Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

MUJAHIDEEN • 451In May 1996 the factions of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and PresidentBurhanuddin Rabbani briefly settled their differences to allowHekmatyar to share power as prime minister. In reality, Hekmatyarused his own power to continue training Muslim militants in hisbases in Herat Province for Islamic militant campaigns elsewhere.Another rival, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, leader of the Wahhabi party,ran his own training camps for foreign Muslim militants. Due tothe unwillingness of the various factions to share power in the governmentand also due to the lack of discipline of their followers,some of whom began to rob and rape civilians with impunity, theAfghan Mujahideen gradually lost their legitimacy and ultimatelywere pushed aside by the Muslim seminary students known as theTaliban, who wanted to institute an Islamic theocratic state basedon Wahhabi principles.By 27 September 1996 the Taliban had seized control of Kabul andtwo-thirds of the country, leaving the northern third still under Mujahideencontrol. On 10 October 1996 General Abdul Rashid Dostamand Ahmad Shah Massoud set aside their differences to unify theirfactions against the Taliban. The Taliban and their Mujahideen rivalson 17 April 1998 agreed to set up a commission of religious scholarsto govern Afghanistan, but this agreement, like its many predecessors,fell through and fighting resumed. In 1999 Massoud and General Dostamquarreled with each other, weakening the remaining Mujahideenalliance in the northern part of the country still under their control.Effectively defeated by the Taliban, the remaining Mujahideen in thenorth stayed in power there thanks largely to Russian and Iranian aid.On 9 September 2001 Massoud was killed by suicide bombers posingas Arab journalists, sent apparently by Osama bin Laden. It is nowbelieved that this assassination was meant to strengthen the positionof the Taliban in Afghanistan prior to the World Trade Center andPentagon Attacks of September 11, 2001.2. Saziman-i Mujahideen-i Khalq-i Iran (MKO, aka MeK): ThePeople’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran is a nonstate Iranian revolutionarygroup that undertook armed struggle against the shah’sregime to establish an Islamic state. The MKO consisted mainly ofuniversity students who formed an offshoot from the Iran LiberationMovement, a group led by Mehdi Bazargan, which continued to existas a token opposition group in Iran until it was banned on 18 October1992.