At the center of the Afghan resistance movement in Peshawar was Pushtun warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had been a junior lecturer at Kabul University and was known as the Professor. He had been schooled in Cairo and spoke fluent Arabic. He became the favored recipient of money from the Saudi and American governments.
The money funded his army, a political party, a newspaper, a huge refugee camp and a college called the University of Dawa al Jihad, which means Convert and Struggle.
The university became known as a place you could learn darker trades than mathematics -- bomb-making, for example. A student once described it to U.S. journalist Mary Anne Weaver as an Islamic Sandhurst, likening it to the famous British military academy. For a time, the college also had as many as 1,000 students studying engineering, medical technology and literature.
The abandoned school sits behind high mud walls amid the sprawling Jalozai refugee camp, which today has more than 200,000 residents and is less an encampment than a city. Pakistanis marvel at the ingenuity of the Afghans, who have built a thriving local economy that includes the manufacture of pottery, textile and latticed wooden roofs that are exported back to Afghanistan where timber to make such things is scarce. There's even a carwash.
By 1989, Mohammed had gone to work at Sayyaf's university, a friend said. He taught there and worked weekends at the refugee camp. The three Baluchi brothers became part of the small, semi-permanent Arab community that included Azzam, Islamic Jihad founder Ayman Zawahiri and Bin Laden, who came and went with his wives and children in his own airplane. Most of the Arabs in town worshiped at a small mosque on a dead-end alley called Arbat Road, across the street from Zahed's office.
It was a different world then, said one man who was part of the scene. Everyone had the same goal: to oust the Soviets. Everyone knew one another, prayed and socialized together, and even went to the jihad training camps together.
Victory over the Soviets, who withdrew in 1989, should have been the crowning achievement of the jihad. But the various Afghan factions, deprived of a common enemy, began fighting one another. American support disappeared with the end of the Soviet campaign. Many felt that the U.S. actively opposed the establishment of an Islamic government in Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal. This was, to some, the cruelest cut of all.
