Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

Abu Salim massacre, in which prison guards killed some 1,200 prisoners after a revolt over
prison conditions. 60
All of the men interviewed for this report were in their late teens or early twenties when
they left Libya. Some of them were founding members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
(LIFG), discussed below. After leaving Libya, most were among a large group of Libyans
who went to Afghanistan around this time, where they joined other Libyans there fighting
with rebel groups, referred to broadly as “the mujahidin,” against Soviet military forces
and the Soviet-backed Afghan government. 61 The United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
and several other governments backed the Afghan rebels with covert funding, weapons,
and training for the fighters. 62 The Saudi government for example, contributed $350 to
$500 million per year for the mujahidin through a US government controlled Swiss bank
account. 63 “In Saudi Arabia, everyone was talking about the Afghan Jihad,” said Osmail
Omar Gebril al-Lwatty, one of the rendered Libyans who fought in Afghanistan. “They made
it so easy for us. There were camps where you could live normally and train, in Jalalabad
and Khost, then you went to Peshawar to get equipped.” 64
A well-known Palestinian cleric at the time, Abdullah Azzam, authored numerous statements
and texts, one of which was published as a book, considered by many to constitute
a fatwa (legal pronouncement), in which he argued that Muslims had a personal obligation
to defend Afghanistan against the Soviets. 65 “I believed the people in Afghanistan were
60 Human Rights Watch interview with Saadi, March 14, 2012; See also Tawil, Brothers in Arms, p. 181, n. 1 and these reports
for more information about the Abu Salim killings: Human Rights Watch, “Libya: June 1996 Killings at Abu Salim Prison,” June
28, 2006, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/libya2003.pdf; and Human Rights Watch, “Libya: Truth and Justice
Can’t Wait,” Dec. 12, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/libya1209web.pdf, p. 46.
61 Noman Benotman, a former member of the Shura Council of the LIFG, estimated in one account that there were between
800 and 1,000 Libyan fighters of various affiliations in Afghanistan. See Tawil, Brothers in Arms, p. 165, n. 38. In another
account, Benotman estimated between 900 and 1,000. See Omar Ashour, “Post-Jihadism: Libya and the Global Transformations
of Armed Islamist Movements,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 23, Issue 3 (2011), p. 382. Although Gaddafi
supported Islamist rebel groups in other countries—the Philippines for instance—he did not throw his support behind Afghan
rebel groups because of Libya’s then close relationship with the Soviet Union.
62 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 119; Ahmed
Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 197.
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10,
2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 65; Ali Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-
Qaeda (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), p. 22.
63 Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 119.
64 Human Rights Watch interview with Lwatty, March 17, 2012 .
65 Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 117-18; See also Tawil, Brothers in Arms, p. 17; and Soufan, The Black Banners, p. 23.
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