Empire: World History - 390. Road To 9/11: The Soviet-Afghan War (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Did the CIA actually fund Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war?  Who was Abdullah Azzam, the radical scholar who turned jihad into a global franchise? How did a bureaucratic office meeting create Al-Qaeda?  In Episode 2 of this new series, William Dalrymple is joined by Jason Burke, author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam and The Revolutionists, to discuss the founding of al-Qaeda.  Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. This is the story of how a regional conflict at the end of the Cold War gave birth to the world's most dangerous terrorist network. It's also the story of a charismatic Palestinian preacher and a quiet, shy Saudi financier named Osama bin Laden,

who between them built a global army of holy warriors. In this episode, we step into the lion's den. We trace the founding of a tiny, highly secretive vanguard called Aungu, Al-Qaeda and explore how a radicalized, stateless army ultimately fell into the hands of Azama bin Laden. Now, Anita's busy with another project today, but instead we have to navigate us through the treacherous world of 1980s per Shawa, a man who was there, as was I at this time, in the beginning of both our careers as young hacks, Jason Burke, welcome back to Empire Pod.

Hi, Willie. Great to be here. But we're going now to Peshawah in the 1980s. So tell us what it was like when you and Azama both turned up. Pejawa in the early 80s, obviously it's a frontier city. You're right up against the Afghan frontier. You're also right up against the border zones of Pakistan that were effectively lawless at the time. I mean, they're pretty lawless now, but I mean, it was even more anarchic back then. It was a city of around a half a million people, but expanding hugely and very rapidly as this enormous influx of refugees came in from Afghanistan fleeing the war, and particularly the kind of bombardments that the Soviets were doing of villages and so forth.

You know, the war started in late 79, but it had actually been unrest for many years previously in Afghanistan. It was a very, very volatile situation. And Prasar was the sort of centre, the base for anyone with interests in Afghanistan who was in Pakistan, which meant, we should say, everything from Osama and Al-Zohiri and these discontented Arabs fighting jihad to English public school girls sort of setting up clinics, odd people working for slightly dodgy charities that were trying to help the Mujahideen, the Mujahideen themselves, Pakistani police fleecing everybody. Yeah, and smugglers, lots of smugglers, drug dealers, like the opium, the beginning. You could drive up towards the Khyber Pass and you'd pass four or five massive compounds of people who were making astonishing fortunes from opium and heroin.

And you could just walk in. I remember literally just getting out of a tourist taxi on my first trip to the Khyber Pass, talking my way through the guards and walking into these extraordinary oases. I mean, it was very, for a young journalist, it was the most exciting thing. I once went to dinner with Imran Khan when I was writing a profile of him. And we went out of Pakistan into this wasteland where Holo of motorcycle outriders, suddenly appeared from nowhere to take his Mercedes through the tribal territories. We arrived at this desert fortress with anti-aircraft missiles on the turrets. And after

dinner, everyone just took racks of AK-47s off the walls and fired tracer into the air as after dinner entertainment. And then there was a slight change of tone, because in the beginning of the Afghan jihad, people like you and I were very welcome. And the Mujahideen were very happy to take us into Afghanistan, and it was oddly a safe place, despite all the sort of guns and everything. It was a place where we were regarded as allies because we were helping the war on the Soviets and providing the oxygen and publicity for these groups. And then you began to hear reports about people running into groups of Arabs who were far less friendly and who were positively hostile to Western journalists like you and me wandering around.

Well, you think it's really interesting because what happens in the 80s is what starts as a religious, conservative revolt of the provinces against a kind of Marxist, modernizing, aggressively modernizing atheistic regime in Kabul evolves into something that is much more modern in its religious outlook, much more politicized, much more global and increasingly incubating. this particular strand of extremist Islamism, not necessarily among all the Afghans, but among exactly the people you're talking about, those Arabs who've come in to volunteer to fight alongside the Afghans. So you have all these different groups with slightly different perspectives on this. From the American perspective, this is part of the Cold War. And this is the freedom-loving West, stopping the Marxist bear of Russia from getting a warm water port, from launching down to into Pakistan and containing communism.

