Islamabad: In a startling revelation, a Pakistani politician has claimed that his country’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) trained one lakh Afghan Mujahideen and 20,000 Arab volunteers, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, during the Afghan jihad with billions of dollars provided by the CIA and Saudi Arabia.
Mushahid Hussain Syed has also claimed that once the war ended, the trained fighters became “jobless jihadis” and moved to other conflict zones, including Kashmir, Palestine and Algeria.
Syed, a former senator and journalist, who served as Pakistan’s information minister when Nawaz Sharif was the prime minister, made the remarks during a recent appearance on KHANCAST, a Pakistani digital talk show.
He linked the ISI directly to the training programme and detailed the funding he said it received from the CIA.
Tracing the programme to the Cold War and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Syed said the Afghan jihad eventually became part of the wider confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union, as reported by News18.
The CIA then provided $2.1 billion to the ISI for training one lakh Afghan Mujahideen and 20,000 Arab volunteers, he claimed. Among those Arab volunteers, he specifically named Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later went on to lead Al-Qaeda.
Syed further claimed that Saudi Arabia provided matching funds of another $2.1 billion for the programme. Another $1 billion was subsequently provided, taking the total amount used in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 to around $5 billion, he said.
He went on to describe what happened to these fighters once the Afghan jihad came to an end.
“They became jobless jihadis,” he said. Some subsequently went to Kashmir, while others headed to Palestine and Algeria, Syed said.
He also linked the Afghan jihad to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, claiming that Islamabad’s role in the conflict helped it pursue its nuclear ambitions during the same period.
Pakistan’s strategic importance during the Afghan jihad gave it room to advance its nuclear weapons programme while the Cold War confrontation in Afghanistan was underway, the former minister said.
