The frontier town of Peshawar had undergone significant changes over the months Anas had spent in Afghanistan. There were now many more Arab volunteers, their numbers swelling from a dozen, when Anas first arrived, to seventy or eighty by the beginning of 1985. Abdullah ‘Azzam had created a reception facility for the growing number of Arabs who were responding to his call. “While you were away,” ’Azzam explained to Anas, “Osama bin Ladin and I established the Services Office [Maktab al-khadamat] with a group of brothers. We established the Office to organize Arab participation in the Afghan Jihad.”⁴⁰ ’Azzam saw the Services Office as an independent center where Arab volunteers could meet and train without the risk of getting caught up in the political divisions of the Afghans. The Services Office had three objectives: to provide aid, to assist in reform, and to promote Islam. The office began to open schools and institutes inside Afghanistan, as well as among the swelling Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It provided aid to orphans and widows of the conflict. At the same time, it engaged in active propaganda to attract new recruits to the Afghan jihad. As part of its propaganda effort, the Services Office published a popular magazine, distributed across the Arab world, called al-Jihad. The pages of al-Jihad were replete with stories of heroism and sacrifice intended to inspire Muslims young and old. Leading Islamist thinkers contributed articles. Zaynab al-Ghazali, who had been imprisoned by Nasser for her Islamist activities in the 1960s, gave an interview to al-Jihad while on a visit to Pakistan. Now in her seventies, al-Ghazali had lost none of her zeal for the Islamist cause. “The time I spent in prison is not equal to one moment in the field of jihad in Afghanistan,” she told her interviewer. “I wish I could live with the women fighters in Afghanistan, and I ask God to give victory to the mujahidin and to forgive us [i.e., the international community of Islam] our shortcomings in bringing justice to Afghanistan.”⁴¹ Al-Ghazali idealized the Afghan jihad as ?a return to the age of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, a return to the era of the rightly guided Caliphs.? The magazine al-Jihad reinforced this heroic narrative of the Afghan war against the Soviets, publishing accounts of miracles reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad’s times. Among them were articles describing a group of mujahidin that killed 700 Soviets, losing only seven of their own men to martyrdom; a young man who single-handedly shot down five Soviet aircraft; even flocks of heavenly birds that created an avian curtain shielding mujahidin from the enemy. The magazine sought to convince readers of divine intervention, in which God rewarded faith with victory against impossible odds. Abdullah Anas was a pragmatist, however, and he’d been on the ground in Afghanistan. There were no miracles in his own dry-eyed account of the war. He returned to Mazar-e Sharif in 1985, where he served under the commander of Jamiat-e Islami forces in the northern Panjshir Valley region, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was a born leader, a charismatic guerrilla commander in the mold of Che Guevara. He regularly withdrew with his forces to the forbidding terrain of the Hindu Kush, creating bases in the deep mountain caves where he could withstand weeks of punishing bombardment, only to emerge from the rubble to inflict heavy casualties on Soviet forces. Yet his men suffered too. On one occasion, Massoud was retreating through a narrow valley with one of his units when they were surprised by Soviet rocket fire. “In less than five minutes, more than ten of our men fell as martyrs,” Anas recalled. “It was an unimaginable sight.”⁴² Anas described another battle, in which Massoud led 300 of his men (including fifteen Arab volunteers) to victory over the Soviets. The engagement lasted a full day and night, and Massoud suffered eighteen dead (including four Arabs) and many more wounded.⁴³ The Afghan mujahidin and their Arab supporters fought a desperate and ultimately successful battle against superior forces. A decade of occupation had proven very costly to the Soviet Union in men and materiel. At least 15,000 Red Army soldiers died in Afghanistan, and 50,000 were wounded in action. The Afghan resistance managed to shoot down over 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters with antiaircraft missiles provided by the United States. By the end of 1988, the Soviets came to recognize that they could not impose their will on Afghanistan with an invasion army of 100,000 men. The Kremlin decided to cut its losses and withdraw. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet units withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet this great victory of Muslim arms over a nuclear superpower was ultimately a disappointment for the men who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan. The Afghan resistance’s victory over the Soviets did not lead to the ultimate Islamist objective—the creation of an Islamic state. Once the Soviet enemy was outside their frontiers, the Afghan factions turned against each other in a power struggle that quickly degenerated into civil war. Despite Abdullah ’Azzam’s best efforts, many Arab volunteers divided along Afghan factional lines, taking sides with the party they knew. Others chose to leave Afghanistan. The violent turf battles between rival warlords did not constitute jihad, and they had no wish to fight fellow Muslims. The Arab volunteers did not make much of an impact in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. In retrospect, Abdullah Anas declared that the Arab contribution to the Afghan war amounted to no more than “a drop in the ocean.” The group of volunteers who came to be known as the “Afghan Arabs” probably never exceeded a maximum of two thousand men, and of those, “only a very small proportion entered Afghanistan and took part in the fighting with the mujahidin,” Anas claimed. The remainder stayed in Peshawar and volunteered their services “as doctors and drivers, cooks and accountants and engineers.”⁴⁴ Yet the Afghan jihad had an enduring influence over the Arab world. Many of those who answered the call to jihad returned to their native lands intent on realizing the ideal Islamic order that had eluded them in Afghanistan. Anas estimated some 300 Algerian volunteers served in Afghanistan; many of them would return home to play an active part in a new Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (more commonly known by the French acronym, the FIS). Others gathered around Osama bin Ladin, who established a rival institution to Abdullah ’Azzam’s Services Office. Bin Ladin called his new organization “the Base,” but it has come to be better known by its Arabic name, al-Qaida. Some of the Arabs who served with Anas in the Panjshir Valley chose to remain in Pakistan and became founding members of al-Qaida. The man who inspired the Arab Afghans was himself laid to rest in Pakistan. Abdullah ‘Azzam was killed on November 24, 1989, with two of his sons when a car bomb detonated as they approached a mosque in Peshawar for Friday prayers. There have been many theories, none conclusive, about who might have ordered the killing of Abdullah ’Azzam: rival Afghan factions; the circle of Osama bin Ladin; even the Israelis, who saw ’Azzam as the spiritual leader of a new Palestinian Islamist movement called Hamas.

