Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

Who is Abdul Rasul Sayyaf?

Ustad Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf is an Afghan Islamist politician. He took part in the war against the PDPA government in the 1980s, leading the Mujahedin faction Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan.

During the war, he received patronage from Arab sources and mobilized Arab volunteers for the Mujahedin forces. Sayyaf is said to have been the one who first invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, after bin Laden's 1996 expulsion from Sudan by the otherwise sympathetic Sudanese régime under Saudi, Egyptian, and American pressure.

In 2005, Sayyaf's Ittehad-al-Islami was converted into the political party, the Islamic Dawah Organisation of Afghanistan. He has been considered a member of the Northern Alliance, despite his close relationship with militant groups such as Al-Qaeda that opposed it. He has also been accused of having knowingly assisted the two assassins that killed Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud in a suicide bomb blast two days before September 11, 2001.