.

* Muslim Public Affairs Council. 3010 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90020. (213) 383-3443.

Web sites:

* Afghanistan Today.

https://frankenstein.

worldweb.net/afghan/

* Afghanistan News Service. https://fermat.stmarys-ca.edu/~twafa/

* Afghanistan--CIA Fact Book. https://www.odci.gov/cia/

publications/95fact/af.html