Abdullah Azzam “mentored Osama bin Laden and co-founded Al-Qaeda,” Israeli Cabinet Minister Amichai Chikli said.
Turkey recently inaugurated a mosque in the Gaza Strip in the name of Salafi theologian Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli said on Sunday.
“What a ‘gesture’ from Turkey: Funding a mosque in Gaza named after Abdullah Azzam—the man who mentored Osama bin Laden and co-founded Al-Qaeda,” the Israeli minister wrote in a post on X.
Azzam, an Islamic scholar from Silat al-Harithiya, a village near Jenin in Samaria, is widely considered the “father of the global jihad,” having been bin Laden’s mentor before being assassinated by a car bomb detonated by unidentified assailants in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1989.
