Life
Atef served two years in the Egyptian Air Force and became an agricultural engineer. He was also a police officer and a member of the group Egyptian Islamic Jihad before he moved to Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion, while operating from Peshawar. He has been credited as having convinced Abdullah Azzam to abandon his life and devote himself to preaching jihad at this time.
Atef was sent to an Afghan training camp where he met Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later introduced him to Osama bin Laden.
He attended two meetings from August 11–20 in 1988, along with Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, Jamal al-Fadl, Wael Hamza Julaidan, and Mohammed Loay Bayazid and eight others, to discuss the founding of "al-Qaeda". Bin Laden later sent a letter to Mohammed Loay Bayazid informing him that Atef and Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri were to each be given 6,500 Saudi riyals monthly, the same as they had been given for their work in Maktab al-Khidamat.
Read more about this topic: Mohammed Atef
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“It were sad to gaze on the blessèd and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)