Next Step : Have Guns, Will Travel : * Thousands of Muslims learned guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Where will they go next?

The House of the Holy Warriors is an unassuming, two-story bungalow on School Road, distinguishable only by the machine-gun nest at the front gate.

There is no sign outside, no address, and few inside who are willing to talk to strangers about the thousands of heavily armed Muslim fighters from throughout the world who have used this and other safehouses as staging grounds in their devastating war with communism for the soul of Afghanistan.

Especially not now.

For now, as the war they helped wage for more than a decade winds down, secular regimes in more than a dozen nations from Algeria to China are increasingly concerned that the international warriors who have passed through these safehouses and fought alongside the Afghan moujahedeen (holy warriors) may represent their worst nightmare: a dedicated and devout army of fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries, trained in the art of guerrilla war and prepared to move on to the next jihad--the next holy war.

Few could explain the phenomenon that has ignited such widespread debate throughout the Muslim belt of Africa and Asia in recent weeks as starkly as Abou Abd Ellah El-Miliani, one of the few Arab fighters willing to meet a Times reporter at the House of the Holy Warriors last week.

“I have come here for jihad,” the young Arab warrior said in broken English. “I have fought for one year in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is still good for jihad . Maybe I will fight for one year more. But then, inshallah , I will go back home and make jihad there. By then, it will be good for jihad at home.”

Home, Miliani explained, is Algeria, the secular North African nation now facing a bitter Islamic uprising after authorities blocked the Muslims from winning elections earlier this year. Miliani apologized for the absence of his translator, a Filipino who, he explained, similarly answered the call to jihad in Afghanistan . The translator will soon return to fight alongside the Islamic Moro National Liberation Front guerrilla army that has been trying to take power in the Philippine island of Mindanao, Miliani said.

As the Algerian spoke, armed militants from Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia and other nations struggling to put down burgeoning Muslim fundamentalist forces at home wandered in and out of the front gate, also biding their time until the next battle in what they depict as a holy war for Islam.

“There’s no question it’s going to be a very big problem when all these people go home,” said an Asian diplomat from one of those secular nations now confronted by an underground Muslim movement. “They don’t know anything but warfare. They’re mercenaries, and even in small numbers, they present a danger to any organized state.”

If these are “mercenaries,” however, the evidence here is that their payoff is mostly religious, not monetary. They may be ready to fight in foreign nations, but most will do so only to defend Islam.

Some analysts also contend that secular regimes in the region are exaggerating the threat posed by these Muslim warriors as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign to excuse their own misrule.

Intelligence sources estimate that at least 10,000 Muslims from as many as 20 countries have trekked in the name of jihad to Afghanistan. An estimated 3,000 remain either there or in Pakistan. Some of the rest are alleged already to have taken their battle far beyond the borders of South Asia.

The Algerian government, for example, asserts that fundamentalist militants involved in recent attacks on its army were trained in Afghanistan. The Tunisian government last year said it uncovered a coup plot involving fundamentalist insurgents from an underground movement called Ennahdha (renaissance) who had fought alongside the Afghan moujahedeen . Authorities displayed a U.S.-made Stinger surface-to-air missile that the insurgents allegedly planned to use to blow up the Tunisian president’s plane. The Stinger is a sophisticated weapon supplied by the CIA to the Afghan guerrillas at the peak of Soviet occupation.

Similarly, Jordan’s interior minister said several of the eight members of the “Army of Mohammed” sentenced to death in 1990 for plotting against King Hussein had received their military training in the Afghan jihad . And many of the Muslim insurgents waging an armed guerrilla war for independence in the strategic north Indian state of Kashmir openly acknowledge that they not only fought in Afghanistan but purchased many of their weapons from moujahedeen stockpiles in and around Peshawar.

“The threat is very serious,” insisted one North African diplomat. “(These people) don’t want to live. They want only to fight. These are desperate people, and all our secular regimes are in danger.”

Many of the Arab warrior-pilgrims who have fought in Afghanistan have been sponsored by the Cairo-based Islamic Brotherhood, which the Egyptians consider a constant threat to the secular regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Just two weeks ago, two Burmese Muslim leaders returning from the Afghan jihad announced in Peshawar that they were returning to Arakan state in western Myanmar (Burma) to battle a brutal, ongoing Muslim purge by the country’s Buddhist army.

The perceived threat from this movable army of jihad is such that several governments have exerted strong diplomatic pressure on Pakistan in recent weeks to take countermeasures. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif quietly answered these behind-the-scenes appeals last week by signing an order to ban all future visas to Muslim warrior-pilgrims and to encourage the ones already here--men like Miliani--to leave.

The order is being implemented by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), which has helped coordinate the moujahedeen’s rebellion against Afghanistan’s authoritarian, pro-Moscow regime.

