the rise of al-qaeda in afghanistan
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As well, in the chaotic period of the late 1980s, when the Soviets and the Afghan government started going on the defensive, foreign Islamic mujahedeen units in the country flourished, notably one founded by Saudi Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan between 1988-1989, known as al-Qaeda (the ‘‘Base’’ in Arabic). In the early 1980s, Osama Bin Laden, from a prominent and wealthy billionaire family himself, was a major financier of the global mujahidin movement, through his personal fortune and the acquiring of substantial funds donated by Saudi entrepreneurs. (Goodson, 2012, p.154)
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Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Bin Laden are notable for having the same mentor, Palestinian
scholar and theologian Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who persuaded the Saudi to come to Afghanistan, and were close friends. In retrospect, al-Qaeda’s goal was to support and foster Sunni fundamentalist groups in Islamic nations (i.e. Taliban) as well as resistance to Western (U.S. and USSR) and Israeli interference and influence in the Middle-East. Thus, the Soviet invasion of a majority Muslim nation and their support of a reformist communist government was considered a threat and unacceptable to al-Qaeda. The organisation recruited many disillusioned men across the Muslim world, mostly from Arabia, to fight against the Soviets. It can be said that the Soviet-Afghan War provided the ideal ground and framework for al-Qaeda to develop as an organisation through the installation of permanent bases that would be later used to train terrorists instead of regular fighters. These Afghan bases would remain long after the end of the civil war during the Taliban regime and would become the seat of Bin Laden’s and the organisation’s power.
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Al-Qaeda also had global aspirations to create a unified nation under Sharia law (a new Caliphate) or gathering of Islamic peoples into a concept one supra-national state (Ummah) which led to al-Qaeda bases and operations expanding to the Maghreb, Syria, Arabia, Iraq, Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya in the 1990s. Al-Qaeda also represents a heavily globalised movement because it possesses a multinational and stateless grouping of terrorist agents and jihadist fighters. While originally a cohesive organisation, the leadership of al-Qaeda is also quite decentralised and many cells act independently of each other, especially since the death of Osama Bin-Laden with many offshoot groups forming in countries with significant Islamic populations possessing the same goals. On February 26th 1993, a truck bomb detonated in the underground parking lot of one of the World Trade Centre towers but did not result in any major damage. This was al-Qaeda’s first attempted strike on America