than one might at first glance have thought. One consideration was
undoubtedly the need to support Muslims under attack by atheistic
communists. Another was the need to shore up the Sunni Muslim
resistance forces at a time when the possible spread of Iranian influ-
ence was greatly feared. However, the Sunni Islam of the Saudis,
shaped by the doctrines of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, differed
in significant ways from the practices of the Afghan Sunnis. In the
nineteenth century, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan had campaigned
against ‘Wahhabism’ (Noelle, 1995) and attempts by radical Arabs
to ‘educate’ their Afghan brethren on such matters as the proper
form of prayer caused great offence during the Soviet–Afghan war
(Gall, 1988: 48–51). As Dupree put it: ‘The Saudis have spent
megabucks among the refugees and resistance fighters in attempts
to gain converts for their ultra-conservative, reformist brand of
Islam, but with little success’ (Dupree, 1989: 44).
Apart from direct involvement of Arab governments, Arab influ-
ence was felt in two other ways. First, a large number of reli-
giously minded Arabs found the Afghan theatre an appropriate one
in which to give voice to their pan-Islamist ideas: notable among
these were the Palestinian Dr Abdullah Azzam, killed in a car
bombing in Peshawar in November 1989 (Rubin, 1997a: 189–90);
and the Saudi Osama Bin Laden, whose militance had taken him to
a number of different countries (Davis, 1993b: 329; Dekmejian,
1994: 641). It would be a considerable exaggeration to paint the
Arabs who served in Afghanistan as constituting a coherent bloc:
as the late Anthony Hyman observed, ‘There is no Arab or Islamic
“International”, along the lines of a Comintern, for example’
(Hyman, 1994: 86). However, they tended to be extreme in their
views, and the majority ended up attached either to Hekmatyar’s
Hezb, or Sayyaf’s party: a number of massacres were credibly
blamed on such Arab volunteers. Afghans tended to refer to these
volunteers either as Wahhabis or as ‘Ikhwani’, after the radical
Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Second, ‘private’
Arab organisations became involved in providing humanitarian
relief both inside Afghanistan and to refugees in Pakistan, often in
ways which blurred what boundary there is between humanitarian
82 The Afghanistan Wars