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Al Qaeda (al-Qaida) is an Islamist terrorist network formed by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden in 1989. It has been associated with a string of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. The most notable of these were the elaborate September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that used hijacked airliners as weapons. Al Qaeda was deprived of its Afghan base and much of its original leadership in the aftermath of September 11. The organization has since become more amorphous than previously. Today local groups take inspiration from bin Laden but largely plan and fund their own attacks. These attacks have come in locales as varied as London, Spain, Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union. Some of these groups target primarily secular and/or pro-Western Middle East regimes in an effort to create a fundamentalist Islamic state. Others focus on the United States and other Western nations that they believe are thwarting this goal. In general, Al Qaeda is only peripherally involved in the Arab-Israeli struggle over Palestine. It has, however, used this struggle to gain support. It also adopted suicide bombings and other tactics developed in this theater that frequently target innocent civilians. Al Qaeda considers Israel to be a tool of the West in the Islamic heartland.

Formation of Al Qaeda

Al Qaeda developed principally among Muslim Arabs who had gone to Afghanistan to fight in what they considered to be a holy war against that country's Soviet occupiers (see jihad). As proxies in this cold war conflict, they received assistance from the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others. After the Soviet Union was driven from Afghanistan in 1989, however, many of these foreigner jihadists did not return home. Instead, they joined forces with an indigenous fundamentalist group called the Taliban. The Taliban took control of the capital city of Kabul in 1996; they established a strict Islamic state in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his associates were allowed to operate freely in that country. There they trained Muslim extremists recruited from the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. Much of Al Qaeda's original leadership was drawn from Egyptian Islamic Jihad. This radical group had been responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat. Al Qaeda's cause was frequently advanced by radical imams in madrassas (religious schools) serving poor children throughout much of the world. These schools were funded largely by Saudi Arabia; the Saudi government attempted to maintain peace at home by supporting radical Islamist causes abroad.

Among the many terrorist acts linked to bin Laden's network was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City. For this act, several men associated with radical Middle Eastern Islamic groups were later tried and found guilty. Bin Laden's followers were also believed to have been responsible for attacks in 1995 and 1996 on U.S. facilities in Saudi Arabia. In addition, they were implicated in the almost simultaneous 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (More than 250 people, 12 of them Americans, died in those attacks.) In retaliation, the United States launched cruise missiles on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. It also attacked a suspected weapons facility in Sudan.

Bin Laden's network was accused of supporting Palestinian terrorist groups. It allegedly operated terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and the remote area in eastern Yemen from which his ancestors had come. It also was believed to have bankrolled Islamic guerrillas in Chechnya and other parts of the former Soviet Union and to have provided weapons to Muslim rebels in Kashmir, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Al Qaeda was further implicated in the suicide bombing attack on the destroyer U.S.S. Cole; this attack killed 17 U.S. sailors in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000. By the turn of the 21st century, bin Laden's network was considered the single greatest threat to U.S security. It relied on encrypted e-mail, cell phones, and satellite communications to avoid detection.

September 11 and the War on Terror

On Sept. 11, 2001, four U.S. commercial airliners were hijacked. Two were flown into the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; from the resulting inferno, both collapsed. A third destroyed part of the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. The fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania. Evidence soon emerged linking Al Qaeda to the attacks, in which almost 3,000 people died. The Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden and his associates. U.S. and British forces then launched retaliatory air strikes on targets in Afghanistan connected to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, beginning on October 7. A broad-based U.S.-led coalition against international terrorism also mounted efforts to track down his followers and cut off their sources of funding.

The Taliban regime swiftly collapsed. It withdrew from the southeastern city of Kandahar, its spiritual center and last major stronghold, just two months after the U.S.-led assault began. The whereabouts of bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar remained unknown, however. Also, many of their supporters had retreated with their weapons to caves in the rugged mountains on the Afghani-Pakistani border. Despite the stunning rout of the Taliban, it seemed clear that the worldwide struggle against bin Laden and his associates would be long and complicated. It was also evident that such Western endeavors in this struggle would have to be precisely targeted. If not, they risked inflaming anti-Western feelings in much of the Muslim world.

