to train militants for the fight against India in Kashmir. This was done at the old al-Qaeda camps in Khost which the ISI had persuaded the Taliban to return to al-Qaeda control. Early aid for attacks Several years before bin Laden was well known outside of Saudi and Islamist circles, he assisted and/or funded what he believed to be physical jihad against impiety involving attacks on civilians. While still in Saudi Arabia in 1989, he angered the Saudi royal family by preaching for and financing assassinations of socialist leaders in the neighboring country of Yemen, his father's homeland, where the country was in the process of re-uniting under a coalition government. In 1992 or 1993, bin Laden sent an emissary, Qari el-Said, with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists there and warn them against compromise with the impious government. Making jihad merely "for politics, not for God" would be a sin, they were told; total war was the only solution. Total war did follow involving many massacres of civilians and a declaration of takfir of Algerians by one of the Islamist factions (the GIA). An estimated 150,000–200,000 Algerians were killed by the end of the war, but the government prevailed over the Islamists. Abdullah Anas, an Algerian Islamist witness to the Al-Qaeda advice, later lamented, `This simple argument destroyed us.` Another unsuccessful effort by bin Laden was the Luxor massacre of 17 November 1997, which Swiss federal police are reported to have found was funded by Bin Laden. The attack by six al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya militants dressed as policemen slaughtered 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians at Luxor Temple. Its goal was to derail the nonviolence initiative between the Egyptian government and Egyptian-based al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the major Egyptian militant Islamist group, but the attack horrified the Egyptian public and turned it completely against Islamist terror. A later attack that did succeed, at least temporarily, was that on the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. While in Afghanistan, bin Laden helped cement his alliance with his hosts, the ruling Taliban, by sending several hundred of his Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban overrun Mazar-e-Sharif. The city fell, but journalists report it as a particularly gruesome conquest. For two days the Taliban drove their pickup trucks "up and down the narrow streets of Mazar-i-Sharif shooting to the left and right and killing everything that moved – shop owners, cart pullers, women