Tracing the origins of Al-Qaeda

Post Comment   Email Story   Print Story   Read Comments

1/1/2003 GMT

The origins of al-Qaeda can be traced to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when a cadre of non-Afghani, Arabic fighters joined the largely United States and Pakistani-funded Afghan mujâhidîn anti-Russian resistance movement. Al-Qaeda was a leading fundraiser and recruitment agency for the Afghan cause in arab countries. Before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 al-Qaeda was already beginning to place itself in opposition to the United States, United Kingdom, and their allies, specifically in their sending troops to Saudi Arabia in preparedness for ending the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Al-Qaeda says that both the U.S. and U.K. are oppressive toward Muslims, citing the invasion and occupation of Iraq, ("Iraq war"), the presence of military bases in several Islamic countries and U.S. support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict, when attempting to recruit people to their cause.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are senior members of al-Qaeda's shura council.

Overview

Although "al-Qaeda" is the name of the organization used in popular culture, the organization rarely uses the name to refer to itself. Indeed the use of the name "al-Qaeda" dates from early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation. Bin Laden himself said in 2001, "We used to call the training camp al-Qaeda ["the base"]. And the name stayed."

Al-Qaeda believes that western governments, and particularly the American government, interfere in the affairs of Islamic nations against the interests of Muslims. Their grievances have included: the provision of economic and military support to regimes perceived by al-Qaeda as oppressive of Muslims (particularly the US and its support for Israel), the vetoing of United Nations condemnations of Israel, attempts to influence the affairs of Islamic governments and communities, direct support by means of arms or loans for anti-Islamist Arab regimes, troop presence in Muslim countries, and the American and British 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The military leader of al-Qaeda is widely reported to have been Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. Its previous military leader, Mohammed Atef, was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Afghanistan in late 2001.

History of al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda evolved from the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) — a Mujahidin organization fighting to establish an Islamic state during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a founding member of the MAK, along with Palestinian fighter Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The role of the MAK was to channel funds from a variety of sources (including donations from across the Middle East) into training Mujahidin from around the world, and to transport the combatants to Afghanistan.

Bin Laden and the MAK have been aided by the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as by the United States, which channelled all of its support via the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, with the ultimate goal of fighting communism by embroiling the Soviet Union in a lengthy an expensive war in Afghanistan.

In an interview with French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski - US President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981 - discussed the CIA's role in establishing, training and funding armed groups in Afghanistan to attack and destablize the pro-Soviet Afghan government. Carter gave his approval to the covert action in 1979, and the plan was successfull: within six months the Soviet army had crossed the border into Afghanistan, prompting Brzezinski to write to Carter, "we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."

After a protracted and costly war lasting nine years, the Soviet Union finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Mohammed Najibullah's socialist Afghan government was rapidly overthrown by the Mujahidin, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was established by the Taliban (literally "students").

The Arab contingent in Afghanistan during the latter half of the 1980s was quite small and not generally involved in the fighting, rather limiting its activities to logistics, housing, recruitment and financing of the mujahidin. Bin Laden, the MAK, and most of the Arab volunteers were apparently unknown to the CIA and the American government during the mission to enage the Soviets in a lengthy war in Afghanistan.

One of these was the organization that would eventually be called al-Qaeda, which was formed by Osama bin Laden in 1988. Bin Laden wished to extend the conflict to nonmilitary operations in other parts of the world; Azzam, in contrast, wanted to remain focused on military campaigns. After Azzam was assassinated in 1989, the MAK split, with a significant number joining bin Laden's organization.

Since other parts of the world were often not in such open warfare as Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation, the move from MAK to al-Qaeda involved more training.

Gulf War and start of US enmity

After the Soviet union withdrew from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, while training operations in Afghanistan continued. Once the Gulf War began, Saudi Arabia appeared to be under a very real threat of invasion from Iraqi forces. He offered the services of his fighters to protect the Saudi Arabia from the Iraqi army. After careful deliberation the Saudi Monarch (King Fahd) opted to allow United States (and coalition forces) to protect his country.


Bin Laden considered this a treacherous deed; allowing infidels to set foot on the soil of the land of the two mosques. He spoke against the Saudi government during the Gulf War for harboring American troops on Saudi soil and was exiled from Saudi Arabia with the renunciation of his Saudi citizenship. The presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques" (Mecca and Medina) was perceived by many Islamists as profaning sacred soil and exemplified the corruption that they believed typified Arab governments.

