But now he says that al-Qaeda’s jihad is un-Islamic, without explaining with reference to the Qur’an and the Sunnah why exactly that is so — which is what would need to be done if he hopes to dissuade young Muslims from joining the group. And now he has been granted political asylum in Britain, which apparently never saw a jihadi it didn’t like.
“Algerian who fought beside bin Laden: ‘I wanted to help Muslims,'” by Madeline Roache, Al Jazeera, February 19, 2019:
London, United Kingdom – Abdullah Anas sits upright, smiling and speaking clearly as he recalls his decision to join the “Afghan Arabs” during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
“I didn’t even know where Afghanistan was on the map,” he says. “I was a country boy from Algeria, all I knew is I wanted to help Muslims.”
For 10 years, Anas was one of the many Arabs who fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, alongside the future icons of al-Qaeda’s global war, including the late Abdullah Azzam, Anas’s father-in-law, and Osama bin Laden.
Anas later turned away from their movements, disagreeing with their political interpretations and plans for what they called a “global jihad”. He now lives in London, where he was granted political asylum.
In his new memoir, To the Mountains: My life in Jihad from Algeria to Afghanistan, written with investigative journalist Tam Hussein, Anas traces the rise of this so-called “global jihadism”, beginning with the networks formed during the Soviet-Afghan War.
Anas and Hussein spoke to Al Jazeera about the evolution of this fight and its role in the modern world.
Al Jazeera: Why did you decide to write this book?
Abdullah Anas: I want to challenge the myths and misconceptions around the Afghan jihad.
With my experience, I feel that it’s my responsibility to help anyone – laymen, imams, journalists, academics, politicians – understand the history of the Afghan jihad because it is misunderstood on all levels all over the world. Many people, especially the younger generation, believe jihad started with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in 9/11. This is not true.
I wrote to counter the false narratives that came about after 9/11, which depicted Afghanistan as the training ground for extremists.
After 2001, so-called “experts” cropped up claiming that thousands of foreign extremists had trained in camps in Afghanistan and were returning home to commit terrorism. In reality, there were about 100 Arab Afghans, committed fighters, at any one time.
Al Jazeera: What do you consider “jihad”?
Anas: Jihad essentially means “a morally just war”. It’s Islam’s martial tradition, with a moral and ethical framework.
It’s important to draw a distinction between jihadism – a modern concept that came about after 9/11 – and the original concept of jihad.
The only legitimate jihad was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when people fought against colonialism and showed immense moral courage. Everything that came after this, including … 9/11, was not jihad.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS, Boko Haram and other bloody organisations have destroyed this noble concept by committing countless horrific crimes and calling it jihad. I challenge any man to see what good has ever come from al-Qaeda.
Muslims are outraged by these groups that have distorted one of their most sacred concepts, and they are upset by the public’s lack of understanding about jihad. So, many people are understandably fearful, and the media hardly helps, only seeing jihad alongside criminals….
Al Jazeera: How would you characterise the roots of “global jihadism”?
Tam Hussein: The roots of global jihadism are not in Arab culture. They partly stem from an idea of the Afghan jihad, that has been distorted by political convulsions experienced throughout the Arab world in recent times.
The Afghan-Soviet war is a significant symbol in the Arab world because it marks a successful holy war against a foreign aggressor. Although jihad ended when the Soviets left in 1989 and Kabul fell in 1992, by the late 1990s and throughout the noughties, terrorist networks claimed their geneses from Afghanistan. In the noughties, one of the very first videos to go viral amongst jihadists was the beheading of a Russian soldier in Chechnya. This was loaded to jihadi websites and forums, which appropriated Afghan jihad symbols and conflated them with something they were not: global jihad.
I have encountered this conflation time and time again while working as a journalist in Syria, and covering major terror attacks in Europe.
For example, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Moroccan who joined the Syrian battalion and organised the 2015 Paris attacks, tried to emulate the Arab Afghans. He believed they had expelled the Russians from Afghanistan and established Islam, before the West and their allies destabilised the region with democracy. So, when Abaaoud saw Syrians calling for the same (democracy), he dragged their heads along the ground and denounced them as infidels.
Many others have gone to Syria, thinking they were taking part in a divinely sanctioned jihad when they were actually taking part in a grubby civil war between Islamist factions.
Al Jazeera: What attracts people to join “jihadism”?
Hussein: There are many complex reasons for this. A lot of people believe in the foundational myths of al-Qaeda that are historically inaccurate. Some people are intellectually immature, from broken families, they lack the education and the necessary critical tools let alone able to distinguish between sophistry and rhetoric….