On August 11, 1988, the terror group Al-Qaeda was formed at a meeting attended by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, aka "Dr. Fadl" in Peshawar, Pakistan. The creation of the group brought together extraordinary Saudi wealth, the expertise of a lifetime Egyptian militant, and a philosophical foundation for jihad from a Cairo intellectual.
Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, aka "Dr. Fadl," attended a meeting in Peshawar with several senior leaders of Egyptian Islamist terrorist group al-Jihad and Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who oversaw the recruitment of Arabs to the cause. A protégé of Azzam, a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, joined them.
The Soviets had already announced their intention to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the prospect of victory awakened many old dreams among these men. They were not the same dreams, however. The leaders of al-Jihad, especially Zawahiri, wanted to use their well-trained warriors to overthrow the Egyptian government. Azzam longed to turn the attention of the Arab mujahideen to Palestine. Neither had the money or the resources to pursue such goals.
On the other hand, Bin Laden was rich, and he had his own vision: to create an all-Arab foreign legion that would pursue the retreating Soviets into Central Asia and fight against the Marxist government that was then in control of South Yemen.
According to Montasser al-Zayyat, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo who is Zawahiri's biographer, Dr. Fadl proposed supporting bin Laden with members of al-Jihad. Combining Saudi money with Egyptian militant expertise, the men who met formed a new group called al-Qaeda. "We used to call the training camp al Qaeda," bin Laden would later recall.
Al Qaeda, which means ‘the base,’ originated in the decade-long Islamic resistance to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. Starting as a civil war between Afghanistan’s communist government and anti-communist guerrillas in 1978, the Afghan War escalated when the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan in an attempt to shore up the beleaguered Communist government.
The jihad declared against the Soviet Union became an international rallying call, resulting in thousands of young Muslims from around the world flocking to Afghanistan to join the fight against the Soviet Union. Al Qaeda originated as a logistical network tasked with supporting, organizing, and funding the resistance against the USSR’s troops.
The “Gold Chain” support network allowed wealthy financiers from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States to channel money to a “Bureau of Services,” internationally used to recruit and train new fighters. Clandestine support for the rebels from the Saudi Arabian and United States government, which saw them both secretly channel billions of dollars to the cause in an attempt to undermine the Soviet Union, allowed the network overseen by Bin Laden to become an increasingly powerful entity.
Al Qaeda was born from the decision to create a “global jihad,” an organization that could build on the success of the Afghan campaign and became a nexus for jihad campaigns around the world. Over the next few years, the organization strengthened through alliances with Egypt’s Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group. Training camps were created at different locations worldwide to teach agents paramilitary skills in preparation for attacks on targets across the globe.
The conflict against the USA started in 1990 when the US army began stationing troops in Afghanistan ahead of the first Gulf War. Bin Laden had offered his troops to protect Afghanistan against Iraq and was angered by the US decision to ignore this offer.
In February 1998, after being expelled from Sudan and returning to Afghanistan, he issued a fatwa against the United States. Later that year, he ordered the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people.
Al Qaeda’s rise came in four waves. In 1988, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders established al Qaeda to combat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Ten years later, on August 7, 1998, al Qaeda perpetrated simultaneous attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Al Qaeda operatives then bombed the USS Cole on October 12, 2000, refueling in Yemen. The attack killed 17 U.S. soldiers and injured 39 others.
This first wave of attacks peaked in 2001 with September 11.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists from al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes, deliberately crashing two planes into the upper floors of the North and South towers of the World Trade Center complex and a third plane into the Pentagon Arlington.
The Twin Towers ultimately collapsed because of the damage sustained from the impacts and the resulting fires. After learning about the other attacks, passengers on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, fought back, and the plane was crashed into an empty field in western Pennsylvania about 20 minutes by air from Washington, D.C.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people from 93 nations. 2,753 people were killed in New York, 184 people were killed at the Pentagon, and 40 people were killed on Flight 93.
A second wave began to build in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad began an aggressive insurgency campaign against the United States and its allies. Zarqawi then joined al Qaeda in 2004. Outside of Iraq, the group conducted attacks in Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. In March 2004, North African terrorists inspired by al Qaeda’s ideology conducted coordinated bombings against the commuter train system in Madrid, Spain, killing nearly 200 people and injuring approximately 200 others.
Al Qaeda surged for a third time between 2007 and 2009 following the rise of Anwar al-Awlaki, a charismatic Yemeni-American who had served as an imam in mosques in California and Virginia. The emergence in Yemen of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The reversal of this wave began with the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden and the deaths of other senior al Qaeda leaders following an aggressive U.S. drone campaign. The Arab Spring and the downsizing or withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan created the conditions for a fourth wave, as al Qaeda affiliates expanded their presence in countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Most of the al Qaeda attacks in the fourth wave occurred in “near enemy” countries, not the West. But the group weakened in 2014 after the rise of ISIS, which was formerly a branch of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Qaida maintains a low operational pace; it has thin resources and limited popular support, and indeed, it is regressing on many of its goals. Rivals like the Islamic State (ISIS) have capitalized on some of its successes, and advancing a movement that other groups have exploited may constitute its greatest achievement.
The al-Qaida core had failed to conduct a successful, spectacular attack in more than 16 years when its operatives bombed London transportation targets in 2005. Since the death of Osama Bin Laden, the core has had little or no involvement in international terrorist attacks. The War on Terror – which is ending in 2021 - severely diminished its capabilities and structure.
Al-Qaida still plots to attack the West, but most such efforts depend on amateurs who lack the training of the generation trained in al-Qaida camps in the 1990s.
By 2011, volunteers traveling to Pakistan often received little training and were made to pay for their own weapons, leading to considerable resentment.
In September 2014, al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri planned his last major international terror plot: to hijack the Pakistani Navy frigate Zulfiqar and sink a U.S. Navy ship in the Indian Ocean, provoking a war between the United States and Pakistan. The plot was foiled only at the last moment. It was al-Qaida’s most audacious conspiracy ever. Had it succeeded, it could have changed the world even more than 9/11.
The successor of al-Zawahiri will also benefit from the decline of ISIS, which is far weaker and less inspiring now that it has lost the “caliphate” and its leader.
The central jihadi message that Islam is under attack by the West remains potent, reinforced by Islamophobia. The speed with which ISIS spread underscores how vulnerable the police states of the Middle East are when they become crippled by civil war. The Saudi-Iranian proxy war feeds sectarian tensions and creates failed states in Yemen, where al-Qaida can stage a comeback.
Such a revival will likely hinge on the ability to take advantage of opportunities that emerges, such as the withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan.
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