Azzam was born in the West Bank in 1941, land later occupied by Israel. He answered his first call to battle with the Palestinian resistance there, which he criticized because it was, he said, mere politics insufficiently rooted in Islam.
He departed for Cairo and an academic career, then left that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He was among the first of the Afghan Arabs to arrive in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an upland basin ringed by hills that rise into mountains north and west en route to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.
Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's unruly Northwest Frontier Province, has for centuries been an international crossroads for traders, warriors and rough statesmen. In the 1980s, Azzam made it the capital of the Afghan resistance and the destination for tens of thousands of Muslims who joined the holy war.
Saudi Arabia's national airline offered special jihad fares. Arab governments sent emissaries and opened offices for dozens of state-sponsored charities to assist the fighters.
For a decade, parts of Peshawar were transformed into a sort of Little Mecca.
"It was a bustling Arab town -- Arab restaurants, bazaars, bakeries. During the jihad there were Arab newspapers and magazines published here. There were men in kaffiyeh, women fully covered in black," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who became a leading chronicler of the Afghan wars.
It was, said Gen. Hamid Gul, who formerly headed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, "the first international brigade of the modern time."
Among those who answered Azzam's call was a former student, Osama bin Laden. Azzam's intellectual fervor and Bin Laden's bank book combined in an organization that eventually became Al Qaeda.
The Saudi government sent dozens of missionaries and millions of dollars. The United States funneled arms and more millions through Peshawar.
Gun violence had been a way of life and death in the region long before the Soviet war. As one Pushtun saying puts it: A man's jewelry is his gun. But there had never been anything on this scale before.
Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, was installed as executor of American and Saudi interests. The service created a new logistics operation just to distribute the flood of armaments. Convoys of 10-ton trucks filled with rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and antiaircraft missiles were sent out daily on the cross-country trip from the docks in Karachi to Peshawar and the Afghan interior beyond.
