Mujahideen

Name and concept

'Mujahideen' is the plural of the Arabic mujahid, one who wages struggle (jihad) for the sake of Islam. It began as a religious designation rather than the proper name of an organization; in Afghanistan it became the name for the armed units that fought the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government that took power in the April 1978 revolution and the Soviet Union that backed it. The mujahideen fought both: the PDPA took power in the 1978 Saur Revolution, and the Soviet Union sent troops in 1979 to support that government.

Formation and organization

Fighters began to gather in eastern Afghanistan in the fall of 1978 and the situation escalated into open rebellion by early 1979, but some organizations predated that: Jamiat-e Islami (1972) and Hezb-e Islami (1976) took part in the 1975 Panjshir Valley and Laghman uprisings and carried out acid attacks on unveiled women. In March 1979 the Herat mutiny saw whole units defect, and in the first half of that year Sibghatullah Mojaddedi founded the Afghan National Liberation Front, Sayyed Ahmad Gailani the National Islamic Front, and Mawlawi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi the Revolutionary Islamic Movement. After the Soviet intervention of December 1979 resistance spread across social, religious and ethnic lines, and following the 1980 exodus of refugees to Pakistan as many as eighty-odd resistance groups are recorded as having formed in Peshawar alone.

The mujahideen had no single command. Their basic unit was the guerrilla band, divided along geographical, party, ethnic, sectarian and tribal lines, and a dual structure emerged: field commanders operating in their own localities below party leaderships based abroad. The war was therefore fought in substance by field commanders, while foreign dealings and the distribution of money were controlled by the parties that mediated external aid. In August 1979 four organizations in Peshawar formed a coalition aiming at an Islamic republic, and loya jirgas in February and May 1980 set up an Islamic National Revolutionary Council. The factions divided into a Sunni coalition based in Pakistan, the Peshawar Seven, and a smaller Shia coalition based in Iran, the Octet Party, alongside independent units that, as the Wikipedia passage puts it, referred to themselves as 'mujahideen'. The Peshawar Seven comprised four fundamentalist parties, including Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i Islami, Mohammad Yunus Khalis's Hezb-i Islami Khalis and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's Ittihad-i Islami, with three traditionalist parties led by Nabi Mohammadi, Mojaddedi and Gailani. Organization reflected a range of social bases: the leadership was mainly Pashtun, but Jamiat-e Islami's leadership and forces were largely Tajik, and in central Afghanistan Hazara Shia groups operated in succession without converging, merging into the Octet Party in 1987 and Hezb-e Wahdat in 1989.

Outside support

The United States backed the mujahideen through Operation Cyclone, Pakistan through its Inter-Services Intelligence, and Saudi Arabia and China were also major backers. Support from Britain, Egypt and West Germany was more covert, and private donations and charities from the Persian Gulf region accounted for a large share. Because all of this passed through Pakistan, Pakistan effectively decided who received weapons and money. The lion's share of ISI and CIA weapons went to Hekmatyar's Hizb-i Islami, while nationalist and left-wing resistance groups were cut off from funding. On 14 April 1988 Afghanistan and Pakistan signed the Geneva Accords, guaranteed by the United States and the Soviet Union, which committed the Soviet Union to withdraw all its troops by 15 February 1989.

Division and cross-fighting

The mujahideen were not a united movement. The parties were deeply divided along ethnic, ideological and personal lines, and the various attempts to build a united front all failed within a short time. In 1981 an observer concluded that the guerrillas were effectively fighting two civil wars: one against the regime and the Soviets and another among themselves, and Hekmatyar's Hizb-i Islami was most often cited as the initiator of clashes between mujahideen. One divisive question was the role of the exiled former king, Zahir Shah.

Infighting was not merely a matter of press reports but of actual combat. In September 1980 an attack by Hekmatyar's forces badly damaged the guerrilla band of the Afghan Mellat party, and in 1981 Massoud's forces drove the Settam-e-Melli out of the Panjshir Valley. Such rivalries extended to practices that treated schools and teachers as legitimate targets. Warlords also engaged in abuses against boys, keeping them in personal servitude and sexual exploitation to display power and status; the practice was reported across several forces prominent in the civil war, although it was outlawed with the death penalty under the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Territory held and the position of women

From the early 1980s the mujahideen controlled almost all of rural Afghanistan, and by 1987 most of the country. However, poor coordination and a shortage of heavy weapons prevented them from taking the major cities. In the areas they controlled the mujahideen built structures of control, including taxation, conscription and courts. In 1984 Ahmad Shah Massoud formed Shura-e Nazar as an offshoot of the Jamiat faction, in an attempt to dissuade infighting and develop a functioning proto-state; it was a military-political body with structures dealing with health and education in the north and north-east where it operated. On the mujahideen side too, secular schools were treated with hostility. The position of Afghan women in this period cannot be described in one direction: women were mobilized as cooks, laundresses and weapons smugglers and encouraged their male relatives to fight, but women who had enjoyed social benefits under the PDPA government were also among its supporters.

A turning point

From September 1986 the American-made Stinger portable surface-to-air missile, operated by the mujahideen, was considered by some to be a turning point in the war. The aircraft-loss figures, however, are based on mujahideen self-reporting of unknown reliability, and the Soviet side claimed the United States greatly exaggerated Soviet and Afghan government aircraft losses.

Stalemate and fragmentation after 1989

After the Soviet withdrawal of 1989, most of the mujahideen kept fighting the government of Mohammad Najibullah, which survived on Soviet military and humanitarian aid while the mujahideen continued to be funded from Washington and Islamabad. The mujahideen did not immediately bring Najibullah down. The civil war settled into a stalemate for three years. When Najibullah's government collapsed in 1992, the factions other than Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin agreed on a power-sharing arrangement, the Peshawar Accords, and took Kabul, but the divisions survived 'Victory Day' on 28 April 1992, leading to a civil war between the new government and factions that rebelled against it.

That fragmentation shaped what followed. Veterans of the war against the Soviets divided over the Taliban after it emerged in 1994: Yunus Khalis and Nabi Mohammadi supported it, while Rabbani and Sayyaf formed the Northern Alliance against it. In 1996 the Taliban took most of the country and established the Islamic Emirate; they were ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 but retook power in 2021. The two currents that split out of the mujahideen thus shaped Afghanistan's state 25 and 30 years later.