Word: azzam
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...long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah-the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam's who was one of the many heirs to a huge...
...King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What's more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity...
...first, bin Laden mainly raised money, especially among rich Gulf Arabs, for the Afghan rebels, the mujahedin. He also brought in some of the family bulldozers and was once famously using one to dig a trench when a Soviet helicopter strafed him but missed. In the early 1980s, Abdullah Azzam founded the Maktab al Khidmat, which later morphed into an organization called al-Qaeda (the base). It provided logistical help and channeled foreign assistance to the mujahedin. Bin Laden joined his old teacher and became the group's chief financier and a major recruiter of the so-called Arab Afghans...
...exhausted Soviets finally quit Afghanistan. With his mentor Azzam dead at the hands of an assassin and his job seemingly done, bin Laden went home to Jidda. The war had stiffened him. He became increasingly indignant over the corruption of the Saudi regime and what he considered its insufficient piety. His outrage boiled over in 1990. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, bin Laden informed the royal family that he and his Arab Afghans were prepared to defend the kingdom. The offer was spurned. Instead, the Saudis invited in U.S. troops for the first time ever. Like...
...past Hamas publicly celebrated successful suicide bombers, but it was the Israelis who, after their investigation of Issa's ring, announced the identities of Sufiyan Jabbarin, 26, the Jerusalem bomber, and his Ramat Gan counterpart, Labib Azzam, 22. Hamas' silence, activists say, was meant to conceal the identities of the bombers' accomplices. "We don't want Israeli security to know the circles from which we are operating," says Amjad, who is connected to the Hamas military wing in the Gaza Strip...