Sudan

In 1991, Sudan's National Islamic Front, an Islamist group that had recently gained power, invited al-Qaeda to move operations to their country. For several years, al-Qaeda ran several businesses (including an import/export business, farms, and a construction firm) in Sudan.
Return to Afghanistan

Taking advantage of an invitation from some Afghan warlords, al-Qaeda returned to Afghanistan. There, bin Laden quickly established ties with the fledgling Taliban group, led by Mohammed Omar, and by providing funds and weapons at a crucial time helped the group rise to power. Thereafter al-Qaeda enjoyed the Taliban's protection and a measure of legitimacy as part of their Ministry of Defense.

Al-Qaeda training camps trained fighters from around the world, some of whom later applied their training in various conflicts in places such as Algeria, Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen, Kosovo, and Bosnia. Others came from Pakistan, parts of Africa, the People's Republic of China (Uighurs), and the United Kingdom. They intermingled at their camps, causing all of those causes to become one.

September 11 attacks

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda, the United States began to build up military forces in preparation for an attack on Afghanistan in response. In the weeks before the United States invaded, the Taliban twice offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the United States would provide evidence of bin Laden's complicity in the attacks. The Americans, however, refused, and soon thereafter invaded Afghanistan and, together with the Afghan Northern Alliance, deposed the Taliban government.

Battles between the United States and the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces continue as of 2005. As a result of this invasion, the al-Qaeda training camps were destroyed, and much of the existing operating structure of al-Qaeda was disrupted. The American government now claims that two-thirds of the top leaders of al-Qaeda in 2001 are currently in custody (including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Saif al Islam el Masry, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri) or dead (including Mohammed Atef). Osama Bin-Laden still remains at large, although he is presumed to be in Pakistan. However all warn the organization is not yet defeated and is still very determined to continue the fight.

Activity in Iraq

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda took more formal interest in the region and is known to have been responsible for actively organising and aiding local resistance to the occupation forces and the emerging democracy.

The chain of command

Though the current structure of al-Qaeda is unknown, information mostly acquired from the defector Jamal al-Fadl provided American authorities with a rough picture of how the group was organized. While the veracity of the information provided by al-Fadl and the motivation for his cooperation are both disputed, American authorities base much of their current knowledge of al-Qaeda on his testimony.

Bin Laden is the emir of al-Qaeda (although originally this role may have been filled by Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi), advised by a shura council, which consists of senior al-Qaeda members, estimated by Western officials at about twenty to thirty people.

· The Military committee
· The Money/Business committee
· The Law committee
· The Islamic study/fatwah
· In the late 1990s there was a publicly known Media committee

The Power of Nightmares

Al-Qaeda has no clear structure, and this permits debate as to how many members make up the organization, whether it is millions scattered across the globe, or whether it is even zero. According to the controversial BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, al-Qaeda is so weakly linked together that it is hard to say it exists apart from Osama bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. The lack of any significant numbers of convicted al-Qaeda members despite a large number of arrests is cited by the documentary as a reason to doubt whether a widespread entity that meets the description of al-Qaeda exists at all. Still, the extent and nature of al-Qaeda remains a topic of dispute.

The al-Qaeda name itself does not seem to have been used by bin Laden himself to apply to his organization until after the September 11 attacks. Previous attacks attributed to bin Laden and al-Qaeda were, at the time, claimed by organizations under a variety of names. Bin Laden himself has since attributed the al-Qaeda name to the MAK base in Pakistan, dating from the Afghan war days. Daniel Benjamin in "The Age of Sacred Terror" cites an incident in the early 1990s where a document titled "The Foundation", Arabic "Al-Qa'eda", was found on an associate of Ramzi Youssef.

Internet activities

In the wake of its evacuation from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and its successors have migrated online to escape detection in an atmosphere of increased international vigilance. As a result, the organization’s use of the Internet has grown more sophisticated, encompassing financing, recruitment, networking, mobilization, publicity, as well as information dissemination, gathering, and sharing. More than other organizations, al-Qaeda has embraced the Web for these purposes.

The publicity opportunities offered by the Internet have been particularly exploited by al-Qaeda. In December 2004, for example, bin Laden released an audio message by posting it directly to a website, rather than sending a copy to a Qatari channel as he had done in the past.

Source: wikipedia









Read Related News