In a recent interview on Al-Arabiya TV, Saudi sheikh Sarraj Al-Zaharani, who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later renounced his ways, talked about his disillusionment and about how the leaders deceived and abused the enthusiasm of the Arab youth who responded to the call to jihad.
Against a backdrop of images of his ID card as a young jihad fighter and footage of fighting in Afghanistan, Al-Zaharani talked about "how low we sank" in terms of un-Islamic behavior. He said that many of the non-Saudi mujahideen were not pious – they smoked, did not grow beards, wore inappropriate clothing, and even brought VCRs and TV sets to Osama bin Laden and Abdallah Azzam. According to Al-Zaharani, although they claimed to be using the devices to screen jihadi films for training purposes, one time he walked in on them and "saw a group, headed by Abdallah Azzam's right-hand man, watching Pakistani free-style wrestlers." Al-Zaharani exclaimed, "Those wrestlers are wearing things that don't even cover their private parts."
In the interview, which aired in two parts on February 19 and 26, 2010, Al-Zaharani alleged that the training of Arab mujahideen was unsuited to the nature of the jihad in Afghanistan and was in fact intended to prepare them to fight their own countries.
