In most historical accounts of the 1980s jihad in Afghanistan, the storyteller is so keen to emphasise the size of the Arab mobilisation that the reader is left with the impression that the Arab Afghans was a mainstream movement. However, this was clearly not the case. Even if we accept the highest estimates of the number of Saudi mujahidin, that is, 20,000, this is still just a fraction of a population which numbered between 6 and 12 million at the time. If one believes, like this author, that the number of Saudis who underwent substantial weapons training in this period is more likely to have been somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000, then we are certainly talking about a marginal phenomenon. This prompts the question: exactly who went for jihad and why? In this chapter I shall analyse the biographies of 161 Saudis who went for jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Tajikistan and Chechnya prior to 1996, by looking in turn at their backgrounds, motivations and recruitment patterns.

Hijazi domination

Socio-economically speaking, the early Saudi jihadists were an unremarkable group (see specific data in Appendix 1). Most were men in their early twenties from urban middle-class backgrounds, but the range of individual backgrounds was considerable and included both delinquents and notables.