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Intel - Terrorism
Abdullah Azzam
"Godfather of Jihad"

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

Azzam, Godfather of Jihad

• Born in 1941 in the village of As-ba'ah Al-Hartiyeh (Seilat al-Harithia village), a few kilometers northwest of the city of Jenin, in the Jenin Sanjak (District), then administered as the British Mandate of Palestine. 

• Azzam wrote an article that appears to oppose the killing of noncombatants, women and children during jihad.

• He went to Khadori College and studied agriculture

• Worked as a teacher in the south Jordanian village of Adder

• He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Damascus

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

• He joined the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood after he left the West Bank

Sheikh Azzam

• Azzam then went to Egypt to continue Islamic studies at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University where he earned a Master’s degree in Sharia.
•  He returned to teach at the University of Jordan in Amman, but in 1970, the Jordanian military expelled PLO militants from Jordan during what became known as Black September, thereby preventing the use of Jordanian territory for anti-Israeli and anti-western attacks. 
• In 1971, Shaikh Azzam received a scholarship to once again attend Al-Azhar University where he obtained his Ph.D. in the Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Usool ul-Fiqh) in 1973.

• During theological studies in Egypt, Azzam met Omar Abdel-Rahman, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and other followers of Sayyed Qutb, an extremely influential leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who had been executed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966
• Azzam adopted elements of Sayyed Qutb’s ideology, including beliefs in an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and non-Islamic world, and in the necessity of violent revolution against secular governments to establish an Islamic state.

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 278]

Abdullah Azzam

• Worked as lecturer at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
• It is where he met Osama Bin Laden.

• The Saudi regime responded with repression, and in 1979, Azzam was expelled from the university at Jeddah.
• He then moved to Pakistan to be close to the nascent Afghan Jihad.

Azzam

• When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shaikh Azzam issued a fatwa, Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which killing occupiers of your land (no matter what their faith) was fard ayn (a personal obligation) for all Muslims.
• The edict was supported by Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti (highest religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz.

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, pp. 278-279]

• In Pakistan in 1980, Shaikh Azzam began to teach at International Islamic University in Islamabad.
• Soon thereafter, he moved from Islamabad to Peshawar, closer to the Afghan border, where he then established Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organize guest houses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan to prepare international recruits for the Afghan war front.

• see also 
  [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 279]

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 279]

Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and his son-in-law Abdullah Anas in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

• In 1984, Abdullah Azzam, with his deputy Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s son-in-law, create an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), known in English as the Services Office.
• It is also known as Al-Kifah.
• This organization will become a key node in the private funding network for the Afghan war.
• Once the anti-Soviet forces' victory was assured, Azzam and bin Laden decided they wanted to keep the jihad alive, and export it globally.

• Initially, Azzam runs it while bin Laden funds it.
• They create a guesthouse in Peshawar, Pakistan, to help foreign volunteers connect with rebel forces in Afghanistan.
• Prior to this time, the number of such volunteers is very small, perhaps only several dozen.
• But the number begins to dramatically expand.
• Donors will include the Saudi intelligence agency, the Saudi Red Crescent, the Muslim World League, and private donors, including Saudi princes.
• MAK/Al-Kifah begins fundraising in the US one year later.

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 279]

• In the 1980s, Shaikh Azzam traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America, including 50 cities in the United States, to raise money and preach about jihad.

• Branches open in over 30 US cities, as Muslim-Americans donate millions of dollars to support the Afghan war against the Soviet Union.
• The most important branch, called the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, opens in Brooklyn, New York.

• He inspired young Muslims with stories of miraculous deeds, muhajideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets.
• Angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors.

• Critics complain these stories proliferated because Sheikh Abdullah paid mujahids to bring "him wonderful tales." 

• This book was written by Shaykh Abdullah Azzam during the Afghan-Soviet Jihad in the 1980's. It deals specifically with first hand accounts of the miracles that occurred during this Jihad.

• In a journal article "Join the Caravan" published April 15 1987, Azzam defined "al-Qa'ida al-Sulbah," or "the solid base," as the vanguard of global jihad.

• He had connections with Yasser Arafat and is said to have had a role in founding Hamas, however he broke with the Palestinian struggle on the basis that it was polluted with a secular national liberation ideology, rather than being purely Islamic.

• The pan-Islamic ideal was important to Azzam, for whom "geographic[al] borders that have been drawn up for us by the Kuffar (non-Muslims)" between Muslim countries were part of a conspiracy to prevent the umma from realising the potential of a trans-national Islamic state.

• Bin Laden’s mentor Azzam frequently visits and lectures in the area.
• The Brooklyn office also raises a considerable amount of money for MAK/Al-Kifah back in Pakistan.

• In 1988, he tells “a rapt crowd of several hundred in Jersey City, ‘Blood and martyrdom are the only way to create a Muslim society… However, humanity won’t allow us to achieve this objective, because all humanity is the enemy of every Muslim.’”

• The Lofty Mountain is perhaps the last book written by the late Shaykh Dr. Abdullah Azzam before he was killed. Part I is the biography of the late Tameem Al-Adnani, one of Dr. Azzam's closest comrades of the Soviet-Afghan war.
• Part II is a unique first-hand account of the infamous battle 'Lion Den Operation' in Afghanistan.

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, pp. 284-285]

• In 1989 CE, a lethal amount of TNT explosive was placed beneath the pulpit from which he delivered the sermon every Friday.
• It was such a formidable quantity that if it had exploded, it would have destroyed the mosque, together with everything and everybody in it.
• Hundreds of Muslims would have been killed, the bomb did not explode.

• see also
  [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• [Source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• Killed in Pakistan by Remote-Detonated Bomb with Azzam on November 24, 1989 with his two sons.
• It is uncertain who killed him.
• They planted three bombs on a road so narrow only a single car could travel on it.
• It was the road Shaykh `Abdullah would use to drive to the Friday prayer.
• That Friday, the Shaykh, together with two of his sons, Ibrahim and Muhammad, along with one of the sons of the late Shaykh Tamim `Adnani (another hero of the Afghan jihad), drove along the road.

• The car stopped at the position of the first bomb, and the Shaykh alighted to walk the remainder of the way.
• The enemies, lying in wait, then exploded the bomb.
• Speculation regarding Azzam's killers has included rival Egyptians, Osama bin Laden or one of his supporters.
• Among the dead was one of the sons of the late Sheikh Tameem Adnani.
• The explosive that time consisted of an estimated 20 kg of TNT.
• see also
  [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• Suspects in the assassination include competing Afghan militia leaders, Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad.
• One much talked about suspect is the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (later to merge with Al-Qaeda), particularly its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
• Azzam's son-in-law, Abdallah Anas, accused the EIJ of killing his father-in-law on the grounds that it "considered Sheikh Abdullah Azzam to be a rogue who had strayed from the right path of the faith ... Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was murdered because he had issued a fatwa in which he stated that once the Russians were ejected from Afghanistan, it would not be permissible for us to take sides."

• Others suspect the killing was part of a purge of those who favored moving the jihad to Palestine.
• In March 1991, Mustapha Shalabi, who ran the Maktab al-Khidmat, the Services Bureau in New York and was also "said to prefer a `Palestine next` strategy, turned up dead in his apartment."
• He was replaced by Wadih el-Hage, who later became bin Laden's personal secretary.
• Osama bin Laden has also been accused of being a suspect in the murder, but seems to have remained on good terms with Sheikh Azzam during this time.