By the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda's training camps had been destroyed. Nevertheless, the organization was thought to have operatives in more than 60 countries as its members were dispersed. Efforts to choke off its funding had mixed success. In October 2002 the group's continued influence was demonstrated via a series of spectacular terrorist attacks. These attacks were conducted by members of local militant Islamic groups believed to have ties to Al Qaeda. They included bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed 202 people; the killing of a U.S. soldier in Kuwait; the bombing of a French ship in Yemen; and a deadly takeover of a theater in Moscow by Chechen rebels. The dispersal of Al Qaeda operatives made efforts to combat the network more complicated. This was particularly true as its focus seemed to shift to smaller, less-protected targets outside the United States; these targets symbolized Western culture, religion, or power. The head of Interpol said in November 2002 that the threat of additional terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies was at least as great as it had been before September 11.

A suicide bombing attack on an Israeli-owned resort hotel in Kenya on Nov. 28, 2002, appeared to mark a new effort by bin Laden to link his cause to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That same day, in what many believed to be a coordinated attack, surface-to-air missiles were fired at an airplane full of Israeli tourists as it left Kenya's Mombasa airport. The projectiles failed to hit their objective. Nevertheless, the incident raised fears that other such mobile, shoulder-launched missiles might be targeted at commercial jetliners.

The Iraq War Era

By early 2003 the United States was massing forces in the Middle East in preparation for a preemptive military strike against Iraq. The purpose of the strike was to eliminate alleged weapons of mass destruction that might be used against U.S. targets or sold to terrorists who might do so. To bolster its case, the U.S. government also said that it had uncovered links between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. The Iraq War was launched in March 2003. Doubts about both Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda were generally confirmed in the war's aftermath. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were temporarily eclipsed by this new U.S. mission. Critics charged that the venture into Iraq diverted scarce resources from more-urgent priorities in the war on terrorism.

In a major victory in the war on terrorism, U.S. and Pakistani forces captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan in March 2003. Mohammed was a Kuwaiti and an Al Qaeda operational leader; he was believed to have been the mastermind of September 11 and numerous other terrorist acts. After being held in a secret CIA-run prison for three years, he was transferred to the facility at Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba. Also arrested in Pakistan were Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, who allegedly handled finances for September 11, and another purported top Al Qaeda financier, Moroccan national Yasser Al Jazeeri. Some counterterrorism experts believed that Al Qaeda's initial failure to launch new attacks while the United States was distracted by the conflict in Iraq indicated that the terrorist network was in decline and disarray.

Between Sept. 11, 2001, and March 2004, nearly 3,500 alleged Al Qaeda members had been killed or captured in more than 100 countries. Two-thirds of the organization's known original leadership had been killed, captured, or dispersed. Some of the organization's assets had been frozen. A number of Islamic charities suspected of channeling funds to Al Qaeda had been shut down or were being closely monitored. Nevertheless, experts later came to believe that the organization had rebounded relatively quickly.

The level of violence in both countries increased after the U.S. government had declared major combat in Afghanistan and the military phase of the war in Iraq to be over on May 1, 2003. The war against Al Qaeda was clearly not over. Later that month local extremists believed to be linked to Al Qaeda staged coordinated suicide bombing attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Casablanca, Morocco. It was clear that individual Islamists allied to or supportive of bin Laden had entered Iraq after the war's launch. They may have teamed up with Iraqi insurgents. But a conclusive link between Al Qaeda and the anti-occupation insurgency was difficult to pinpoint. Sunni Muslims wanted to restore their privileges. At the same time, foreign and local Shiite and Sunni Islamists sought to undermine the emergence of a secular, pluralistic, and modern Iraq. This situation severely tested U.S. efforts to establish democratic institutions there. It also called into question the validity of U.S. president George W. Bush's doctrine of preemptive warfare.

One of the alleged leaders of the group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq was Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; he was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on June 7, 2006. It was unclear whether Zarqawi's group was allied with or a rival to Al Qaeda. Its alleged links to Saddam Hussein were generally discounted. Nonetheless, the group was believed to be responsible for a spectacular series of suicide bombings and beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq. These murders were seen as part of a coordinated effort to deter Arab nations from recognizing the new Iraqi government. There were further indications that Iraq had become a new base from which militants could plan and launch attacks. Al Qaeda in Iraq also claimed responsibility for the Nov. 9, 2005, suicide bombings at three Western-owned hotels in Amman, Jordan; more than 60 people died in the blasts.

A year of suicide attacks in Iraq had claimed far more lives than had similar acts in the Palestinian-Israeli second intifada launched in September 2000. The brutal actions attributed to Zarqawi and other insurgents were condemned by the world's moderate Muslim majority. Despite this condemnation, the images of U.S. military operations, dead Iraqi civilians, and the abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison fueled anti-American anger in Muslim-majority countries. In this way, the situation in Iraq bolstered recruitment for Al Qaeda and its allies throughout the Muslim world. This was true even after the return of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, 2004, and the holding of democratic elections there in January 2005.

