Abu Anas al-Shami

Abu Anas Al Shami was a Palestinian cleric, teacher, writer, and jihadist born in Kuwait. Originally from the Palestinian West Bank town of Yabroud, Abu Anas obtained an Islamic studies degree at Madinah University in Saudi Arabia.During the 1980s, he went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union. There he met the Islamic scholar Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. In the mid-1990s he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina to teach Islam in towns and refugee camps. He then returned to Jordan and became a preacher in the neighborhood of Sweileh.In the late 1990s, the Jordanian officials shut down an Islamic center that al-Shami had established in Amman on the grounds that it was promoting a fanatical interpretation of Islam.In 2003, al-Shami joined Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in north-eastern Iraq. He was appointed to the advisory council of al-Tawheed wal-Jihad and soon became Zarqawi's second in command.