mujahideen, members of a number of guerrilla groups operating in Afghanistan during the Afghan War (1978–92) that opposed the invading Soviet forces and eventually toppled the Afghan communist government. Rival factions thereafter fell out among themselves, precipitating the rise of one faction, the Taliban, and an opposing coalition, the Northern Alliance. The following is a discussion of these factions during the Afghan War and its aftermath. For discussion of the term mujahideen within the context of Islamic revivalism, see mujahideen (Islam).

The roots of the Afghan War lay in the overthrow of the centrist government of Pres. Mohammad Daud Khan in April 1978 by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups, which had little popular support. The new government forged close ties with the Soviet Union, launched ruthless purges of all domestic opposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that were bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim and largely anticommunist population.

Insurgencies arose against the government among various tribal and urban groups who drew upon Islam as a uniting source of inspiration. Adopting liberation rhetoric previously developed by Muslim thinkers in the Indian subcontinent, these groups became known collectively as the mujahideen (Arabic: mujāhidūn, “those who engage in jihad”). Along with internal fighting and coups within the government among the Marxist-Leninist factions, the rise of the mujahideen contributed to the decision of the Soviets to invade the country in December 1979, sending in some 30,000 troops and toppling the short-lived presidency of Hafizullah Amin. The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their new but faltering client state, now headed by Babrak Karmal, but the mujahideen rebellion grew in response, spreading to all parts of the country. The Soviets initially left the suppression of the rebellion to the Afghan army, but the latter was beset by mass desertions and remained largely ineffective throughout the war.

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Afghanistan: Civil war, mujahideen-Taliban phase (1992–2001)

The mujahideen were at first poorly equipped, and they remained decentralized throughout the war. Holding most of the countryside, they used mainly animal transport against Soviet motor transport. The quality of their arms and combat organization gradually improved, however, as a result of experience and the large quantity of arms and other war matériel shipped to the rebels, via Pakistan, by the United States and other countries. The Haqqani network, coordinated by a prominent commander of the mujahideen, became a key instrument of this foreign assistance. The mujahideen also received aid from sympathetic Muslims throughout the world, and an indeterminate number of Muslim volunteers—popularly termed “Afghan-Arabs,” regardless of their ethnicity—traveled from all parts of the world to join their war effort. These foreign volunteers coordinated among themselves and with Muslims in their homelands through a network of their own, known as al-Qaeda (Arabic: al-Qāʿidah, “the Base”). In 1986 the mujahideen’s acquisition from the United States and Great Britain of substantial numbers of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles enabled the mujahideen to challenge Soviet control of the air—a significant factor in the Soviets’ withdrawal early in 1989.

Despite their common cause throughout the war, the mujahideen remained fragmented politically. After the war ended, a short-lived transitional government was established, sponsored by several factions of the mujahideen. Pres. Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society (Jamʿiyyat-e Eslāmī), one of the major factions, refused to leave office in late 1994 in accordance with the power-sharing arrangement reached by the new government. Other groups among the mujahideen, particularly the Islamic Party (Ḥezb-e Eslāmī), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, surrounded Kabul and began to barrage the city with artillery and rockets. These attacks continued intermittently over the next several years as the countryside outside Kabul slipped into chaos.

Meanwhile, the newly materialized Taliban (Pashto: “Students”), a puritanical Islamic group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar, began seizing control of the country systematically, occupying Kabul in 1996. The Taliban—augmented by volunteers from various Islamic extremist groups sheltering in Afghanistan, many of whom were Afghan-Arab holdovers from the earlier conflict—soon controlled all but a small portion of northern Afghanistan, which was held by a loose coalition of mujahideen forces known as the Northern Alliance. Fighting continued at a stalemate until 2001, when U.S. special operations forces, in response to the Taliban’s failure to hand over the leaders of al-Qaeda after the latter’s September 11 attacks on the United States, launched a series of military operations in Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power by early December. (See Afghanistan War.) The Northern Alliance subsequently dissolved into several factions, many of which were absorbed into the new Afghanistan government established in 2004.