By this time, the lack of an effectively functioning central command had significantly changed the nature of the international terrorist movement. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 extremists were believed to have been trained in Afghan camps between 1996 and the post-September 11 U.S.-led military strikes that drove most of bin Laden's foreigners out of the country. These strikes had reduced the camps to rubble. Deprived of their main operating base, it became far more difficult for Al Qaeda and similar groups to plan and organize large-scale attacks. Instead, the militants who had trained in Afghanistan returned to their native lands. There they recruited and trained young local activists. They also joined forces with local groups that had few direct links to Al Qaeda but shared similar radical agendas. They launched attacks against "soft" targets such as tourist and religious sites, particularly in Muslim states closely allied to Washington; these included Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf narrowly survived two Al Qaeda-linked assassination attempts in December 2003. Al Qaeda was believed to have provided money and training for some of these attacks, which were often carried out by local organizations. In many cases, however, the group was the inspiration for rather than the director of the attacks.

The first major assault against a Western capital since September 11 took place in Madrid, Spain, on Mar. 11, 2004. Islamist-linked bombings of that city's commuter rail network killed 191 people; they also contributed to the defeat of a Spanish government that had been one of the strongest European allies in the war on terrorism. The precise affiliations of the plotters, who were mostly Moroccan, remained unclear. Nevertheless, the incident reflected the increasingly complex network of alliances in the world of international terrorism. It appeared that Al Qaeda had decided to recruit within indigenous Muslim communities in targeted countries. It then allowed these recruits to operate independently. The fact that regional terrorist cells were acting increasingly autonomously made them in some ways more dangerous. It became harder to identify and track their members and zero in on them with direct military action. There was also mounting evidence that Al Qaeda had long recruited supporters and operatives in the United States. In their more amorphous new form, bin Laden's followers and sympathizers continued their efforts to unite the Islamic world and destabilize U.S. allies.

The July 2004 arrest of Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan in Pakistan and the subsequent seizure of computer records and other material provided a significant new source of intelligence about Al Qaeda. This intelligence included information about possible new targets in the United States. It also provided information that the organization had been regenerated under new and younger leadership after the killing or capture of most of its top officials in the aftermath of September 11. A number of suspected Al Qaeda operatives were subsequently arrested in Britain and Pakistan. Previous allegations that bin Laden's fortune was bankrolling current Al Qaeda activities were later abandoned. There was evidence that the group had become financially self-sustaining through donations. UN sanctions and the U.S. war on terrorism had largely been unable to stem this source of financing. Except for September 11, most of the Al Qaeda attacks have been low tech and relatively low cost. Some cells, operating independently, have relied on petty crime to finance their activities. Regardless, Al Qaeda was clearly committed to conducting major complex operations. Some experts believed that the fighting in Iraq would advance this goal by training a new generation of skilled and battle-hardened operatives.

By 2005 it was estimated that as many as 4,000 people had been arrested worldwide on terrorism-related charges. Between Sept. 11, 2001, and June 2005 the U.S. Justice Department had filed terrorism-related charges against more than 400 people. Convictions had been won against only about half of them; most of these were for minor infractions such as fraud and immigration violations. Only 39 of those charged had been convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. One of two U.S. citizens declared to be enemy combatants was returned to Saudi Arabia in 2004 after his usefulness as an intelligence source had been exhausted. The second, Jose Padilla, was formally charged in a U.S. civilian court in January 2006 with plotting to murder, kidnap, and maim abroad. By that time Padilla had been held in military custody for more than three years. He was convicted in 2007; in January 2008, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. (Originally, it had been alleged that Padilla had plotted to set off a radioactive device in a U.S. city; his detention had led to a legal battle over the U.S. president's power to hold U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants." His conviction seemed to undercut the Bush administration's contention that terrorist suspects should not be tried in the U.S. civilian justice system.) A third U.S. citizen, Iyman Faris, pleaded guilty in May 2003 to plotting to sever the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.

A British citizen, attempted airline "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison by a U.S. court in 2003. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national, pleaded guilty in April 2005 to conspiracy charges related to the September 11 attacks. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by a U.S. federal court in May 2006. Australian citizen David Hicks pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism and attempted murder in 2007; his plea averted a controversial military trial. Hicks was sent home to serve a relatively short sentence.

