“The young Arab keeps his head down and his mouth shut and stays for a week or two and returns disappointed about the jihad and the Mujahidin.” Thus Abdallah Azzam described the situation for foreign fighters in Peshawar in the early 1980s. He had noticed a steady increase in Arab volunteer arrivals in 1983–1984, and it frustrated him to see their enthusiasm going to waste. In the summer of 1984 he decided to set up the Services Bureau (Maktab al-Khidamat), an organization devoted to hosting Arab volunteers and putting them to good use in the Afghan jihad. The establishment of the Services Bureau would turn out to be a game-changer for the mobilization of Arabs to Afghanistan.