Former Pakistani politician and Information Minister during Nawaz Sharif Government Mushahid Hussain Syed has made fresh claims about Pakistan’s role in the Afghan jihad during the Soviet-Afghan war. Speaking on the Pakistani digital talk show KHANCAST, Syed claimed that the CIA and Saudi Arabia provided billions of dollars to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to support the training and mobilisation of fighters in Afghanistan. According to Syed, the CIA provided around 2.1 billion US dollars to the ISI for training approximately 100,000 Afghan fighters and 20,000 Arab volunteers. He claimed that the Arab volunteers included figures such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Syed further claimed that Saudi Arabia contributed a matching amount of around 2.1 billion dollars. He said an additional 1 billion dollars was subsequently provided, taking the overall funding involved in the Afghan programme to around 5 billion dollars between 1979 and 1989. Discussing the aftermath of the Afghan conflict, Syed said thousands of trained fighters were left without a battlefield once the war ended. He described them as “jobless jihadis”, claiming that some subsequently moved to other conflict zones, including Kashmir, Palestine and Algeria. Syed also linked the Afghan jihad to the broader Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, saying Afghanistan became a major theatre of that geopolitical struggle following the Soviet intervention. The financial figures, fighter numbers and other details mentioned above are claims made by Mushahid Hussain Syed during the interview and are presented as such.