The Caravan

Abdallah Azzam the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar Pakistan he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here in the first in-depth biography of Azzam Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam''s extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents CIA agents and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is however also a story of displacement exclusion and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.