Now, other people are fighting the same war with a completely different perspective. For the Mujahideen, as for the Arab Afghans, the conflict is for Islam against secular or Marxist heresy. These people regard the pro-Russian regime in Kabul as the work of the devil and suddenly they've got to overthrow with the sword of Islam. And linking these two worlds is the whole Saudi effort. Now, the Saudis are matching every dollar that the Americans give for the jihad with a dollar of their own. That connection is a really important one because it links the Afghan war with what's going on in the Middle East.

and that connection with Saudi Arabia is one of the principal conduits for influence and ideas, as well as just material money and so forth, people, to flow backwards and forwards. And Saudi is really important, but there's also Egypt and a flow from Egypt backwards and also elsewhere in the Middle East, right the way actually from Morocco, the broader Islamic world, from Morocco all the way across the Philippines, you end up with these connections being established. But just to clarify a Knaad that's often put out there, it's not true, is it, that the CIA are funding extremists like bin Laden to fight against the Soviets? They're not directly receiving CIA money. No, there's one of these myths that is just impossible to uproot, because

so many people want to believe it. But, you know, it just didn't work like that. You have the seven major mujahideen parties who are all led by Afghans and entirely staffed by Afghans. People like Bin Laden are a tiny minority. You know, you're talking probably under 100 fighters, perhaps a couple of hundred at the peak, even before then you've talked to dozens in a war where you've got an entire population of Afghans mobilized, basically, or two-thirds. There are 500,000 Afghans in the field or 250,000 Afghans are like 100,000. So this idea that they either played a significant part or were receiving substantial CIA funds or training or anything else.

It is a nonsense. There's no evidence for it whatsoever. But it is a nice morality tale, basically. But it's also quite an important thing in that it sets bin Laden up within the Saudi establishment. This guy who would have been known to the Saudi establishment in Prince Turkey as the son of a builder is regarded. locally in Saudi Arabia and among Arabs interested in the jihad as now a hero figure. By the end, yeah, by the end. I mean, I think it's important to remember that, you know, from most of the 80s,

during the war against the Soviets, bin Laden is a completely obscure figure, and nobody knows who he is and nobody's really aware of what he's doing. In fact, he's not really doing very much. Now, there's also a very important character who's much less familiar to the world. I like everyone's heard of bin Laden, but very few people have heard of Abdullah Azam. but he's a crucial figure at this point. Tell us about him. So this is a man who is born in the north of the West Bank. Janine, they are?

And Shinene, absolutely. And who is forced to leave his home in 67, when the Israelis take over the West Bank, move to Jordan. So for those that don't know this bit of history, in the 1967 war, at the moment when the Israelis captured the wall in Jerusalem, and you have those pictures of the paratroopers standing there, triumphant. At the same time, 350,000 Palestinians become refugees in Jordan. There is a whole second mini Nakhpa that takes place at this point, and among them is Abdul Larasim. Yeah, Azam is, he's a school teacher, he's young, he's forced to leave his home, he goes to Jordan,

he wants to become an Islamic scholar, and he's not immediately active. He's deeply involved with the cause of the Palestinians in the sense that he is. a victim of the occupation of the worst bank by the Israelis in 67. But he doesn't see a clear path. He's more interested in a career in Islamic scholarship. Really interestingly, there's a very good anecdote, which is well verified, which is the moment for him where he's already blaming the failure to fight the Israelis and to defeat the Israelis in 67 on the lack of faith among Arabs and Muslims in the region.

And he's at home. It's late at night, and he hears singing, and the singing is nationalist, secular, Palestinian fighters, possibly belonging to Yasser Arabs, Fata, maybe Marxist, popular front for the liberation of Palestine, people like that. And he hears them singing nationalist songs about their fight for Palestine, and he thinks, what am I doing? I'm an Islamic scholar, aspirant Islamic scholar, a Palestinian who's lost his home, I haven't done anything. And at that moment, he sees a different way forward, a much more military.

way forward. He spends some time with an armed group of Islamists who are operating within actually interestingly the PLO with quite a lot of tension. I haven't heard this story. They don't get on very well because the PLO is predominantly kind of secular and so there are lots of arguments. He gets into trouble for insulting Che Guevara, who is the great hero of the Palestinian nationalist armed movement at the time. And he's very derogatory about some of the other practices that are going on. That ends in 1970. He ends up studying clerical studies in Damascus. He goes from there to Egypt, interestingly, in the early 70s where he's exposed to and part of the circles around Said Qutub. Did he know Said Qutub personally?

