Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's jihadist organization, grew out of an agency he cofounded in Pakistan, the Maktab al-Khidmat (Service Office), which provided assistance to the so-called Arab Afghans, Arab volunteers who flocked to Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion to fight alongside their fellow Muslims against the Soviets. Bin Laden developed the idea of keeping these volunteers together to fight wherever there was a need for jihad; thus was born al-Qaeda, meaning "the base," in or around 1988.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden hoped to put al-Qaeda to use defending his homeland, Saudi Arabia, against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's threats to invade in 1990. The Saudi king, however, spurned the offer, instead inviting U.S. forces to establish a presence on Saudi territory. For bin Laden, having infidel soldiers on the sacred land of the Prophet Muhammad's birth was an act that planted the seeds of his hatred toward the Saudi royals and the U.S.

But he did not seriously begin to build al-Qaeda until 1996, when he returned to Afghanistan, having been stripped of his Saudi citizenship because of his ties to violent Islamist groups. Welcomed by the Islamist Taliban regime then ruling in Kabul, bin Laden began attracting Islamist militants from around the world to jihadi training camps in Afghanistan. They came from Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, but also from Chechnya, Kashmir, the Sudan, even the U.S. They drilled like ordinary foot soldiers but some also learned the arts of terrorism: surveillance, bomb-making, poisons, lessons compiled into a compendium called the Encyclopedia of Jihad.

In February 1998, bin Laden and several other militants signed a fatwa saying it was a duty for Muslims to kill Americans, including civilians, wherever possible. Three months later bin Laden and others, including his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician and a leader of al-Jihad, the group behind the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, held a press conference to announce formally the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews.

Bin Laden claimed that the U.S. had declared a new crusade on the Islamic world. For examples, he denounced "massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and Bosnia-Herzegovina." He said Muslims were obliged to unite in order to confront the U.S. and its allies. He urged the Islamic world to establish a caliphate—a system of rule by Islamic law under a holy leader.

In August 1998, al-Qaeda operatives bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, mostly Africans. In 2000, al-Qaeda attacked the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing 17 U.S. service members. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, provoking the U.S. war on Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban, destroyed the al-Qaeda camps and sent Zawahiri and bin Laden into hiding.

The Afghanistan war and a worldwide counter-terrorism effort resulted in the death, capture or scattering of numerous al-Qaeda leaders and fighters and eventually the dismantling of the organization as it had existed. However, jihadi groups around the world continue to affiliate themselves with al-Qaeda and to emulate the organization in tactics and ideology, or at least to be inspired by it. For instance, the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for bombings in Bali in 2002 and 2005, is allied with al-Qaeda. It is thought that there is an al-Qaeda link to the 2005 London bombings. And the organization al-Qaeda in Iraq has been responsible for considerable violence in that beleaguered country.

In periodic audio and video recordings, bin Laden, who is thought to be taking cover somewhere in Pakistan, has welcomed the opportunity for jihadists to challenge the U.S. in Iraq, saying the war is "a golden opportunity" and "a point of attraction and recruitment" for his allies.

Security experts doubt that bin Laden and Zawahiri retain operational control over terrorist groups. But through the tapes the two release from time to time, they may provide inspiration and even broad goals. In 2002, for instance, Zawahiri warned countries against cooperating with the U.S. either in Afghanistan or Iraq; in subsequent years, Spain and Britain, both of which had sent troops to Iraq, were victims of explosions set off by Islamic extremists.

—Lisa Beyer