Another category: the 1980ties jihad against the soviets. I recently had the chance to look at the famous “encyclopedia of jihad” – thousands and thousands of pages on weapons, security, intelligence, espionage, prisons etc.

Most of that are actually translations of US Army and other documents which the West had provided to the Mujahidin of the 1980s to combat the Soviets. But these translations have over time been altered and experience from the field aswell as “tales of soldiers and commanders” have entered these encyclopedias – all of it in Arabic. Now all of these documents are widely availible on the internet, mostly in the radical-islamistic arabic forums. Most of these documents bear the signature of the maktab al-khidmat, a “service office” created by – most prominently – Abdullah Azzam and Gulbiddin Hekmatyar. Together with bin Laden, these offices established lists of recruits, which were the basis for further jihad activity in Afghanistan – the rest of the story is more or less know. Please note that these documents and lists bearing thousands and thousands of names of people who underwent training and combat in Afghanistan are the origin of the name/label al-Qa’ida (the basis).

Its important and quite interesting to go through these documents, most of them are hardly readable as they are scanned to PDF from the original typewriter copies, but importand links can be found.

1. Typical for the maktab al-khidmat documents are that the first 4 or 5 pages look like the one shown: claiming the aims and giving out credits
2. Abdallah Azzam is often already mentioned as a shahid, so these documents were renewed after 1989 and bin Laden is mentioned as a big hotshot
3. Lots of information on military hardware and combat skills show up in the mu’askar al-battar, a military magazine of the saudi cells, published parallel to the voice of jihad.
4. Not surprising the “religious” ideology has hardly changed, but there are some changes
5. Not only the basis for the already mu’askar al-battar, but also several concepts, such as the concept of security and safety and “islamic” security perceptions are sometimes identical to the newly released encyyclopedias (such as the “ultimate security encyclopedia)

On page 5 of the document entitled “security and intelligence” the mujahidin thank the government of Pakistan. The Full translation of this page is as follows:

Thanking – God, exalted is he, says: “do not withhold the things of the people, that are their due” [7:85]

One who doesn’t thank the people, doesn’t thank god [hadith]

We thank the government of Pakistan, a government by the people for allowing the arab brethren to stay on their soil, despite of the heavy preassure from the enemies of God because of the victory of their brethren, the afgan-mujahidin.

We ask God may he protect this government [well, things changed today] against the tricks of its enemies and may it remain a reserve for Islam and the muslims – signed: maktab al-khidmat