Background
Nawaf was born in Mecca in Saudi Arabia to Muhammad Salim al-Hazmi, a grocer. He traveled to Afghanistan as a teenager in 1993. CNN's preliminary report following the attacks claimed that an unnamed acquaintance relayed "He told me once that his father had tried to kill him when he was a child. He never told me why, but he had a long knife scar on his forearm", and claimed that his older brother was a police chief in Jizan.
In 1995, he and his childhood friend, Khalid al-Mihdhar, joined a group that went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian War. Afterwards, Nawaf returned to Afghanistan along with his brother Salem, and Mihdhar. In Afghanistan, they fought alongside the Taliban against the Afghan Northern Alliance, and joined up with Al-Qaeda. Nawaf al-Hazmi also fought alongside Chechnyans sometime around 1998, possibly with his brother and Mihdhar, and returned to Saudi Arabia in early 1999.
Read more about this topic: Nawaf Al-Hazmi
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