No, he's there too late. Kutub's been hanged in 66. He gets there in the early 70s, but he knows the family. And he's quite impressed by the family and their devotion to to the memory of Qutub and also their own personal commitment to a fairly militant form of Islam. And he's in those circles in Cairo. Although there's one moment where he does meet a sort of genuine militant who's going to go on within a few years to sort of refer into an armed revolt against the Egyptian authorities. And who tells him that he's a backslider, he isn't sufficiently militant. He's, you know, he's a hypocrite. And Azam, who is no shrinking vallet, ideologically, is quite shocked by this.

He gets his PhD in Islamic studies. He goes to Jordan. He's quite successful in Jordan's university system as a young academic. Teaching Islamic law or what's he teaching? Yeah, Islamic studies generally. And he really enjoys the contact with the students and teaching and so forth. But he rubs up pretty fast against Jordanian. security services, who aren't very keen on his sort of implicit criticism of the king.

So they boot him out, and he gets a contract in Mecca to teach his unexpected again. In Mecca, I mean, this is for him enormously important, also gets him out of Jordan. This is heaven, yeah. Again, he's part of this, like he was in Cairo, he's part of this really interesting and important new world milieu of quite radical, very much. Modern, contemporary Islamists, extremist thinkers, publishes a couple of books. One is called Red Cancer, and it is a kind of diatribe against the left. Communism is atheistic and all that's to it.

He blames it all on the Jews, echoing decades of similar conspiracy theories. And then he publishes another one, which is called Islam and the future of mankind. One is a prescription of what's gone wrong, and the other is a prescription of what should be done. It's a pretty, pretty brutal prescription, you know, and they sell like hotcakes. They're best sellers. He becomes a kind of Islamist celebrity. He's on the circuit, lecture circuit. This is a moment where you've got better communications, end of the 70s, earlier 80s.

Cassettes of his sermons, that sort of thing. Yeah, he's all over. He's all over the Middle East, but he's also in, he's in Italy. He goes to the US. He's traveling really widely, and he's a very good public speaker. He's quite striking. He's a handsome man. He's full of fire. And he has the kind of Islamic clerical scholarship behind it, which a lot of the lay preachers are the actors don't have. So at what point does he issue this famous fatwa, the defense of Muslim lands? Well, that comes out of his experience in Afghanistan. So in 81, he goes from Mecca to take up a job in Islamabad, a job that's actually funded by the

Saudi, one of the big Saudi NGOs. And he's really impressed by the Afghan Mujahideen. He believes there on the front of the battle against global unbelief. And he starts to build a support network for them. And he starts to build a huge propaganda network devoted to bringing in funds and volunteers for that. So this is actually quite an important point, Jason, isn't it? Because in the pop version of this story, bin Laden is absolutely the, you know, the central and the overwhelming figure. But Azam is actually the guy who is turning the jihad into a global franchise before bin Laden gets anywhere near this. Bin Laden is nobody. I mean, bin Laden is this young, rich kid from Saudi Arabia, the son of a tycoon who's never done anything.

He's been into Afghanistan. He goes into Afghanistan once in 1980s. for a couple of days, and he's sort of transformed by it. But Azam has been doing this for years and is really, really good at it. This is so interesting. I remember after 9-11 writing pieces in newspapers saying how much the Palestinian issue was generating, how important it was, as one of the principal elements in the Muslim complained against the West, and got a lot of pushback at that.

time, people saying, oh, it's absolutely separate, nothing to do with, nothing to do with al-Qaeda, absolutely different. Azam shows that there is a direct link, doesn't it? Well, Azam's a Palestinian. You're absolutely right in the sense that in 1985, he publishes this extraordinarily influential book, which is in defense of Muslim lands, and in which he innovates by saying that the obligation, individual's obligation to commit to jihad in whatever way you can, is incumbent on everybody, wherever they live, and wherever, whenever a jihad is necessary.