“The ISI, which dealt with this problem all these years, has been asked to convey to all the moujahedeen leaders that such persons who are here on such a mission are no longer required,” said Gulzar Khan, Pakistan’s refugee commissioner. Khan, who has looked after the 4 million Afghan refugees and moujahedeen fighters who flooded Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, added that if the foreign fighters refuse to leave, they will be deported.

Authorities on the foreign holy warriors in Peshawar stress that diplomatic pressure was not the only factor that led to the ban on young men once received in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation with a deep sense of Islamic brotherhood.

Commented one Western diplomat who has followed the Afghan war for several years: “I see it as a big problem here and potentially in Afghanistan. If there is a lot of pushing and shoving there, and if the U.N. peace plan fails in Afghanistan, these people could play a destructive role. I see that as a bigger problem than if they’re dispersed to a jihad here and a jihad there. And certainly, the Pakistanis don’t want a bunch of people around who are armed to the teeth and more radical and fundamentalist than the official government.”

Tracing the evolution of the Muslim warrior phenomenon, Gulzar Khan also underscored the potential for unrest that the fighters present to Pakistan itself.

The man he credited most with calling the Muslims to jihad in Afghanistan was, in fact, murdered in Peshawar--possibly by the very force he helped recruit. Abdullah Izam, a Palestinian who came to Peshawar in the early 1980s and, in Khan’s words, “galvanized a large number of Arabs to come and participate in the jihad” through books and pamphlets on the concept, was blown up in a car bombing several years ago.

Last year, Jamil ur Rehman, an Afghan moujahedeen leader who relied heavily on financial support from Saudi Arabia and whose army included many Arabs, met a similar fate. He was receiving guests in the courtyard of his stronghold in the Afghan province of Kunar when an Egyptian mercenary knelt before him and, for unknown reasons, shot him dead. Rehman’s bodyguards riddled the assassin with machine-gun fire before he could be questioned.

What will happen when young fighters like Miliani are expelled? Said Khan: “What I foresee for people like him is to go and stay in Afghanistan--a marriage there, perhaps--and I think 3,000 people will not hurt Afghanistan, which has lost more than a million young men to this war.”

Clearly, many of the young fighters cannot go home--at least not yet. Many of the Muslim warriors are Iraqi fundamentalists, all but exiled by the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Others are Syrians, equally unwelcome under President Hafez Assad’s version of Baath Arab secular socialism. And most of the pilgrim-warriors are from Saudi Arabia--the center of Islamic religious pilgrimage that, despite its fundamentalist trappings, is ruled by a Western-backed monarchy. That monarchy is singularly afraid of an Islamic revolt launched by returning veterans of the Afghan jihad .

“What Saudi Arabia did during the Afghan jihad was it encouraged these youngsters, these militants, to come over here,” said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer. “The intelligence services in Saudi Arabia are there only to protect and prolong the royal family. So, when they found men who would be a potential problem, they gave them money, tickets, air fare and the necklace that would bring them martyrdom if they died in jihad, and they sent them here. They sent them here to kill them. It was very simple. This was a ploy.”

Senior Pakistani officials confided that Islamabad has promised governments like the Saudi ruling family that they will share intelligence information on each holy warrior they deport. But at least one senior Pakistani official close to the prime minister reflected the harder Muslim line that remains in the government and that several analysts suspect will dilute the mercenary-expulsion order.

“We’d like them to go. We want them to go. And we will encourage them to go,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “But, so far, there will be no coercion in making them leave.”

The official stressed that most members of Pakistan’s ruling Islamic Democratic Alliance see the foreign fighters not as international warriors to be feared but as selfless heroes to be praised. And he insisted that Afghanistan was not the first battlefield for the jihad--only the most visible.

“The Islamic jihad force has always existed,” he said. “What happened here in Afghanistan is that the Western world has come into contact with these Islamic fundamentalist warriors for the first time.”

World Warriors

Muslim fighters from up to 20 countries have flocked to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Among their home nations:

* China

* Egypt

* India (from Kashmir)

* Iraq

* Jordan

* Myanmar (Burma)

* Philippines

* Saudi Arabia

* Sudan

* Tunisia

Afghanistan’s Nightmare

* THE STRUGGLE: For 13 years, traditionalist Muslim tribesmen known as moujahedeen have battled various Communist regimes in Afghanistan. For much of that time, the United States was a powerful ally, supplying the guerrillas with money and arms. Opposing them was the Soviet Union, which used its army to prop up successive Marxist leaders. In 1989, after U.N-sponsored talks, Moscow withdrew its more than 100,000 troops. Both Washington and Moscow ended military aid to the combatants last winter.

* THE PEACE PLAN: Last week, Afghan President Najibullah, installed in 1986, endorsed a U.N.-brokered truce with the Muslim rebels. It would transfer power from Najibullah to a transitional government, chosen at a meeting in either Vienna or Geneva. Eventually, elections would be held.