Captured al Qaeda terrorists being held at the Camp X-Ray military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have provided U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies with a chilling account of al Qaeda's bloody rise to power in the wake of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in 1989.

Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve in 1979, Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Azzam - a seasoned veteran of the Palestinian jihad against Israel (Hamas' military wing is still called the Abdullah Azzam Brigades) - resigned his teaching post at the King Abdul-Aziz University in Saudi Arabia and emigrated to Pakistan to assist in the recruitment and training of mujahideen, Muslim holy warriors.

Azzam utilized his professorial skills to instruct the mujahideen in the extremist theology of radical Islamic scholars such as Shiekh ul-Islaam Taqi-ud-Deen Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad Al-Wahhab, and Sayyeed Qutb (see "Moderate Muslims Must Seize The Reins of Islam" DefenseWatch, Feb. 26, 2003.)

Azzam's written works, Join the Caravan and Defense of Muslim Lands, became the manifesto of Muslim fanatics who sought to foment an armed global jihad against the West and the perceived "puppet governments" of the Middle East. He preached that the coupling of armed conflict and Islamist theology was the only pathway for "true Muslims" to restoring the greatness of the umma, the Islamic community.

By the time the Soviet Army officially withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, Azzam had become the foremost Sunni Islamist figure in the world and instilled the Islamist community with a divine myth of invincibility.

However, civil war erupted as Afghan warlords vied for control of the war-torn nation's provinces in the face of a power vacuum left by the Soviet withdrawal. Azzam bitterly blamed the United States and its Israeli allies for what he perceived was the undermining of the Afghan victory.

He continued to proliferate his wartime global network of highly trained and well-financed militant Islamists, the Pakistan-based Makhtab al Khadimat (Office of Services). The chief purpose of the Makhtab al Khadimat was to be the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan - a process Azzam expected to take decades.

But Azzam had grievously miscalculated. His infamy during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets had attracted the most virulent and militant Islamists, the largest faction of whom were members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, seasoned veterans of the wave of terrorism in Egypt that had led to the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Chief among these men were Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the late Mohammad Atef, and the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. They believed that the jihad must be conducted on a global scale, engaging several different fronts concurrently - particularly against the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel and secular regimes in the Middle East. Moreover, as disciples of the late Islamist theologian Muhammad Abdus Salam Faraj, the Egyptian faction believed that the failure of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Pakistani President Mohammed Zia al-Haq to institute governments based upon Islamic law, the sharia, made them infidels and necessitated their assassination. 

According to Sri Lankan intelligence expert Rohan Gunaratna in his book Inside Al Qaeda, a "high percentage of radicalized Egyptian intellectuals, professionals and military wish to see an Islamic regime in power." Failing to overthrow the Egyptian police state from within, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad wanted to focus their efforts on destabilizing the regime from without.

Azzam, however, believed that Afghanistan would one day serve as a place of refuge from which mujahideen would be able to emulate the Prophet Mohammad's hijra to Medina before embarking on a jihad (see "Successes - and a Saudi Betrayal - in Terror War," DefenseWatch, Nov. 27, 2002). He adamantly opposed the undertaking of a global jihad before the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan and he flatly rejected Faraj's heretical theology on the justification of the murder of moderate Muslim leaders.

U.S. intelligence sources now believe that it was al-Zawahiri and Atef who planted the car bomb that killed Azzam and two of his sons in Peshawar, Pakistan on Nov. 24, 1989.

Immediately after the assassination, the Egyptian faction moved to seize control of the global network that Azzam had created. The defeat of arguably the most formidable secular Arab nation, Iraq, by an American-led coalition in 1991, and the stationing of "infidels" in the holy land of Saudi Arabia further cemented their brand of Islamist ideology in a generation of Muslim youths.

The Egyptians committed what Azzam warned against in his last will and testament as the "sin of abandoning jihad in Palestine," and transformed the Makhtab al Khadimat into what is today recognized as al Qaeda - an organization that had been almost completely absent from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the fall of 2002.  By 1991, al Qaeda had largely abandoned operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and relocated to Sudan as a guest of President Hassan al-Turabi.

Al Qaeda would return to Afghanistan in 1996, and under the Taliban-al Qaeda regime almost all of Azzam's former Muslim allies were either driven into exile (Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) or killed (Ahmed Shah Masood).

Sheikh Rahman relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he became heavily involved in the Al-Farook Mosque and the main office of the al Kifah Refugee Center, Azzam's main fundraising, recruiting and planning organization in the United States. The head of al Kifah in Brooklyn was Mustafa Shalabi, who, like his mentor Azzam, believed funding should be most heavily allocated to the continuing effort to create an Islamic state in Afghanistan. 

Shalabi was found murdered in his home on Feb. 26, 1991, apparently by disciples of Sheikh Rahman. At the time of Shalabi's murder, al Kifah had over $2 million in its coffers, a portion of which would later fund Sheikh Rahman's disciples' attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Egyptian faction continues to be at the forefront of al Qaeda operations. U.S. Army infiltrator Ali Muhammad, lead 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta, Rabbi Meir Kahane's assassin El Sayyid Nosair, and almost all of the terrorists indicted in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were all members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad faction of al Qaeda.

Up until this juncture, Western terrorist analysts errantly viewed the Egyptian Islamic Jihad as a subsidiary of al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden's guiding hand. However, it now appears that the leadership of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and Ayman al-Zawahiri in particular, have been the driving force behind al Qaeda.

The diabolical Osama bin Laden may ultimately be viewed by historians as one of the most notorious dupes in modern times. As Abdullah Azzam's most trusted disciple, he was extremely well liked by the mujahideen and provided a sense of continuity after Azzam's assassination. Moreover, despite his lack of military expertise or strategic planning ability, his sizable personal fortune and ability to raise funds in the oil-rich Gulf States made him an extremely valuable figurehead for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad's operation. 

Western intelligence analysts have generally agreed that bin Laden's infamous 1998 fatwa religious decree against "Jews and Crusaders" was ghost-written, possibly by al-Zawahiri.

A victim of his own narcissistic and grandiose dream of becoming caliph of a pan-Islamic state, bin Laden is blinded by his hatred for Jews and the West and fails to recognize that he is little more than a pawn of al-Zawahiri and his Egyptian cohorts.

In a historical context, bin Laden is the Hindenburg to al-Zawahiri's Hitler.

With the capture of senior al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Shaikh Mohammed this past weekend, the Western news media has clamored that this may be a giant leap in finally locating Osama bin Laden.

While there is no question that bin Laden must be captured or "otherwise brought to justice" for his culpability in the heinous acts of terrorism perpetrated by al Qaeda, we are continuously undermining the war on terrorism by focusing on the strategic value of his death or capture.  In many respects, the sickly bin Laden - now largely devoid of his vast personal wealth, will be more valuable to the Islamist movement as a "martyr" than as a fugitive in the remote wilderness of northern Pakistan.

The immediate focus of the war on terrorism should be the death or capture of al-Zawahiri and the permanent dismantling of his Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Tom Knowlton is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at TKnowltonDW@aol.com.