So that even if you are in the US, as a Muslim, or in Egypt, or in Saudi, or in the Philippines, wherever, and there is a jihad underway, a supposed defensive war against unbelief in Afghanistan or in wherever it might be, then it's still your duty to act. even if, and this is important to, your sovereign, your ruler, your parents, your cleric, says you shouldn't. And this is a kind of globalization. It's the global call to jihad, which is really powerful, particularly when it's backed by Azam's rhetorical gifts, but this big propaganda network he's built up with magazines and with videos and cassettes, particularly influential. audio cassettes and with this vocabulary that he's developed which talks of martyrdom and of

the almost supernatural interventions of birds that make Soviet helicopters crash and of the wonder and mystique of death for the face and the beauty of the violence and the cause and this is really heady stuff particularly if you're a an 18-year-old, it's somewhere in Algeria or wherever who are reading, he's reading this for the first time. Now, we need to bring these two currents together, Bin Laden and Asam. They meet for the first time in Peshawah, is that right? No, they've met previously in Mecca, which is only just up the road from where Bin Laden lives in Jeddah. He's there often. Bin Laden has attended some of the lectures, but Azam has done. So when they bump into each other again in Peshawa, they're already friends?

Yeah, they know each other and they've stayed in touch. And in fact, Azaam is going to, when he goes to Saudi Arabia, sometimes he stays with bin Laden. Bin Laden is much younger. He's very inexperienced. He's completely overall by the older, very accomplished but famous. Azam sees someone who could be very useful and he's right. But they do have a prior relationship. And when bin Laden first goes to Pakistan,

which is in about 81, he's taking money that he's raised, not his own money, but money he's raised from others to give to the Majahedin. He checks in with Azam, and eventually it's Azam, who in 84 convinces him to go over the border and spend a few days with one of the Majiddin factions and experience the war firsthand for the first time. And that, as I say, is just this extraordinary powerful experience for bin Laden, and it changes his out. look in a really significant way. We need to take a break, but after the break, we're going to see how these two men,

Azam and the young bin Laden, established the Maktab al-Kidemat, the Services Bureau in Peshawar, essentially a reception desk for Holy War. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters. On September 19th,

Join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. Welcome back. So, Jason, tell us about the Magtab al-Kidemat, the services bureau in Peshawah. Is this the first stab at al-Qaeda? Well, it becomes a sort of prototype, perhaps, for al-Qaeda.

It's important to the formation of al-Qaeda. But when it's created, which is about 1985, no one's thought of al-Qaeda. Nobody's even thought of taking the jihad beyond Afghanistan, and certainly not at that moment. And it's funded by bin Laden, not by bin Laden's personal fortune, by the donations that bin Laden is able to get in Saudi Arabia, where he has loads of contacts and so far. So we should say that this is actually a bit of a low point in the jihad against the Soviets. In a few

years' time, the Stinger missile will appear, which is a small shoulder-head held missile that the Mudge can take in with them and which changes the whole nature of the resistance. But at this point, it's not at all clear that the Mujahideen are going to succeed, is it, Jason? No, it's a horrendous, bloody attritional struggle. The villages are in smoking ruins all over rural Afghanistan. The Soviets can't win. Famously, they own the roads and the towns, but the Mudge own the countryside and the night.

It's just one of those classic kind of insurgent wars that no one's going to win. And the sufferers are the rural Afghans, and millions have fled, I think, four, five million flees, something like a third of the population, more and a lot of them are around Peshawar right in the face of the people who we're talking about the Arab Afghans who are arriving. And it's important to say that, and it's directly relevant to the creation of Mahdama al-Hidma, that a lot of those Arab Afghans who are arriving, and

there are a few hundred at any one time, maybe up to a thousand. 90% of them, so maybe 18% of them, are involved in what would be called charitable activities. They're involved in clinics, schools for refugees, handing out food parcels, whatever it is. They're not involved in military activities at all. And Maktab al-Kidma is set up as, as you say, reception center, a logistics center for the volunteers who are coming in in answer to Abdullah Azam's call for support. And it kind of fits into this NGO,

role, offering some multiple pathways for helping the Afghans, but primarily it's about the military assistance and that these volunteers can offer. And it's dealing with things like finding guest houses for, or opening guest houses, for these fighters who are coming in, which, as we'll see in later episodes, the registers that they keep later become very important intelligence documents. It's bureaucratic. It's like a lot of NGOs, you know, there are a lot of meetings, a lot of registers and records. Because a lot of the volunteers turn up with their families, and families are often quite numerous. So they've got to find accommodation for them, they've got to give them some money for food, whatever, find jobs for people, get them in school.

