On November 24, 1989, radical Palestinian university professor and member of the Muslim Brotherhood Abdullah Azzam was assassinated by unknown assailants in Afghanistan where he had been involved in the anti-Soviet jihad that had broken out in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. (see also Communist coup of April, 1978).
Azzam was born near Jenin in northern Palestine in 1941. He fought in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He took his doctorate from Cairo's al-Azhar University in 1973, then taught Islamic sharia law in Jordan before moving to Abd al-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where one of his students was Osama bin Laden. In 1984, he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan where he coordinated support for the Afghan resistance.
Azzam was a militant jihadist who preached that the jihad in Afghanistan was an obligation for all Muslims everywhere. After Afghanistan had been made safe for Islam once more, Muslims would then be duty-bound to carry the jihad into all other lands that had once been Muslim but had fallen away, including Spain (which he referred to by its Muslim name "Andalusia"). Other areas Azzam singled out for jihad were Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, and Tashkent. (See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 144-147)