global rise of al-qaeda
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With the Gulf War of
1991, American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, a deeply religious
country, to counter the armed forces of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that
invaded Kuwait. The arrival of foreign troops of an infidel and morally-corrupt
nation in what was considered holy soil for Islam by al-Qaeda due the presence
of holy sites Mecca and Medina made Al-Qaeda more confrontational to what they now saw as their new number one threat and rival to their ideology: the United
States. Al-Qaeda continued to operate under Taliban protection after they were
expulsed from Sudan. Al-Qaeda benefitted from the isolationist Taliban regime
which sheltered the group from American spies and intervention. Al-Qaeda
trained elements in the Taliban army while remaining a formal part of it too.
Al-Qaeda would then intervene heavily in the Bosnia War in 1995 against Serbia
under Slobodan Milosevic. By this point, the concept of global jihad, already
present since the 1980s in al-Qaeda, had fully matured and plans were made for
possible future interventions.
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On February 23rd 1998, al-Qaeda’s leaders co-signed and issued a fatwa ‘‘calling on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies where they can, when they can’’, a warning of the deadly attacks that were to follow in the next century. (Bin Laden, 1998, par. 4) That same year, on August 7th, the organization orchestrated the truck bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania resulting in hundreds of deaths and wounded. Soon after, the U.S. launched a retaliatory response in the form of cruise missiles to suspected bases of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In October 2000, al-Qaeda attacked USS Cole, a missile destroyer ship harboured in the Yemeni port of Aden, with a suicide bomb, killing 17 Navy sailors and wounding 39 others. (Goodson, 2012, p.154-155) After these two successful operations, the terrorist organisation would try their hand at another attack on U.S. home soil.