Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

Islami and Harakat‐e Inqilab before, Ittihad‐e Islami failed to realize its lofty goals of
binding the different mujahidin factions together in one political organization. If Sayyaf
was disappointed he kept it to himself, and when Ittihad‐e Islami ceased to function as
a union, Sayyaf converted it into his own personal political party.
It is easy to imagine that these political parties coalesced relatively quickly once they
were declared by their respective leaders, but the primary sources tell a more complex
story. Urgent military necessity and the need to access money through official channels
helped to crystallize the various parties to a certain degree. But whereas all of the
parties would scramble to quickly achieve the proper status to secure international
funding, it is not clear how quickly their structures evolved. As explored below, some
of Khalis’s earliest military forays into Afghanistan had a disorganized and almost
desperate character because the system for distributing weapons and materiel in the
late 1970s was in a state of flux. By contrast, Hekmatyar and Rabbani both represent a
somewhat special case: they inherited a cadre of activists who were informed by their
political awakening within the Kabul Islamist movement.
Hekmatyar quickly turned Hizb‐e Islami into “a political party in the modern and
specifically Leninist sense,” 135 and although Rabbani never created such a centralized
organization, he benefited from the common political experience that many of his
commanders shared with one another. However, it is less clear whether Sayyaf’s
organization ever had such cohesion, 136 and there is relatively little information about
how effective the Sufi parties of Gailani and Mujaddidi were at transferring Sufi
spiritual networks directly into a chain of command for the mujahidin. Lastly, Khalis
apparently moved into Afghanistan to fight even before he formally declared the
creation of his political party. Although the primary source accounts have a clear
mythologizing element to their description of this first movement of Khalis’s group into
Afghanistan, the biographical narratives provide a unique window into this little‐
understood time.
which became the Ittihad‐e Islami. When it failed, he kept its name for his own party, and the rest is
history. See Muhammad (2007), 39–40.
135 Edwards (2002), 276.
136 Roy seems to argue that Sayyaf’s Ittihad‐e Islami barely functioned as a party at all; Sayyaf gave many
weapons to small and isolated groups with no overall political control or agenda, nor any meaningful
links between them. See Roy, 135–136.
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