Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

Ustad Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (/ ɑːbˈduːl rəˈsuːl saɪˈjɑːf /; Pashtu : عبد رب الرسول سياف, born in 1946 in the Paghman Valley, Afghanistan ) is a former mujahideen and currently a politician. In the 1980s he fought against the government under the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan by leading the radical Islamist splinter group Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan (Tanzim-e Dahwat-e Islami-ye Afghanistan), of which he is still chairman today. His current Secretary General Maiwand Safa also fought alongside him against the regime.

During the war he received support from the Arab side and was able to mobilize volunteers from the Arab region for his troops. It is also said to have been Sayyaf who offered shelter to Osama bin Laden in the city of Jalabad (Afghanistan) in 1996 after he was expelled from the country by the otherwise sympathetic Sudanese regime under pressure from the United States , Saudi Arabia and Egypt .

In 2005, Sayyaf's Union was transformed into an official party, now under the name Islamic Daʿwa Organization Afghanistan . Despite his ties to militant groups such as al-Qaeda, he was seen as a member of the hostile National Islamic United Front for the Rescue of Afghanistan . Sayyaf was also accused of deliberately assisting the two suicide bombers who killed the association's leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud , in a bomb attack two days before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks .

Life

Sayyaf is an ethnic Pashtun , speaks fluent Arabic and has a degree in religion from Kabul University and a Masters from the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He is described as a "heavy, strong man with smooth skin and a thick, gray beard", is about 1.91 m tall and weighs 110 kg. "Usually he wears a white skull cap or a large turban and the typical salwar kamiz , a tunic with wide trousers."

Sayyaf was a member of the Afghan Muslim Brotherhood , a Sunni - Islamist movement whose branch in Afghanistan was founded in 1969 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Dr. Burhanuddin Rabbani was founded. Ustad (Professor) Abdul was a professor in the Faculty of Islamic Law at the University of Kabul until 1973, when he and the two founders planned to overthrow the then President Daoud Khan . However, the coup failed and he was forced to flee to Pakistan ; on his return to Afghanistan he was arrested.

Soviet times and friendship with bin Laden

Sayyaf (left) in 1984 as a commander of the Afghan mujahideen

Imprisoned by the People's Democratic Party in Afghanistan in April 1978, he was liberated under controversial circumstances by the party's second leader, Hafizullah Amin , who happened to be a distant relative of Sayyaf. After his arrest in Peshawar in 1980, after the actual Soviet interference, he was nevertheless recognized by the Pakistani as the leader of the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan , a coalition of several parties that fought the Soviet Union and the state troops of Afghanistan. The union soon collapsed and Sayyaf kept the name for his own group.

Sayyaf fought against Soviet forces occupying parts of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and was generously supported and favored by Saudi Arabia, apparently due to its religious resemblance to the Wahhabi royal family and its excellent knowledge of Arabic. During the jihad against the Soviet Union and its Afghan allies, a close friendship was formed with Osama bin Laden. Together they created a network of training camps with bunkers in the Jalalabad region. In 1981 the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan was officially founded, and four years later a university in an Afghan refugee camp near Paschawar called Dawa'a al-Jidad (Call of Jihad), which was described as a “pre-eminent school for terrorism”. Ramzi Ahmde Yousef , who was behind the first attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, attended this school.

Despite his growing wealth, Sayyaf continued to live a spartan life, avoiding modern comforts such as mattresses or air conditioning; at the same time he found pleasure in a night game of tennis.

During the post-war period, he maintained the training camp and used it for military exercises and the indoctrination of new recruits by teaching them for conflicts with Islamic involvement such as those in Chechnya , Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the southern Philippines , where his name is the Abu Sayyaf group inspired, tried to inspire. Sayyaf Chalid Sheikh Mohammed , who would later become a high-ranking member of al-Qaida and mastermind of the 2001 attacks in New York, also trained and supervised in these camps .

War in Afghanistan (1989–1996)

After the forced resignation of the worn-out Soviet troops in 1989 and the overthrow of the regime under Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, Sayyaf's organization increasingly violated human rights, particularly through its involvement in notorious massacres and rampages against the Shiite Hazara of Kabul as a result of Operation Ashfar . In 1993, the splinter group was responsible for "repeated human slaughter" during the civil war when allied jihadists attacked civilians and the Shiite group Hezb-e Wahdat-e. Amnesty International reported that Sayyaf's forces were raging in the predominantly Shiite Tajik district of Kabul, slaughtering and raping residents and burning houses.

War in Afghanistan (1996-2001)

Sayyaf claimed then as now that he was an insulting opponent of the like-minded Taliban movement, which was the reason for joining the National Islamic United Front to Save Afghanistan , despite the religious and ideological similarities mentioned with groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He is said to have helped the assassins, who killed the Führer Massoud disguised as journalists with a bomb in their cameras, with the preparations.

Loja Jirga (2003)

In 2003 Sayyaf was elected as one of the 502 representatives of the constitutional Loya Jirga in Kabul and chaired one of the working groups. Originally, all delegates were to be randomly assigned to the ten working groups, but Sayyaf objected and suggested that delegates be divided among the groups to ensure an equal distribution of professional competence, origin, gender and other criteria. "Those who know the constitution, the ulamā , and the lawyers should be divided into different groups so that the results of the discussions and debates are positive and closer together," he explained.

Abdul Sayyaf's influence in Congress was further felt when his ally, Fazal Hadi Shinwari, was illegally appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Hamid Karzai because Fazal was over the age limit and trained only in religious law. Shinwari filled the Supreme Court with sympathetic mullahs who were executing Islamic law and called for Taliban-style punishment.

today

Sayyaf has been an influential parliamentarian since 2007 and has called for the pardon of former jihadists.

In the 2014 general election, he was his party's candidate for the presidency, gaining 7.04% of the vote in the first round, winning Kandahar Province .

Individual evidence

1. ^ John Pike: Ustad Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Retrieved November 5, 2018 . 
2. ↑ John Lee Anderson: The Lion's Grave = . Atlantic Books, London 2002, ISBN 1-84354-118-1 , pp. 224 (English).
3. ↑ Marcus Warren: Former bin Laden mentor warns the West . December 3, 2001, ISSN  0307-1235 ( telegraph.co.uk [accessed November 5, 2018]).
4. ↑ Michelle Shephard: Guantanamo's Child . Ed .: John Wiley & Sons. 2008.
5. ↑ Human Rights Watch (ed.): Afghanistan: Blood-stained hands - past atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan's legacy of impunity . New York 2005, ISBN 1-56432-334-X ( hrw.org [PDF; accessed November 6, 2018]).
6. ^ Phil Rees: A personal account. In: BBC.co.uk. December 2, 2001, accessed November 5, 2018 .