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Abdul Rasuul Sayyaf
(b. 1946, Paghman Valley, Afghanistan, full name: Ustad {Professor} Abdul Rabb al-Rasuul Sayyaf, also Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf)
Abdul Rasuul Sayyaf is the only notable ethnic Afghan Pashtun factional leader in the Northern Alliance government that took over Afghanistan in December, 2001, and a hard-line Wahhabi Islamic Fundamentalist supported closely by Saudi Arabia in its attempts at proselytisation of their version of Islam, although this alienated most other Sunni Muslim Afghans, who follow the far more moderate Hanafi sect, as well as the Afghan Shi'ites, such as the Hazaras.
Sayyaf was a member of the Afghan branch of the Ikhwan-al-Muslimeen, along with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Dr. Syed Burhanuddin Rabbani, engaging in radical Islamist practices {e.g. throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women, a practice that would become one of Hekmatyar's specialties}, around this time he also gained degrees in Religion at both Egyptian and Saudi Universities, and a teaching post at a small Islamic University in Kabul. He subsequently lost this post in 1973 after plotting with Hekmatyar, Rabbani, and future famous Mujaheddin and ethnic Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud to overthrow then-Afghan President Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan in a failed coup attempt launched from Massoud's homeland of the Panjshir Valley, which forced them to flee to Pakistan.
Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979, Sayyaf spent time in prison, being imprisoned by the Communist PDPA in April, 1978, and being freed in controversial circumstances by the second PDPA leader Hafizullah Amin, who, coincidentally, happened to be Sayyaf's distant relative. Although, by virtue of him being incarcerated, and, consequently not arriving in Peshawar until 1980, until after the actual Soviet invasion, he was only recognised by the Pakistanis as the leader of the Ittihad-i-Islami Baraye Azadi Afghanistan {Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan} faction, a coalition of all the parties fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that soon imploded, and Sayyaf retained the name as the title of his own organisation, after being elected as its leader.
It was here in his Afghan home base, although because of his espoused Wahhabi brand of Islam he was unable to win many ideological supporters amongst the Afghan population, instead buying support with the extensive funding and armaments he received from his wealthy Saudi benefactors, including bin Laden, that he met the future Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and together they established military training camps and related infrastructure that was later utilised by bin Laden for terrorist training camps, and it was Sayyaf who invited bin Laden back from his Sudanese exile in 1996.
Primarily because of his extensive funding, Sayyaf was able to be a relatively-effective Mujaheddin commander.
During the post-war period, Sayyaf retained his training camps, using them for militarily training and indoctrinating new recruits to fight in Islamic-backed conflicts such as Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the Southern Philippines, with the Islamist terrorist group Abu Sayyaf being named after him, for which he has been cited by the 9/11 Commission in the United States of America.
Also, in these camps, Sayyaf trained and mentored the soon-to-be-infamous, Kuwaiti-born, future Al-Qaeda operative and senior commander, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after being introduced by the latter's brother, Zahid, during the Afghan Jihad in 1987.
After the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in 1989, and the overthrow of the Mohammad Najibullah régime in 1992, Sayyaf's organisation's human rights record became noticeably worse, underlined by their involvement in the infamous massacres and rampages in the Kabul neighbourhood of Karte Seh
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