Al-Qaeda

Template:TOC-right al-Qaeda is both terrorist organization and a "brand name" of affiliates, all of an extreme Salafist ideology centered around reestablishing the Caliphate through armed jihad. Its immediate predecessor was the Services Office created to support the Afghanistan War (1978-92) by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. It was joined by Egyptian Islamic Jihad under Ayman al-Zawahiri. They, in turn, trace their origins to modern Salafism derived from the medieval concepts of Ibn Tamiyya.

The group has been conducting terrorist operations since the mid-1990s, including the 9-11 attack, when its leadership was in Afghanistan. It has become a distributed worldwide organization, but the leadership is believed to be in the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Origins

Its core began with the Services Office in Pakistan, supporting the resistance in the Afghanistan War (1978-92), a Pakistan-based groups supporting the Afghans, but also helping foreign volunteers, especially Arabs, to come to Afghanistan. Abdullah Azzam was its leader, with Osama bin Laden as his deputy. Bin Laden had an informal relationship with Saudi General Intelligence Department (GID), international Islamic organizations and Saudi-backed Afghan leaders. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said it had no contact with Bin Laden during this time, although they did interact with Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which, in turn, worked with GID. The CIA, however, did fund a U.S. division of the Services Office, al-Khifa.

In the summer of 1989, Azzam became concerned with the approach of bin Laden and Zawahiri, who wanted to expand the fight. Azzam's concern was finishing Afghanistan, and then dealing slowly with other Muslim states. Zawahiri wanted to act against Hosni Mubarrak of Egypt. Bin Laden thought worldwide. Others were concerned with Pakistan. Zawahiri told his son-in-law, Abdullah Annas, that he was worried about Bin Laden if he stayed with the radicals: "This heaven-sent man, like an angel; I am worried about his future if he stays with these people."

Azzam was assassinated in November 1989; there are many conjectures but no consensus on who did it. Bin Laden took over the Services Office.

Al-Qaeda proper was created in 1989, organized by Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi and bin Laden. Volunteers gave an oath of bayat to bin Laden. Their motivation was to carry on after the Soviets left.

Its first combat operation was the siege of Jalalabad, in 1989, where bin Laden demonstrated himself to be brave but tactically unskilled. He and his followers, often Arabs motivated by martyrdom, participated in the Afghan civil war until 1992, when Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Bin Laden had come home to Saudi Arabia and witnessed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He offered his fighters to the Saudi government, who infuriated him by accepting Western troops on Saudi land. Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, saw bin Laden's personality change after that meeting, "...from a calm, peaceful gentle man interested in helping Muslims to a person who believed he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness."

Complaining overtly, they stripped him of his citizenship. Exiled to Sudan, his hate for the Saudi royal house continued to motivate him.

Sudan

At this point, from 1992 to 1996, al-Qaeda was principally a centralized organization, operating under the patronage of Hassan al-Turabi. Eventually, al-Turabi expelled them, but not before al-Qaeda had supported the Somalian resistance.

During this period, al-Qaeda both conducted operations, and began its pattern of cooperating with other militant groups, some of which would later merge. One of these, Jamaat al-Islamiyya or the Islamic Group, was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, was the spiritual leader of the faction that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, of which the tactical leader was Ramzi Yousef. Yousef is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had not yet bonded with any major group.

Al-Qaeda carried out a series of programs against the Western involvement in Somalia. It began with a December 1992 of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, used by American military personnel traveling to the U.N. Operation RESTORE HOPE. Bin Laden issued a fatwa in 1993, telling Somalis to attack and eject Americans.

Its first known attack against Americans was a December 1992 bombing of a Yemeni hotel in Aden used by American soldiers traveling to Somalia to participate in Operation RESTORE HOPE. By April 1993, bin Laden issued a fatwa calling upon all Somalis to attack American forces and eject them from their country; he sent trainers and planners, including Mohammed Atef, to Somalia. They played a role in the Battle of Mogdishu on June 5.

In August 1994, two Spaniards are shot to death three French Muslims in a hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco. The investigation was reported to have established telephone contact between the killers and the Office of Services, and learned that the suspects had been in Afghanistan.

Four Algerians belonging to the Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France jet in December 1994, apparently planning a suicide attack on the Eiffel Tower, but French counterterrorists diverted them to Marseilles and successfully killed them in a raid there.

Al-Qaeda did direct the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing.

Bin Laden, who was not a cleric, issued a fatwa in August 1996, as the “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” (i.e., Saudi Arabia).