And it's in the sort of nice bit of Peshawar, which is going towards the Chiba Pass over in university town, Hyatabad. Up to the cantoothement, yeah. Yeah, which is where a lot of the Mujahideen factions are about. and the truck smugglers as well. This is the year I first turned up, the 86, and these guys are very much around. Yeah, and visible, and particularly distinct from the Afghans and the Pakistan, is because these guys have got a lot more money. They're the ones driving around the big four-wheel drive trucks.

All brand new, exactly. And that's important, too, because there's a lot of resentment from some of the Afghan Mujahideen to these Arab Afghans, you turn up, who don't speak Pashto or Dari or any of the Afghan languages, don't have a very different form. of Islamic observance, much more rigorous, much more Saudi-style, wakbis style, much less kind of involved with the Sufi-inflected local traditions of Barelvi in Pakistan and elsewhere. I went on that first visit to a Sufi shrine outside Beshawar, and already there was tension between the, every Thursday night all the Afghans would turn up with their rebabs and start

singing songs to the saint. And there was a new madrasa funded by the Saudis down the same lane, And these guys would turn up and argue with these guys, saying you shouldn't be playing music. This is completely wrong. Exactly. And there are other things that were causing a lot of tension inside Afghanistan as well, and particularly the fact that these guys, the Arab Afghans, often have no military experience and are pretty useless, frankly.

So it's at this point, 1986, exactly at this point, that bin Laden actually builds a base in eastern Afghanistan. that will become very important. To his legend. Yeah. So tell us about this, Jaji. Jadji. Okay, so he's been to Jadji before.

Jadji is a small outcrop, basically, very close to the Pakistan-Afghan-Badha-Khaar al-Qaeda border, just over into Afghanistan. It's hilly, woody, forested. A faction called Itahadi Islami, which is quite close to the Saudis, one of the Saudis favorite factions, with Jihadine-Afghan-Fakhan factions,

has been based there for a while. That's where Bin Laden went on his first little trip into Afghanistan in 84. He goes back in 87. and he builds a military post there, basically, which he then kind of staffs up, if you like, with his various followers or people from Magdab al-Khidmat and the other Arab Afghans and this little group of Afghans that he's trying to do. And one of the interesting things about this is that previously, the Arab Afghans, when they have fought, have fought within another group.

They've kind of done embeds with Afghan factions, just joined them and fought with them. Now he's trying to create something that is purely sort of Arab-Afghans, volunteers from overseas, Saudis, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, whoever. It gets quite rough. By April, May 87, the Soviets have located this camp. They're pounding it not just with rockets, but also Nipal, which is a terrifying thing. And bin Laden is present at this point. I don't really know who's in it, I don't think. But then they just attack it. As they were attacking all the way up that front at that particular time, trying to sever the supply lines from the Pakistani logistics bases into Afghanistan. They attack the camp. And yeah, there's no doubt. Lots of eyewitness accounts, I heard people talk about it.

There's audio, there's some video that Bin Laden was on the front line and fought bravely, was injured slightly, a dozen or so of his people were killed. They may or may not have inflicted casualties on the Soviets and their Afghan artillery. you know, we don't know. 13 Arab fighters die, I think, in this attack. Yeah, it's something around that figure. And the main thing is the myth. I mean, militarily, it's of absolutely no significance whatsoever.

But it kind of launches bin Laden. There's publicity about this, isn't it? Yeah. In the Saudi papers, bin Laden is for the first time shown to be this sort of fighter for Islam. Well, a young reporter called Jamal Khashoggi goes to interview him about it, actually. It's Jamarca Shovia, the guy with the bone saw, the guy who gets bone sword.

The very same. But he also, and this is where, you know, you start to see the transformation of Bin Laden. He's suddenly much more confident. He's suddenly a kind of leader of men. And he also discovers this talent for self-promotion. And a lot of the publicity is pretty much orchestrated by bin Laden. I mean, he starts to invite the journalists. He starts to stage-manage stuff.

