Afghan war veterans formed a floating Islamist international fighting across many conflicts.

Evidence

The most active have been the governments of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Libya, who together, at times with other Muslim states, have contributed varying degrees of support to Muslims fighting non-Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Transcaucasus, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Sudan, and the Philippines. In addition to governmental support, many primary level Muslim groups have been bolstered by the floating Islamist international of fighters from the Afghanistan war, who have joined in conflicts ranging from the civil war in Algeria to Chechnya to the Philippines. This Islamist international was involved, one analyst noted, in the “dispatch of volunteers in order to establish Islamist rule in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia; joint propaganda wars against governments opposing Islamists in one country or another; the establishment of Islamic centers in the diaspora that serve jointly as political headquarters for all of those parties.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 757

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later rise of organized transnational jihad in the 2000s; prefigures network-based insurgency literature. — connects to: Afghan war transformed scattered urban militants into an organized movement — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 397