By December 1987, the people of Gaza had spent twenty years under Israeli occupation. The Gaza Strip is a narrow finger of coastland 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, then populated by about 625,000 Palestinians. The residents of Gaza, three-quarters of whom were refugees from those parts of Palestine conquered by the new state of Israel in 1948, had suffered great isolation between 1948 and 1967. Gazans were confined to their enclave by the Egyptian authorities and cut off from their lost homeland by the hostile frontier with Israel. With the Israeli occupation of 1967 came new opportunities for Gazans to cross into the rest of historic Palestine and meet the other Palestinians who had remained on the land?in the towns and cities of Israel and the occupied West Bank. Gaza also enjoyed something of an economic boom after 1967. Under the occupation, Gazans were able to secure jobs in Israel and moved back and forth across the border with relative ease. Israelis shopped in Gaza to take advantage of tax-free prices. In many ways, life for the residents of Gaza had improved under Israeli rule. Yet no people is happy under occupation, and the Palestinians aspired to independence in their own land. But their hopes for deliverance by the other Arab states were dashed when Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and their hopes for liberation at the hands of the PLO collapsed after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon dispersed Palestinian fighting units across the Arab world. Increasingly, over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinians within Gaza and the West Bank began to confront the occupation themselves. The Israeli government recorded an escalation of “illegal acts” in the West Bank alone, rising from 656 “disturbances” in 1977 to 1,556 in 1981 and 2,663 in 1984.⁴⁵ Resistance within the occupied territory provoked heavy Israeli reprisals: mass arrests, intimidation, torture, humiliation. A proud people, the Palestinians found the humiliation hardest to bear. The loss of dignity and self-respect was compounded by the knowledge that their occupier saw them, in the words of the Islamist intellectual Azzam Tamimi, as “sub-human and not worthy of respect.”⁴⁶ Worse yet, Palestinians felt complicit in their own subjugation through their cooperation with the Israeli occupation. The fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were taking jobs in Israel and attracting Israeli customers to their shops implicated them in the occupation. Given that the Israelis were engaged in land confiscation and settlement building on occupied Palestinian land, cooperation with the Israelis felt more like collaboration. As the Palestinian scholar and activist Sari Nusseibeh explained, “The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble our anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable.”⁴⁷ The explosion finally came in December 1987, sparked by a traffic accident near the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza. On December 8 an Israeli army truck drove into two minivans carrying Palestinian workers home from Israel, killing four and wounding seven. Rumors spread throughout the Palestinian community that the killing was deliberate, raising tension in the territories. The funerals were held the next day and were followed by major demonstrations, which Israel troops dispersed with live fire, killing demonstrators. The killings on December 9 sparked riots that spread like wildfire across Gaza and into the West Bank, rapidly transforming into a popular uprising against twenty years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians called their movement the “Intifada,” an Arabic word that means both an uprising and a dusting off, as though the Palestinians were shaking off the decades of accumulated humiliation through direct confrontation with the occupation. The Intifada began as an uncoordinated series of confrontations with the Israeli authorities. The demonstrators ruled out the use of weapons and declared their movement nonviolent, stone-throwing notwithstanding. The Israeli authorities responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Israeli forces killed twenty-two demonstrators before the end of December 1987. Instead of quelling the violence, Israeli repression only served to accelerate the cycle of ad hoc protests and confrontations. In the opening weeks of the Intifada, there was no central leadership. Instead, the movement developed through a series of spontaneous demonstrations across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Sari Nusseibeh recalled, it was a grass-roots movement in which “every demonstrator did what he thought best, and the more established leaders raced to catch up with him.”⁴⁸