Abdullah Yusuf Azzam - Assassination

Assassination

In 1989, a first attempt on his life failed, when a lethal amount of TNT explosive was placed beneath the pulpit from which he delivered the sermon every Friday. The Arab mosque was in the University Town neighbourhood in western Peshawar, in Gulshan Iqbal Road. Abdullah Azzam used the mosque as the jihad center, according to a Reuters inquiry in the neighborhood. Had the bomb exploded, reportedly it would have destroyed the mosque, and killed everybody in it.

But then on November 24, 1989, Muhammad Azzam was driving his father and brother to Friday prayers in Peshawar, when unknown assassins detonated a bomb as the vehicle approached; lying in a narrow street across from a gas station, the explosive had a 50 metre detonation cord which led to the sewerage system where the assailant presumably waited.

According to Time magazine Waheed Muzhda had noticed what he assumed was a crew doing routine road maintenance working on the culvert where the bomb was placed, the day before the assassination.

Azzam and his sons were buried near the same site as his mother the year before, the Pabi Graveyard of the Shuhadaa' (martyrs), in Peshawar.

Suspects in the assassination include competing Islamic militia leaders, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad.

Since the Soviet Union had withdrawn all troops from Afghanistan by this time, the CIA would not seem to have an obvious reason to assassinate Azzam. Many 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 Azzam during this time. However, it was reported that Bin Laden and Azzam also had a major dispute on where Al Qaeda should focus their operations. Bin Laden favored using the organization to train fighters in various parts of the world whilst Azzam favored on just keeping the training camps in Afghanistan.

Yet another actor accused of the hit is Iranian intelligence, an active adversary of Salafi Islam. In 2009, Jordanian double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi claimed knowledge of Jordanian Dairat al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah cooperation with the CIA to set up the assassination.