Al-Qaeda: Aims, Beliefs and Bin Laden
From the Anti-Soviet Jihad to a Global Network
Al-Qaeda did not appear on 11 September 2001. By that date the network had been organising, recruiting and bombing for thirteen years. Its origins lie in the Soviet–Afghan war of 1979–89, when thousands of Arab volunteers travelled to Pakistan to fight alongside the Afghan mujahideen. They were recruited, housed and funded through a Peshawar office called Maktab al-Khidamat, set up in 1984 by the Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam and a young Saudi engineering graduate called Osama bin Laden. The CIA, Pakistan’s ISI and the Saudi government all helped finance the wider war. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Azzam and bin Laden disagreed about what to do next. Azzam wanted the volunteers to defend Muslim communities. Bin Laden wanted a permanent fighting force. In August 1988, in a meeting at Peshawar, that force was given a name: al-Qaeda — Arabic for ‘the base’.
Al-Qaeda was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, in August 1988, at the end of the Soviet–Afghan war. It was built around veterans of that war and Maktab al-Khidamat, the Arab-volunteer office bin Laden had co-run since 1984. The network was already in place a full thirteen years before 9/11.
Bin Laden: From Saudi Heir to Stateless Militant
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventeenth son of a Saudi construction billionaire. He grew up wealthy and devout, was radicalised at university by exposure to the writings of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, and travelled to Pakistan within weeks of the 1979 Soviet invasion. The young bin Laden brought money, bulldozers and his family’s construction expertise to the mujahideen cause. He returned to Saudi Arabia a hero in 1989. The break with his country came in August 1990, when, after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the Saudi king accepted American troops on the soil of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden offered to raise an Arab volunteer army to liberate Kuwait instead and was rebuffed. He never forgave that decision. Bin Laden was stripped of Saudi citizenship in 1994 and moved his operation first to Sudan and then, in May 1996, back to Afghanistan.
Bin Laden’s stated aims combined religion and grievance. He wanted Western, especially American, troops out of Saudi Arabia and the wider Muslim world. He wanted to topple Arab governments he considered corrupt and un-Islamic, beginning with the Saudi royal family and the Egyptian state. He demanded the destruction of Israel. Eventually he hoped to restore a unified Islamic state, or caliphate, governed by his strict reading of Wahhabism. These were not mainstream Muslim aims. Most Islamic scholars rejected bin Laden’s reasoning, particularly his willingness to kill civilians. But the aims gave the network a coherent, exportable ideology that could speak to grievances from Cairo to Karachi.
The 1996 and 1998 Fatwas
From his new base in Afghanistan, bin Laden issued two declarations of war on the United States in the form of religious rulings. In August 1996 he published a long fatwa titled ‘Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places’. The grievance was the continuing American military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War. In February 1998, with the Egyptian Islamist Ayman al-Zawahiri and other militants, bin Laden issued a second, sharper fatwa under the banner of the ‘World Islamic Front’. It declared it the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans — military and civilian — wherever they could be found. Mainstream Islamic scholars condemned both rulings. Bin Laden, untrained as a cleric, had no authority to issue them. But the fatwas gave his followers a rhetorical licence the network was about to use.
Embassy Bombings and the USS Cole
On 7 August 1998, almost simultaneous truck bombs exploded outside the United States embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Around 224 people died, most of them African civilians, and over 4,000 were injured. President Bill Clinton responded with cruise-missile strikes on al-Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan and a pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan. The strikes missed bin Laden, who had left the camps hours before. The FBI placed bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list. On 12 October 2000, two suicide bombers in a small boat detonated alongside the American destroyer USS Cole as it refuelled in Aden harbour, Yemen, killing 17 sailors. CIA and FBI investigators concluded that al-Qaeda was responsible for both attacks. Plans for an even larger strike inside the United States, code-named ‘the Planes Operation’ by the network, had already been approved by bin Laden in late 1999.
The 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004, concluded that the United States had ample warning that an al-Qaeda attack on American soil was being planned. A presidential daily briefing on 6 August 2001 was titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US’. The CIA had tracked two of the future hijackers to a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 but lost them. FBI field offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis sent memos in summer 2001 about Arab men taking flight lessons. The Commission found the failures were of imagination, structure and information sharing rather than effort — the agencies were watching for a different kind of attack.
Why the Network Worked
By 2001 al-Qaeda was unlike any earlier terrorist organisation. It was small at the centre — perhaps a few hundred sworn members — but franchised outwards through training camps in Afghanistan that had hosted, by US estimates, around 20,000 fighters since 1996. Recruits returned to their home countries to set up local cells. Funding came from Gulf donors, charities, and bin Laden’s own dwindling fortune. Communication was by courier, encrypted email and satellite phone. The network was decentralised enough to survive the loss of any single cell, but coordinated enough to plan a synchronised four-airliner attack on New York and Washington. That combination of tight central planning and loose external reach was what made al-Qaeda dangerous in a way Saddam’s state-bound regime never was.
Three pre-9/11 al-Qaeda attacks established the network as a global threat: the East African embassy bombings of 7 August 1998 (around 224 dead), the failed Millennium plot at Los Angeles airport in December 1999, and the USS Cole bombing of 12 October 2000 (17 American sailors dead). The 1998 fatwa told the world what al-Qaeda intended; these attacks proved it could deliver.