> After the Soviet Union intervened and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, Islamic mujahideen fighters engaged in war with those Soviet forces.

> Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq feared that the Soviets were planning to also invade Balochistan, Pakistan, so he sent Akhtar Abdur Rahman to Saudi Arabia to garner support for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation forces. A while later, the US CIA and Saudi Arabian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funnelled funding and equipment through the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen.[112]

> About 90,000 Afghans, including Mohammed Omar, were trained by Pakistan's ISI during the 1980s.[112] British professor Carole Hillenbrand concluded that the Taliban have arisen from those US-Saudi-Pakistan-supported mujahideen: "The West helped the Taliban to fight the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan".[113] Nearly all of the Taliban's original leadership previously fought in the Soviet-Afghan War for either the Hezb-i Islami Khalis or Harakat-i Inqilab-e Islami factions of the Mujahideen.