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.
Formation
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."[1]
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. [2]
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. [3]
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, 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."[4]
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
References
- ↑ Annas, New York Times, January 14, 2001, quoted by Coll, p. 204
- ↑ Jamal al-Fadl testimony, United States vs. Osama bin Laden et al., quoted by Globalsecurity, [1]
- ↑ Brian M. Drinkwine. (January 26, 2009), "The Serpent in Our Garden: Al-Qa'ida and the Long War", Carlisle Papers, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, p. 10
- ↑ Coll, p. 223