AL QAEDA
In 1979, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) moved to invade Afghanistan. A mujahideen organization headed by Bin Laden and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK), fought to keep out those who they had deemed ‘infidels’. The United States of America (USA) chose to provide the organization with arms and funds, aware that if the USSR lost the Middle East, it would be a great blow to communism all over the globe.
Shortly before his death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” was not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujahideen and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
“Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’ punishment.
“For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant ‘You’ll be logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘you will receive a warning . . .’ If the case were more severe, they would talk about ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will be punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al Qaida.‘
[According to a Pakistani major] The database was divided into two parts, the information file, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’, where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file, ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat’, where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. Those two files were kept in one file called ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word ‘Al Qaida’ which is means ‘The base’
“A lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by the French Rapid Action Force contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and … Al Qaida.”
—Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
After nine years, the USSR withdrew from the Middle East, leaving the remaining mujahideen free to overthrow the Afghan government. But the mujahideen leaders were unable to agree on a structure for governance, and soon fell into chaos and disarray, constantly reorganizing alliances between the regional warlords.
The mujahideen’s success in repelling one of the world’s two superpowers from a Muslim land most likely had a significant impact on Bin Laden. To his mind, the USSR’s defeat set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism. Bin Laden, accordingly, concluded that confronting the United States would produce a similar result: U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East.
Thus, the movement which came to be known as Al Qaeda was conceived. Broad outlines began to take shape during 1987 and 1988. In 1989, Azzam was assassinated — killed in the explosion of a car bomb, generally blamed on a rival Afghani faction. Several rumors circulating at the time blamed Bin Laden himself for the attack. After the death of Azzam, the Al Qaeda formally split from MAK to become a jihadist movement in its own right.
“Al Qaeda is a radical Sunni Muslim umbrella organization established to recruit young Muslims into the Afghani Mujahideen and is aimed to establish Islamist states throughout the world, overthrow ‘un-Islamic regimes’ expel US soldiers and Western influence from the Gulf, and capture Jerusalem as a Muslim city.“
—US Department of Defense
Since then, at least two fatwas or religious rulings have been made. The first was issued on February 1998 by Osama Bin Laden and it states that:
“The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian or military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it”
Bin Laden regards the U.S. military presence as a continuation of the Crusades, a series of wars during the Middle Ages in which Western Christians sought to capture the Holy Land from Muslims
Then, on 14 May 1998, The London Al-Quds al-‘Arabi published an article saying that clerics in Afghanistan had issued a fatwa that emphasized the necessity to move U.S. forces out of the Gulf region. Addressing Muslims all over the globe, the Afghan ulema (Ulemas are the guardians of legal and religious traditions on Islam) had said:
“The enemies of Islam are not limited to a certain group or party; all atheists are enemies of Islam, and they take one another as friends. There must be jihad — based on the rules of the Shari’ah — against the United States and its followers. If Muslims are lax in their responsibility, the enemies of Islam will occupy the two holy mosques as well, just as they occupied the al- Aqsa Mosque. This fatwa–with the evidence and the rulings issued by early and current ulema, on which it is based–is not merely a fatwa issued by the ulema of a Muslim country, but rather a religious fatwa that every Muslim should adopt and work under.”
George Bush, the U.S. president, tries to explain. “We face an enemy that has an ideology,’’ Mr. Bush says. “They believe things. The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of the way we think.”
Bin Laden counters this in a videotape sent to broadcast on Al-Jazeera, a TV station based in Qatar. In the video, Bin Laden accused Bush of misleading Americans by saying the attack was carried out because Al Qaeda “hates freedom.” The terrorist leader said his followers have left alone countries that do not threaten Muslims. “We fought you because we are free … and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security, we undermine yours,” Bin Laden said.
“The current goal of Al Qaeda is to establish a pan-Islamic Caliphate throughout the world by working with allied Islamic extremist groups to overthrow regimes it deems “non-Islamic” and expelling Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries.”
-The Terrorism files
On September 11, Al Qaeda delivered on its promise. In Bin Laden’s own words, they “struck some of America’s best buildings, the place where they are softest. And this America then is filled with fear from the north, south, east, and west, thank God.”
He said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.
“While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women.”
The attack soon became one of the most devastating in American history, with almost 3,000 people killed, the destruction of four commercial airliners, the collapse of both World Trade Center Towers, and the damaging of the Pentagon fortress.
“Al Qaeda cannot take on an organized army. It will try to go around it by striking directly at the center of power and culture of a society and bypass the military in the process.”
Chuck Spinney, Pentagon Defense analyst
Al Qaeda, in this case, may be showing great foresight or long-term planning. There is evidence that many of Al Qaeda’s leaders and main personages left Afghanistan, where their main base and training camp is located, before the bombing of the Twin Towers in America. They did not wait to see the public’s reaction, they knew that the attack would have tremendous effects on everything, especially travel.
While the September 11 attack is the most prominent of Al Qaeda’s to date, they have made numerous hits, most with devastating results. There is actually some question as to whom the attacks should be attributed to. Some of these actions may not be directly planned by the Al Qaeda, but committed by other militant groups inspired by their tenets and strategies.
