There’s no shortage of documentaries or books tracing the “road to 9/11,” or the decadeslong wars that followed in the attack’s wake. But surely one of those paths both began and ended on a street in Peshawar, Pakistan, in November 1989, not far from a mosque on a dead-end road.
Many of the architects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are well known. But one of the key figures in the creation of al Qaeda has largely been overlooked in major news accounts. Abdullah Azzam made al Qaeda and all its evils possible.
Azzam was “the father of modern Islamic terrorism,” the scholar Bruce Riedel noted on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. He was a “Palestinian who still inspires attacks on America around the world but is virtually unknown to most Americans.”
“More than any other cleric,” West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center noted, Azzam was the “strategic founder of al-Qaeda.”
Born in 1941 in what was then British-ruled Mandate Palestine, Azzam joined the Muslim Brotherhood in his early teens. Azzam grew up in Jordan “with an abiding hatred for Israel,” Riedel observed.
Azzam and his family left Jordan after Israel’s victory against its Arab opponents in the 1967 Six-Day War. He then went to Al-Azhar University in Cairo and obtained a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence.
Just like Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam was a teacher. He served on the faculty at the University of Jordan before his activism and ties to the Brotherhood got him dismissed.
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After a brief stint at a university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Azzam became a teacher of the Quran and Arabic languages at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 1981. It proved to be a fateful appointment.
In 1979, the modern Middle East was born.
The Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran, proving to Islamists the world over that a modern nation-state could be overthrown and a government, based on Islamic law, put in its stead.
In Saudi Arabia, hundreds of jihadis captured the Great Mosque in Mecca in a bloody siege that left hundreds dead. In December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, leading to a decadelong war that helped bleed the Soviets dry but which also became a rallying cry for Islamists the world over.
That year, in neighboring Afghanistan, the Palestinian Islamist found his jihad.
“I felt as if I had been reborn,” Azzam would later say of his early visits to the war-torn country. “Jihad for him was like water for a fish,” his wife Umm Mohammed said.
Azzam regularly returned to Saudi Arabia, where he recruited young men for the jihad in Afghanistan. He frequently stayed at properties owned by Osama bin Laden, the son of a billionaire developer.
Azzam served as bin Laden’s mentor and muse. “Bin Laden revered Azzam, who provided a model for the man he would become,” the author Lawrence Wright noted in his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Bin Laden soon began running a halfway house for recruits and creating special military training camps for budding jihadis to join Azzam’s “caravan.”
In 1984, Azzam convinced bin Laden himself to leave Pakistan for a training camp in Afghanistan. In September of that year, the two men met in Mecca. “The two men agreed to create a more formal role for the Arabs in Afghanistan, although there were few Arabs actually fighting the jihad at that time,” Wright pointed out. Bin Laden promised financial support for the Arab mujahideen (“holy warriors”), which, at their height, would only number 3,000.
Azzam issued a fatwa, or religious edict, arguing that jihad was obligatory for every able-bodied Muslim. As the scholar Shiraz Maher noted, Azzam elevated the importance of jihad and made it “the foremost obligation after arriving at a belief in Islam itself.”
“Neglecting jihad,” Azzam once wrote, “is like abandoning fasting and praying.”
In an effort to further bolster recruitment, Azzam and bin Laden created the Services Bureau in a house that bin Laden was renting in the University Town section of Peshawar.
The nucleus of what would become al Qaeda was arguably born there.
Azzam used the building as a headquarters for his magazine, Jihad, and other publishing efforts. “We are trying to satisfy the thirst for martyrdom,” he said of his budding empire of books, magazines, videos, and cassette tapes.
From the beginning, Islamists placed a premium on propaganda. Decades later, Azzam’s writings continue to inspire jihadis.
Azzam’s long-standing connections to the Muslim Brotherhood provided him with a network to recruit from, but he couldn’t compete with bin Laden’s money or his ability to fundraise.
“In a place where magical legends sprouted so easily, Bin Laden soon became a part of jihadi lore,” Wright said. “Many of the Arab Afghans swore fealty to Azzam, but it was Bin Laden who was paying their rent.”
In 1986, Ayman al Zawahiri joined the so-called Arab Afghans in Peshawar. Zawahiri had been a jihadi of some renown long before bin Laden. He and a clique of his fellow Egyptians would soon supplant Azzam as the primary influence in Bin Laden’s orbit. Zawahiri sought to undermine Azzam, whom he viewed as the chief competitor for bin Laden’s attention.
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Azzam’s arguments for the need to create an al-Qaeda al-Sulba (“firm foundation”) inspired the creation of the infamous terrorist group in 1988.
Azzam wanted to create an Islamic state. But he wanted to focus on destroying Israel first. He helped birth Hamas and sought to train its operatives in Afghanistan. Yet his plans “ran counter to Zawahiri’s intention of stirring revolution within Islamic countries,” Wright observed.
Rumors were spread by the Egyptians that Azzam was guilty of mismanaging money and that he may have been a CIA plant. In Peshawar, fights broke out in mosques between supporters of the different cliques, and placards appeared demanding that Azzam be put on trial.
An explosive was soon discovered under the rostrum of a mosque where Azzam led prayers. Not long after, on Nov. 24, 1989, a roadside bomb killed Azzam and two of his sons as they drove to the mosque.
Azzam’s murder remains unsolved. But his bloody legacy is undeniable. We’re still living with it today.