I mean, this audio that you can find, which is of bin Laden during one of the attacks in Jaji, kind of issuing commands and talking to his men, is really interesting. You know, who records themselves in the middle of a battle unless you've got in your head? This is going to be useful, then you can use it, yeah. So this is where you start to see bin Laden's talent for, you call it self-emotion, you call it propaganda, or at least communication, and it's very broad. dissent, communication designed to radicalise, to mobilise, to polarise, you know, that emerging. So this is a point in the story where a minor ex-prisoner who no one's ever heard of called

Aiman al-Zawahiri turns up in Peshawar. Now, he's no one actually at this point, while Azam is very much the boss with the Islamic training and with the global reputation. Yeah, and Zerakri turns up and he's been in an Egyptian shale. He's been. on the run afterwards effectively, and he gets to Bashar. It's a town he knows. He's been there twice before, some years before, at the beginning of the war against the Soviets, when he came as a doctor to treat Afghan refugees from whose terrible injuries inflicted by Soviet bombardment.

And he comes back to Bashar, partly because it's one of the few places he can actually be safe. I mean, he still, he can't go back to Egypt, clearly. And he slightly missed the boat, hasn't he, in the sense that in August 1988, The whole thing has turned around. These stingers have arrived. The Soviets are in retreat. They're not formally in retreat, but they're not winning the war.

And it's now looking more and more as if the Budge are going to win this. And it raises the question of what's going to happen to all these trained, radicalized, stateless young men who've come here for jihad. And more than that, because it's actually the last couple of years of the war against the Soviet that the most volunteers come in from the Arab world. It's actually in that 88-89, right at the very end, that you get the bigger numbers. I mean, earlier, they're just dozens. And by the end, you've got hundreds. So when in 1989, bin Laden deploys a big force of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, in a kind of pitch battle, he deploys hundreds, and it goes very badly, actually.

They lose a lot of people. But it's at the end of the conflict that you get all these people coming in. And as you say, the actual end of the conflict, the Russians pull out, and it leaves all these hundreds. with nothing to do. Now, a lot are coming in just for sort of two months or three months, and then they go back to Saudi or they go back to wherever. But there's a kind of hardcore, often the most militants, people who've come from the Middle East

because they simply can't stay where they are because of the repression. Like Al-Zawahri, it leaves those people sitting there in Peshawar thinking, we have defeated the Soviet Union. They're on their way out. and they kind of credit themselves with this, though it's completely spurious. So there now comes this issue, Jason, of what to do with these guys.

They've all gathered. There's now hundreds, not dozens, and the war is almost over. So how does this bureaucratic meeting at Osama bin Laden's house in August 1988 lead to the founding of Al-Qaeda? So this meeting is amazing, and we have this sort of minutes of it. And it's like some kind of, you know, office bureaucratic meeting. anywhere, they're all sort of sitting there and it goes on for too long. And then there's been arguments over the agenda, and there's lots of politics

between the people involved who is there and who hasn't come. But it's basically 15 senior people in Peshawar, all from the Arab world, not Afghans or Pakistanis, who are looking to find a way to continue the role of the Makhdabad-Kidmat or similar kind of organisations in the future once the Afghan war is over. They don't want to go on and fight just the Afghan regime, which is going to be left there, once the Soviets have gone. They are now looking elsewhere, and they are looking at Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Kuwait, Saudi. The ISI are of course desperate to get them into Kashmir at this point, aren't they?

Well, I said got their thing going with their own people to get into Kashmir, least Kashmiris to try and get them across. But it's an interesting question where the ISI knew about this meeting, actually. I doubt it, to be honest. Interesting. So they're on operating below the radar because they're simply not important enough at this point? My guess would be that they don't really know about that meeting. Also, it's very, it's very incalate. It's not like a defined project. But they do say, okay, we're going to create this group. And it's going to be a kind of foreign legion of all of us, international Jihadi militant fighters.

And the name, Jason, tell us what it means. Al-Qaeda al-Azkaria. Yeah, that's the warrior's base, which may have been sort of stoned from the idea that bin Laden and had when he'd created his little base in Jaji and fought there. But it may also be a reference to other things. So Al-Qaeda in Arabic can refer to the base of a pillar. or anything that supports something else. And there's that sense of it being the foundation,

that kind of the fundamental element of something that's much bigger and depends on it. There's also an al-Qaeda al-Sulba, which is a kind of vanguard in almost a Leninist sense, and that's quite interesting. So some people have translated it as a kind of database, taking the Mahdab al-Qaeda kind of bureaucracy very literally. But the bottom line is it is a... a group, a concerted, organized group with a leader and a directive committee and so forth. And a bank account.

