To the Mountains

In the closing decades of the 20th century, the world had witnessed an extraordinary spectacle in the forbidden mountains of Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. This was the story of the triumph of a ragtag army of mujahidin fighters over the second nuclear superpower of the world, Soviet Russia. Abdullah Anas and Tam Hussain provide a rare insider’s view of an ArabAfghan ‘who, like the rest of the world looks back at this extraordinary success with astonished disbelief’ and observes, ‘at the time I never thought that our actions in Takhar, Panjshir or in Peshawar will shake the walls of Berlin’ (p. 25). But shake it did, any objective analysis of the fall of Soviet Russia will credit the actions of the mujahidin in Afghanistan of not just shaking but bringing the whole Berlin wall crumbling down and the mighty Soviet Union along with it. Unlike the repenting confession of those former jihadis who have seen the ‘liberal light’, Anas remains proud of his record as a mujahid and proclaims with...