Al-Qa'ida
Established by Usama Bin Ladin in 1988 with Arabs who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, al-Qa‘ida’s goal is uniting Muslims to fight the West, especially the United States, as a means of defeating Israel, overthrowing regimes al-Qa‘ida deems “non-Islamic,” and expelling Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries. Al-Qa‘ida’s stated goal is the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate (right) throughout the world. Al-Qa‘ida issued a statement in February 1998 under the banner of “the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders,” saying it was the duty of all Muslims to kill US citizens—civilian and military—and their allies everywhere. The group merged with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (al-Jihad) in June 2001, renaming itself “Qa‘idat al‑Jihad”—the Jihad Base.
On 11 September 2001, 19 al-Qa‘ida suicide attackers hijacked and crashed four US commercial jets—two into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and a fourth into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—leaving nearly 3,000 people dead or missing. Al‑Qa‘ida also directed the 12 October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 US sailors and injuring another 39, and conducted the bombings in August 1998 of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people and injured more than 5,000 others. From 2002 to 2005, al-Qa‘ida, using its own operatives or surrogates and sympathetic groups, backed attacks in Tunisia, Indonesia, Kenya, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
In 2004, Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s group declared allegiance to al-Qa‘ida and outlined a plan to expand the unrest in Iraq. In 2005, Bin Ladin’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, publicly claimed al‑Qa‘ida involvement in the 7 July 2005 bombings in the United Kingdom. In 2006, British security services foiled an al-Qa‘ida plot to detonate explosives on up to 10 transatlantic flights originating from the London Heathrow airport. Also in 2006, al-Zawahiri announced that the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat had joined al-Qa‘ida and changed its name to al-Qa‘ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb. In 2007, al-Qa‘ida’s physical safehaven in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area provided the group the physical—and psychological—space to meet, train, expand its networks, and prepare new attacks. |
