Al-Qaida Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Al-Qaida (Arabic for “The Base”) is defined by the U.S. Department of State as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” This means that the organization is foreign, engages in terrorist activity or terrorism or retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism, and its terrorist activity or terrorism threatens the security of U.S. nationals or U.S. national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests).

The State Department labels the al-Qaida network, which includes a core al-Qaida organization and numerous confederated extremist groups, the greatest terrorist threat and a threat that will remain for decades. According to the State Department, al-Qaida uses subversion, sabotage, open warfare, and terrorism, and it seeks weapons of mass destruction. It aims to unite Muslims to fight the United States as a means of defeating Israel, overthrowing regimes it deems “non-Islamic,” and expelling Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries. The eventual goal is the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate throughout the world. The State Department believes the group probably has several thousand extremists and associates worldwide. It maintains moneymaking front businesses, seeks donations from supporters, and illicitly siphons funds from donations made to Muslim charitable organizations.

Al-Qaida was founded by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1988. Bin Laden was born into a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia in 1957 and appears to have adopted militant Islamist views during his university studies. One of bin Laden’s instructors, Abdullah Azzam, viewed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an attempt by a non-Muslim power to conquer sacred Muslim territory and people. Bin Laden and Azzam went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and in 1984 established a network of international recruiting and fundraising offices. In 1988, toward the end of the Soviet occupation, there was a power struggle between bin Laden and Azzam, and Azzam was assassinated in November 1989.

The August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait apparently changed bin Laden from a de facto U.S. ally against the Soviets into an enemy of the United States. Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989 and opposed the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia following Kuwait’s fall. In 1991 he relocated to Sudan, where he hosted and trained al-Qaida militants to fight against the United States and its interests. These militants also received training for al-Qaida operations in the Balkans, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the Philippines. Bin Laden and his close confidant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, apparently believed that the only way to bring Islamic regimes to power was to end the U.S. regional presence.

In 1992 the group claimed responsibility for bombing a hotel in Yemen, and it has been linked to the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. In May 1996, bin Laden was expelled from Sudan and returned to Afghanistan, where he helped the Taliban gain control of the country. Kabul, the capital, was captured in September 1996, and the Taliban imposed their extreme interpretation of Islam on the Afghan people. Al-Qaida was allegedly responsible for the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States in turn launched a missile attack against bin Laden’s Afghanistan terrorist training camp. In October 2000, al-Qaida members attacked the USS Cole while it was docked in Yemen.

The United States was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001, (9/11) in the worst attack to date. On that day, al-Qaida members hijacked and crashed four U.S. commercial jets—two into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon near Washington, DC, and a fourth into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attack left nearly three thousand people dead or missing.

Following the Taliban’s repeated refusal to expel bin Laden and his group and end its support for international terrorism, the United States and its allies began a military campaign in Afghanistan. This led to the fall of Taliban-occupied Kabul in November 2001. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and said at a December 2008 pretrial hearing in Guantanamo Bay that he would plead guilty.

Al-Qaida has remained active since 9/11. Apart from the continued fight against the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and post–Saddam Hussein Iraq, it has been linked to numerous incidents. These include the bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2002; bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2003; bombings in London, England, in July 2005; and the September 2008 attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said in November 2008 that bin Laden was isolated from the daily operations of al-Qaida and probably was hiding in the tribal area of northwestern Pakistan. As of November 2009 he remained at large.

Bibliography:

British Broadcasting Corporation. “Bin Laden ‘Cut Off from al-Qaeda,’” November 14 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ americas/7728551.stm.
Congressional Research Service. CRS Report for Congress—Al Qaeda: Profile and Threat Assessment, February 10, 2005, www.fas.org/irp/crs/RS22049.pdf.
DeRouen, Karl, Jr., and Paul Bellamy, eds. International Security and the United States: An Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2008.
DeRouen, Karl, Jr., and Uk Heo, eds. Civil Wars of the World: Major Conflicts since World War II. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2007.
Gunaratna, Rohan. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. Melbourne, Australia: Scribe, 2002.
Kronenwetter, Michael. Terrorism: A Guide to Events and Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004.
United States Department of State, n.d., www.state.gov.
United States Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence. Al-Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat: Report of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2007.

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