On December 29, 1992, Al Qaeda planted three bombs at the hotels where American troops were staying in Aden, Yemen. In 1993, Al Qaeda operatives were said to have assisted in the shooting down of U.S. helicopters in Somalia. Two bombings in Saudi Arabia (1995 and 1996) are believed to be the work of either Al Qaeda or Hezbollah.
A bombing in Riyadh of a U.S. military facility during November 1995 killed 6 people. On June 1996, American military personnel were killed in the Khobar Towers bombing. Al-Qaeda is also believed to have been behind the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the August of 1998, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 5,000 others.
Al Qaeda also conducted The March 2004 bomb attacks on Madrid commuter trains, which killed nearly 200 people and left more than 1,800 injured, the May 2003 car bomb attacks on three residential compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the November 2002 car bomb attack in Mombasa, Kenya. Several spring 2002 bombings in Pakistan. The April 2002 explosion of a fuel tanker outside a synagogue in Tunisia. The October 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing.
Al Qaeda is not always successful though, a couple of examples of their failures being their plan to attack the Tourists visiting Jordan for millennieal celebration, their plan to bomb the U.S. warship USS The Sullivans. and a failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli jetliner with shoulder-fired missiles.
Since 9/11, Al Qaeda has made numerous hits, including killing 11 German tourists in a historic synagogue in Indonesia on April 2002, bombing a French oil ship off the shore of Yemen in October 2002, and on November 2002, they bombed an Israeli owned hotel in Kenya. Al Qaeda was said to have contemplated bombing a nuclear factory before the Twin Towers, but decided against it, opting for a more symbolic attack.
After the attack on 9/11, The united states waged war on Afghanistan, though they claimed that they were not at war with a country but an individual and a network. Their enemy was not just a handful of wealthy, religuosly eccentric men, but a philosophy of zealotry and extremism.
In December 2001, thousands of Al Qaeda operatives were found in a cave complex called Tora Bora in the mountain ranges of eastern Afghanistan. Only 23 Al Qaeda fighters were captured, and Omar Samad (spokesman, Republic of Afghanistan) says that it was a missed opportunity. A lot of firepower was used, but not enough attention was paid to the escape routes connected to Pakistan. The attack ultimately failed.
Since Al Qaeda lost its base in Afghanistan and its training camps, it has morphed into something that is both less centralized and more spread out. It has spawned franchise operations from Spain to Singapore and is evolving from an organization into an anti-western ideology for muslims around the world.
Al Qaeda is only one of the many Islamist Terrorist groups that span the globe. They work together, forming alliances. Al Qaeda has been known to work with Hezbolla, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, The Libyan Islamic Fighting group, The Islamic Army of Aden (Yemen), Jama’at al-Tawhid wal Jihad (Iraq), Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Kashmir), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Salafist Group for Call and Combat and the Armed Islamic Group (Algeria), Abu Sayyaf Group (Malaysia, Philippines), and Jemaah Islamiya (Southeast Asia).
Al Qaeda is less cohesive in membership with a more open and diffuse structure, meaning that individuals or local terrorist groups under Al Qaeda are able to operate without direct orders from the central command units. This is probably why it has survived for so long despite global onslaught.
Its unusual structure, more flat than other terrorist groups, which tend to be pyramidal, is believed to be the reason why said group is being particularly difficult to eradicate. Its unusual structure encourages out-of-the-box thinking and allows local groups and sympathizers to carry out missions in the name of Al Qaeda without a direct link to Bin Laden himself.
The result is that even if Bin Laden is killed or captured, that’s not going to solve the problem. He is actually treated as a middle-eastern ‘Robin Hood’, by the tribes along the Afghan-Pakistan border. He has, in their own words, ‘attacked America, the great oppressor’.
In the words of Robert Baer, a Former CIA field officer…
“As long as there are underlying causes for terrorism, more and more people will join Al Qaeda, and they may be more adept than the previous generation.”
SOURCES:
• http://www.terrorismfiles.org/organisations/al_qaida.html
• http://www.terrorismfiles.org/organisations/faces_of_al_qaida.html
• http://www.terrorismfiles.org/individuals/usama_bin_laden.html
• http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137095,00.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda
• http://www.september11news.com/OsamaBinLaden.htm
• http://stpeteforpeace.org/why.did.sept.11.happen.html
• http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_701610346/Al-Qaeda.html
• http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_701505592/bin_Laden_Osama.html
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9126/
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9235/
• http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/15411245.htm
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9156/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9135/
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9154/
• http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/12942
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/8948/
• http://www.cfr.org/publication/9155/
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/faqs/
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/etc/today.html
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/alqaeda.html
• http://www.intellnet.org/documents/200/060/269.html
• http://www.ict.org.il/inter_ter/orgdet.cfm?orgid=74#history
• http://www.ict.org.il/inter_ter/orgdet.cfm?orgid=74#ideology
• http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/misc/janes010928_1_n.shtml
• http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ladin.htm
• http://terrorismfiles.org/organisations/abu_sayyaf_group.html
• http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=3836
• http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4131
• http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/09/censored-ny-times-terror-plot-expose.html
• http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/al_qaedas_grand.html
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3519414.stm
• http://www.bond.org.uk/networker/2003/july03/opinion.htm
• http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DFED.htm
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-090206qaida,0,2016849.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Epicurealis 