text: In the 1980s, Azzam traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America, including 50 cities in the United States, to raise money and preach about jihad. He inspired young Muslims with stories of miraculous deeds, mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets. According to his stories also, angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors. Steven Emerson's 1994 television documentary Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America includes an excerpt from a video of Abdullah Azzam in which he exhorts his audience to wage jihad in America (which Azzam explains "means fighting only, fighting with the sword"), and his cousin, Fayiz Azzam, says "Blood must flow. There must be widows; there must be orphans." Azzam recruited the Al Kifah Refugee Center as the Marktab al-Khidamat's official branch in the United States, the only country to have one aside from Pakistan. Azzam also radicalized El Sayyid Nosair, the man responsible for the assassination of Meir Kahane in 1990. In 1989, the FBI office in Dallas started investigating Azzam for his role in recruiting fighters for the Soviet-Afghan War.
  After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Azzam became disillusioned with the breakout of the Afghan Civil War in which former Muslim members of the mujahideen fought each other. Azzam initially supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin in the war, but after meeting Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley switched his preference to Jamiat-e-Islami. He compared Massoud to Napoleon and told audiences in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, "I have seen the future of jihad. It is Massoud!" This put him at odds with bin Laden, who continued supporting Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.