Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [27]
Mature propagators are still the talk of the hour in the Islamic jihad of Afghanistan, and the subject of pressing necessity and glaring need. There are still many solutions which lie in the hands of those who are not playing the roles they should.34
In the months after al Qaeda was established, Azzam used his considerable influence in an effort to seize control of the copious amounts of Saudi money flowing into Peshawar under the pretext of humanitarian relief. He strong-armed former friends, spread nasty rumors about those who didn’t play ball, and even called in favors with bank officials to have strategic accounts frozen. When persuasion and politics failed, he turned to force, sending loyalists to beat his opponents and seize their assets. Yet the al Qaeda faction committed to bin Laden was growing in influence. The Saudi had friends in high places, in Afghanistan and back in Saudi Arabia, where donors were becoming concerned about the infighting and the lack of direction. Azzam was forced to create a committee to explore the possibility of exporting jihad to other fronts around the world.35
In late 1988 Azzam was dragged into arbitration over one of these disputes, involving a project account worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The deck was stacked against him. The chief arbitrator was Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, a legendary jihadist ideologue known best by his pen name, Dr. Fadl. Sharif was an Egyptian, a longtime friend of Zawahiri, and a member of the Islamic Jihad. One of Azzam’s trusted lieutenants, a financier with close ties to bin Laden, testified that Azzam had falsified evidence in the case. In the end, Azzam suffered a humiliating loss; he was ordered to relinquish the funds and return the materials he had seized during the dispute.36
The situation continued to deteriorate. Sometime in 1989 his enemies planted dynamite under the pulpit in a Peshawar mosque where Azzam preached every Friday. That improvised bomb failed to detonate, but the next one succeeded. On November 24, 1989—just days after a contentious meeting about money with bin Laden’s supporters—Azzam’s car was bombed.37
The founding father of the Afghan Jihad had been assassinated, quite possibly by one of his former friends. Exactly who did it remains unknown to this day. There were a multitude of suspects, including the CIA and the Mossad, but Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri certainly had means, motive, and opportunity.38
Whoever was responsible, bin Laden took advantage of the situation and began to consolidate his control of the Afghan fund-raising apparatus. In subsequent issues of Al Jihad magazine, which Azzam had founded, the father of the Afghan jihad’s history was rewritten to tell the tale of his support for the global jihad. His death was portrayed as having united the fractious mujahideen factions in Afghanistan—their continued internecine bloodshed notwithstanding.39
Back in Brooklyn, Mustafa Shalabi was caught in the middle of this breaking storm. Although he had long-standing ties to Zawahiri and kept an open channel with bin Laden, he wanted Al Kifah to continue in the direction Azzam had started, specifically by cultivating the Afghan refugees and working to consolidate Afghanistan as a base for future operations.40
Things got worse when Omar Abdel Rahman arrived in New York. Shalabi and El Sayyid Nosair picked up Rahman at the airport when he arrived in 1990. Nosair smelled trouble immediately.
“Each one of them has a different view for the Islamic war,” Nosair told a friend. “They are going to have a clash someday.” Nosair wanted to stay out of it.41
Although Azzam’s rhetoric was sometimes harsh and always focused on jihad, he was also