Sheikh Ahmed Yassin;
Martyr and true leader

The assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a figure whose symbolic stature on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict far surpassed the actual potential of his paralyzed, feeble body, is certain to become one of those pivotal events around which passions and hatreds coalesce Sheikh Yassin was already an icon in the Arab world, now he is a martyr, said the International Herald Tribune.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, former Hamas spiritual leader, born in January 1937. He was a refugee in Gaza after 1948 and worked as teacher, preacher, and community worker. Yassin confined to a wheelchair after a sports accident at the age of 12.

Yassin was assassinated in March 22, 2004 when an Israeli helicopter missile hit his car as he was leaving a mosque in the northern Gaza Strip.

He joined the Muslims Brotherhood and adopted the movements belief calling for the rule of Islam everywhere. After returning to Gaza, Yassin became completely involved in politics. He established the Islamic Centre in Gaza in 1973, which controlled all religious institutions afterwards.

Sheikh Yassin was arrested in 1984 and sentenced to 13 years in jail for establishing a military organization that calls for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Yassin founded a religious organization aiming at fighting non-religious factions in the territories, and carrying out Islamic "Jihad" operations against the Israel occupation. This organization used monies from Islamic groups in Jordan to be able to acquire needed quantities of weapons to fight back the Israelis constant attacks. Yassin was imprisoned until May, and then he got released in a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and the organization of Ahmed Jibril.

During the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded the Hamas group that stands up till now as one of the strongest the Islamic resistance movement; Hamas means zeal in Arabic.

The organization gained popular support in the territory, expressing in its covenant the conspiracy theories of the "Protocols of the elders of Zion" and a commitment to wage war against the Jews and raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was held from May 1989 until October 1997, when he was released in exchange for two Mossad agents following a failed assassination attempt in 1997 by the Mossad on a Hamas member in Jordan.

The West demands from us that we stop the resistance. Instead of asking the occupiers to leave our land, they ask us to surrender to the occupier. The peace that reinforces occupation, settlements, and the exiling of the Palestinian people, is not really peace, said Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

On September 6, 2003, the Israeli air force dropped a bomb on a Gaza building where Hamas leaders had gathered, but Yassin escaped with a small wound on his hand.

On March 22, 2004, he was assassinated by an Israeli missile, as he returned from a mosque in Gaza City at daybreak. Seven others were killed and many wounded.

For Muslims, the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin represents a watershed event, perhaps signaling a turning point in the Arab-Israeli struggle and in the overall Western-Muslim conflict that has recently taken on global proportions with the U.S. claimed war on terrorism.