Afghan Arabs

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Afghan Arabs (Arabic: أفغان عرب; Pashto: افغان عربان; Dari: عرب های افغان) were the Arab Muslims who immigrated to Afghanistan and joined the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War.^[1] The term does not refer to the history of Arabs in Afghanistan before the 1970s. Despite being referred to as Afghans, they originated from the Arab world and did not hold Afghan citizenship.

It is estimated that between 8,000^[2] and 35,000 Arabs immigrated to Afghanistan to partake in what much of the Muslim world was calling an Islamic holy war against the Soviet Union, which had militarily intervened in Afghanistan to support the ruling People's Democratic Party against the rebelling jihadists.^[3][4] The Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was the first Arab journalist from a major Arabic-language media organization to cover the Soviet–Afghan War, approximated that there were 10,000 Arab volunteer fighters in Afghanistan during the conflict.^[5] Among many Muslims, the Afghan Arabs achieved near hero-status for their association with the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, and it was with this prestige that they were later able to exert considerable influence in mounting jihadist struggles in other countries, including their own. Their name notwithstanding, none of them were Afghans, and some who were grouped with the community were not even Arabs—a number of the foreign jihadists in Afghanistan were Turkic or Malay, among other ethnicities.

To the Western world, the most notorious Afghan Arab fighter was Osama bin Laden, who immigrated to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia and founded al-Qaeda, which carried out the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, prompting the American invasion of Afghanistan a month later. Bin Laden then took refuge in Pakistan (with alleged Pakistani support) until May 2011, when he was assassinated by U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six, though the American-led War in Afghanistan against the Taliban continued until August 2021.