Yeah, yeah. Well, very importantly, a lot of funds, sufficient funds to keep going. And they have this mission, which is, again, sort of not entirely clear, but is going to go above and beyond the war in Afghanistan. This is this crucial moment. So we've now got Al-Qaeda funded. The Afghan-Soviet war is now won, 1989. The 15th of February, 1989. General Boris Gromov walks alone across the bridge from Afghanistan into Soviet Uzbekistan, officially the last Soviet soldier to leave. The jihad has actually won. Yeah, and in their view, crucially, in the view of bin Laden and Al-Zawahri and all the others, won by the forces of Islam against the superpower of the Soviets. And against Marxism and a secular ideology that is anti-Islamic in their view. The forces of unbelief globally.

Now, it's at this point that something extremely important happens. Now, you've made the very important point that in 1989, The really towering figure is Abdullah Azam. He is the one everyone knows. His cassettes are viral across the Islamic world. And both Eman al-Zohiri and Osama bin Laden are minor players at this point. We big them up in retrospect, but they're not important at the time. Now, what happens?

What is this mysterious bomb that goes off, which kills Azam in 1989? Just at the moment of victory, he's taken out. Who does it? I'm going to disappoint you, Willie. We just don't know. We just don't know. You have suspicions, though, Jason. It's really difficult.

The kind of list of possible suspect is absolutely endless. I mean, the number of people who want to take Azam out at that particular moment. It was a quick short list of... Well, you could have Soviet intelligence of one sort of another. You could have Pakistani intelligence of one sort of another who want to get rid of him because he's just getting too big, he's getting too influential. There could be a threat to Pakistan. You could have a range of other security services from across the Arab or Islamic world.

You could also have, and this has often been mooted as a possibility, you could also have rivals within the jihadi movement. And as you mentioned previously, it's incredibly fissar. I mean, it's fragmented. There are enormous numbers of, personal and ideological disputes, usually the two going together, as is so often a case. We should say that one year before this, General Zia has been assassinated in the similar sort of strike. A bomb has gone off.

We don't know who did that either. We don't know who did that either. The box of exploding mangoes. Or even if it was a manga, although mangoes are much better story than anything else. But with Azam, even the best scholars who have looked at this, There's no solid evidence as to who killed Abdullah Azam at that moment. And it's a big bomb, I think, kills one or two of his sons. He's on his way to the mosque.

But it leaves the international and globalizing jihadi movement leaderless and to an extent rudderless. And that's important too in its way, because it clears space for all these other actors who commit all sorts of increasing extreme acts over the next decade. And so tell us, Jason, who is it who steps into his shoes? I'm going to disappoint you again. It's not immediately bin Laden. There's this moment for about, you know, 10 years where there are so many different actors. There is bin Laden and he actually goes back to Saudi and he goes to Sudan and so forth.

But there are loads of others, all acting, all coming out of this, world that has been created in Peshire in the 80s. All of them have connections to each other. They all have connections to the various training camps that were established to train them with Jihadine. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York was committed by people involved in this kind of military attacks on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. And obviously, there are the attacks all around the world that start to come through

as Afghan veterans go home. And it's a kind of boiling cauldron through the early 90s, a very broad and fragmented, diverse movement. Bin Laden emerges towards the end of the decade as the obvious preeminent. But in the early 90s, in the late 80s, when this all starts to break up in Peshawar, it's really unclear. At the death of Azam genuinely just leaves this very complicated fragmented landscape. I have to say, Jason, it's your unwillingness to take the easiest and most pleasing storyline that gives such credibility to what you're saying. As historian, it chimes very much with my experience.

Anyway, the next episode, we're going to be going to the brilliant double Pulitzer winner, Steve Cole, who is the real sort of Urquil Poirot of jihadism and who's got these extraordinary contacts within Langley and the CIA. He is taking us on to the next stage of this story. Now, if you want to access that right now and at free, then head straight to EmpirePoduk.com. That's Empirepodukuk.com and become a member. It also helps us keep this whole show on the road.

Jason, thank you so much. You've been an amazing, amazing source. I'd love me to see you again after a while. Absolutely. Yeah, no, it's fun. It's fun. It's nice to talk about our old tramping grounds, are they? It is very much, place where you and I cut our teeth and where we had a lot of fun, actually, in our 20s.

Anyway, goodbye from me, William Durimple. And from me, Jason, though. Goodbye. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends and family to walk 21 kilometers. in support of life-saving research.

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