UBL got his start by taking over the MAK Service Organization during the period that the CIA was using it as a global organizing front for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
The U.S. channeled funds through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to the Afghan Mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation in a CIA program called Operation Cyclone.[75][76]
At the same time, a growing number of Arab mujahideen joined the jihad against the Afghan Marxist regime, facilitated by international Muslim organizations, particularly the Maktab al-Khidamat,[77] whose funds came from some of the $600 million a year donated to the jihad by the Saudi Arabia government and individual Muslims—particularly independent Saudi businessmen who were approached by bin Laden.[78][page needed]
Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the "Services Office", a Muslim organization founded to raise and channel funds and recruit foreign mujahideen for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, was established by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and bin Laden in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984. MAK organized guest houses in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, and gathered supplies for the construction of paramilitary training camps to prepare foreign recruits for the Afghan war front. Bin Laden became a "major financier" of the mujahideen, spending his own money and using his connections with "the Saudi royal family and the petro-billionaires of the Gulf" in order to improve public opinion of the war and raise more funds.[79]
Omar Abdel-Rahman
From 1986, it began to set up a network of recruiting offices in the U.S., the hub of which was the Al Kifah Refugee Center at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. Among notable figures at the Brooklyn center were "double agent" Ali Mohamed, whom FBI special agent Jack Cloonan called "bin Laden's first trainer,"[80] and "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman, a leading recruiter of mujahideen for Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda evolved from the MAK.
Beginning in 1987, Azzam and bin Laden started creating camps inside Afghanistan.[81]
U.S. government financial support for the Afghan Islamic militants was substantial. Aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen leader. and founder and leader of the Hezb-e Islami radical Islamic militant faction, alone amounted "by the most conservative estimates" to $600 million. Later, Hekmatyar "worked closely" with bin Laden in the early 1990s, when US support had ceased.[82] In addition to hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, Hekmatyar also received the lion's share of aid from the Saudis.[83] There is evidence that the CIA supported Hekmatyar's drug trade activities by giving him immunity for his opium trafficking that financed operation of his militant faction.[84]
MAK was an MB offshoot, and Azzam was an important MB leader:
http://www.pwhce.org/azzam.html
Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941-1989)
Also Known As The Godfather of Jihad Abdullah Al-Zam
Biography Dr Abdullah Azzam was both a scholar and a mujahid of immense importance to the development of contemporary Islamic radicalism, particularly in the foundation of al-Qaeda. Born in West Bank Jordan in 1941, he was a child when Israel was founded. He joined the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood before he had come of age, and was involved in actions against Israel.1
1 Introductory biographical notes to Abdullah Azzam, Defence of the Muslim Lands.)
Azzam obtained a PhD in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) at al-Azhar University, Egypt, in 1973, where he became friends with the Qutb family, Sheikh 'Umar Abd el-Rahman2 and Ayman al-Zawahiri. He became a lecturer at Amman University but was obliged to leave due to his radical views, and resumed his academic career as a lecturer at Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia, where he influenced a generation of Saudis, including Usama bin Laden.3
2 Leader of Gamaa Islamiyya.
3 Peter Bergen, Holy War Inc, p50,55.
He had connections with Yasser Arafat and is said to have had a role in founding Hamas,4 however he broke with the Palestinian struggle on the basis that it was polluted with a secular national liberation ideology, rather than being purely Islamic.5 The pan-Islamic ideal was important to Azzam, for whom "geographic[al] borders that have been drawn up for us by the Kuffar (non-Muslims)" between Muslim countries6 were part of a conspiracy to prevent the umma from realising the potential of a trans-national Islamic state.
4 Esposito, Unholy War, p7.
5 Bodansky, Bin Laden, p11.
6 Defence of the Muslim Lands, Chapter four.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Azzam produced a fatwa (religious proclamation), Defence of the Muslim Lands, and had it confirmed by high-ranking clerics including Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti (highest religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz. The fatwa declared that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads and that killing kuffar in those countries was fard ayn (a personal obligation) for all Muslims. He founded Mekhtab al-Khadimat (Services Office, MAK), establishing guest houses in Peshawar, Pakistan and training camps in Afghanistan, working closely with Usama bin Laden from an early stage.7 Many recurring elements in bin Laden's declarations duplicate the ideas Azzam expressed in works such as Defence of the Muslim Lands.8 It was also during this time that Azzam, lecturing in Islamabad, supervised the PhD thesis of Mullah Krekar, who went on to be the leader of Kurdish terrorist organisation Ansar al-Islam.
7 Chasdi, Tapestry of Terror, p297. Bergen, Holy War Inc, p54.
8 See for example, Abdullah Azzam, Join the Caravan.
9 Abdullah bin Omar, The Striving Sheik: Abdullah Azzam, Nida'ul Islam, 14th issue, July-September 1996.
Also reproduced with alterations in Rubin and Rubin, Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East, p63.
11 Zeidan, The Islamist View of Life as a Perennial Battle, in Rubin and Rubin, p23. See also Defence of the Muslim Lands, chapter one; "One of the most important lost obligations is the forgotten obligation of fighting."
11 By 'takfiri' is meant post-Qutbists who condemned Egyptian society as non-Muslim and absolutely rejected collaboration with the Government.
12 Reeve, The New Jackals, p169.
Azzam's message was a radical one. The struggle in Afghanistan was a model for future struggles, with the objective of establishing an Islamic Khillafat (Caliphate, Islamic empire) spanning all Muslim lands, and eventually the world.9 He agreed with Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj that jihad was a vital but forgotten duty11 - Azzam's trademark slogan was, "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues." This intoxicating message, breathtaking in its expansiveness, played an important role in the ideological formation of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Krekar and many other Islamic radicals.
External Enemies Between 1966 and 1979, Egyptian post-Qutb 'takfiris'11 saw the destruction of the near enemy (the Egyptian regime) as a prerequisite for attacks on the far enemy (Israel), and condemned those who allied themselves with the regime in order to attack Israel for placing (Egyptian or Arab) nationalism ahead of the pan-Islamic ideal. Azzam's approach to this question, and the experience of fighting a defensive war against an external enemy in Afghanistan, turned this understanding on its head. Those who begged indifference to the 'foreign' war in Afghanistan were recognising artificial national barriers between Muslims. It is this shift which caused pan-Islamist terrorism to change its modus operandi from intra-Muslim terrorism to the global terrorism of al-Qaeda.
On 24th November 1989, Abdullah Azzam and two of his sons were killed in Peshawar when their car exploded. It is not known who planted the bomb.12 (Many believe that it was UBL, or his backers, who had Azzam assassinated.)
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