THE ISLAMIC FRONT FOR JIHAD AGAINST THE US & ISRAEL

The following groups are believed to have joined his Front:

1. The Jamatul Jihad of Egypt led by Dr.al-Zawahiri. bin Laden understands English, but cannot speak fluently. Dr.al-Zawahiri, who speaks English without difficulty, therefore, acts as his spokesman.

2. Another Egyptian group led by Abu Asim ("kuniyat" or assumed name and not real name), a son of Sheikh Omer Abdur Rehman, the blind Egyptian cleric, who is undergoing imprisonment in the US for his involvement in the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in February, 1993. Two other sons of the Sheikh are also living in the Kandahar area.

3. A third Egyptian group led by Shawqi Islam Bolo, brother of Khalid Islam Bolo, one of the assassins of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

4. The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen of Pakistan and its two splinter groups.

5. The Markaz Dawa Al Irshad of Pakistan and its militant wing the Lashkar-e- Toiba.

6. The Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan, an extremist Sunni organisation, which has been campaigning for the proclamation of Pakistan as a Sunni State and is believed to be responsible for the murder of a number of Shia leaders of Pakistan.

7. The Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, the organisation of bin Laden, consisting exclusively of Arab volunteers of Afghan war vintage. Most of them are Saudis and Yemenis with a small sprinkling of Egyptians, Sudanese and Palestinians from Jordan and the Israeli-occupied territories.

8. Groups from Tadjikistan, Xinjiang and the Philippines, whose identities are not clear.

What is described as bin Laden’s terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan consists of the training camps of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which had been in existence even before the arrival of Bin Laden in Jalalabad in May, 1996, the camps of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar, the Afghan Mujahideen leader, which were taken over by the Taliban and handed over to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or Bin Laden and the camps set up during the 1980s by Jalaluddin Haqqani, another Mujahideen leader, who has since joined the Taliban. Contrary to the claims of US officials, these were not sophisticated training facilities, but improvised structures to put up the trainees.

rest of the article is at http://www.saag.org/papers/paper10.html

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