"Whoever is against mujahideen is against Islam and they are the enemies of this country," former fighter Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (*), now an influential lawmaker, told the crowd of demonstrators. ... Youths later marched through the streets of the city, shouting "Death to the enemies of Afghanistan!" and "Death to America!".
(*) Abdul Rasul Sayyaf: According to the Wikipedia article: Abdul allegedly arranged the interview in which Ahmad Massoud was assassinated.
According to Global Security: Sayyaf, a Wahabi Muslim, had a close relationship with Osama bin Laden during the jihad against the Soviets.
BBC offers a photo and a personal account, from 2001: I ventured west to the district of Afshar, where block after block of shattered housing resembles the ruins of an ancient civilisation. In 1993, it was the site of repeated human butchery during fighting between a faction that adheres to the Shi'ite Muslim faith and followers of a Saudi backed Mujahideen leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Amnesty International reported that Sayyaf's forces rampaged through Afshar, murdering, raping and burning homes. Now Sayyaf's forces are back in Kabul, a key component of the Northern Alliance army.
In 2004, Foreign Affairs published Kathy Gannon's Afghanistan Unbound: In 1994, bitter fighting between competing warlords raged throughout Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city. It was a time marked by endless attacks, many of them on civilians. I saw one young boy raise his hand to catch a ball, only to have it sliced off at the wrist by a rocket. A 13-year-old girl, running home to retrieve blankets and clothes left behind by her fleeing family, stepped on a land mine, which exploded and blew off the bottom of her leg. All told, 50,000 Afghans -- most of them civilians -- died in the four-year fight for Kabul, and even more were maimed. In one particularly grisly attack, five women from the Hazara ethnic group were scalped. Their attackers were not Taliban; this was still two years before that radical Islamist militia took Kabul. The assailants were loyal instead to one of many warlords battling for control of the city: Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
It's interesting that, according to the Afghanistan Justice Project, Massoud was once Sayyaf's commander: The Afshar massacre and mass rape in Kabul by Abdul Rasul Sayy... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]
|