Critics maintained that the U.S. Justice Department was frequently overly aggressive. Many of its charges were later shown to have been erroneous or exaggerated. One example was the mistaken holding of a Portland, Oreg., attorney as a material witness to the terrorist bombings in Madrid. The right of the U.S. government to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or foreign-born terrorism suspects with links to Al Qaeda was eventually denied by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ruled, on June 28, 2004, that such prisoners could not indefinitely be denied access to courts or lawyers; it also declared that U.S. citizens had the right to due process. Four years later, it again ruled that such detainees had the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. civil courts. Such detentions at the U.S. naval base at Guant‡namo Bay had been used by militant hostage-takers elsewhere to justify their actions.

On July 7, 2005, more than 55 people died and hundreds were injured when three bombs on London subway trains exploded almost simultaneously at the height of the morning rush hour; these explosions were followed by another on a double-decker bus. A group claiming affiliation with Al Qaeda quickly declared responsibility for the attacks. The London attacks were particularly significant because they involved suicide bombers and had been carried out by British citizens. Another plot, designed to destroy multiple U.S.-bound commercial airliners after takeoff from London, was averted in 2006; a third, designed to set off car bombs in the heart of London in 2007, was also averted. A string of attacks in southern Thailand, and deadly bombings in Algeria in 2007, gave evidence of Al Qaeda's reach.

A September 2006 agreement between Pakistan's government and militants in the lawless Pakistani-Afghani border region was considered a setback for the battle against Al Qaeda. In 2008 the Pakistani government again attempted to negotiate with tribal leaders to quell militant activities. By this time, a variety of loose-knit militant groups were based in Pakistan's untamed tribal areas; they also had an increasingly visible presence in Peshawar. Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were still believed to be hiding in the northwestern territories bordering Afghanistan. It was unclear what degree of command the two leaders still maintained over the planning of additional terrorist attacks. What was clear was that extremist activities were extending ever deeper into Pakistan as political turmoil there increased. This was particularly true after the December 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

In late 2008, Saudi Arabia launched procedures to try hundreds of alleged terrorists under Islamic law; the verdicts might thus have greater legitimacy than the rulings of the military tribunals favored by other countries. The first military war-crimes trial at Guant‡namo Bay was that of bin Laden's former driver, Yemeni Salim Hamdan; it began in July 2008. Hamdan received a relatively light sentence in what was seen as a defeat for the Bush administration; but the administration said that Hamdan would be held indefinitely as an "unlawful enemy combatant" even when he became eligible for release. By this time only one "enemy combatant" was still held on U.S. soil—joint Saudi-Qatari national Ali al-Marri. Under Bush's successor, Barak Obama, al-Marri was formally charged with supporting terrorism and conspiracy in a U.S. civil court in March 2009.

A report from the U.S. State Department stated that in 2006 more than 14,000 terrorist attacks had taken place worldwide; this was a nearly 30% rise over 2005. Most of the increase was due to the escalating violence in Iraq (the site of 45% of the attacks) and Afghanistan. About 5,800 of the attacks resulted in at least one death. Terrorist attacks in Iraq later declined when the United States sent additional troops there and paid Sunni tribal leaders to oppose Al Qaeda. A new Status of Forces Agreement governing the U.S. military presence in Iraq became effective on Jan. 1, 2009. It paved the way for an eventual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Iraq remained unstable, however. At the same time, the security situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan worsened. Al Qaeda also gained new recruits in such places as Algeria and Somalia. Many terrorism experts were convinced that the world had entered a new kind of war against an amorphous enemy. This struggle was therefore likely to last for a very long time.

Further Reading:

Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (2002).

Benjamin, Daniel, and Simon, Steven, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War against America (2002).

Brisard, Jean Charles, and Martinez, Damien, Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda (2005).

Burke, Jason, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (2004).

Feldman, Noah, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (2003).

Greenberg, Karen J., Al Qaeda Now: Understanding Today's Terrorists (2005).

Gunaratna, Rohan, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (2002).

Jacquard, Roland, In the Name of Osama bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the bin Laden Brotherhood (2002).

Lewis, Bernard, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003).

Marlin, Robert O., commentator, What Does Al-Qaeda Want? Unedited Communiqués (2005).

Napoleoni, Loretta, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (2005).

Nasiri, Omar, Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story (2006).

v Pargeter, Alison, The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe (2008).

Riedel, Bruce, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (2008).

Wittes, Benjamin, Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (2008).

Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2007).