Al-Qaeda three years on: holy war and a label for terror

September 11, 2004

Paris - The Al-Qaeda network headed by chief terror suspect Osama bin Laden is a shadowy organisation with worldwide reach that espouses one overriding cause - holy war against the United States.

Seen as the force behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that left some 3,000 people dead, Al-Qaeda has since stepped up its attacks around the world.

The chances of seeing a rapid end to Al-Qaeda-related terrorism are nil. Using minimal resources and exploiting their global notoriety, they have been able to create the impression of an international crisis," experts said in a UN report published last month.

Former mujahedeen fighters who led the "holy war" against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 make up a hard core of militants who today stand accused of operating in countries as varied and as dispersed as Tajikistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Morocco.

Three years after the attacks on key US symbols - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - the group stands accused of being behind the main anti-Western attacks around the world, making bin Laden, a Saudi-born millionaire, America's public enemy number one and the most wanted man on the planet.

Since late 1991, when he escaped the US-led attack on Afghanistan whose Taliban regime had provided shelter to Al-Qaeda, he has defied all efforts to track him down.

Western intelligence services believe that Al-Qaeda has financed, trained and operated groups in anywhere between 35 and 60 different countries.

It is believed to have originated as a computer data base (the name means "base" in Arabic) around 1988, a year before the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan where it had been fighting Islamic rebels for nearly a decade.

For bin Laden the key moment in turning the "base" into a fighting force came during the 1990-91 Gulf War when the US deployed large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia, birthplace of the prophet Mohamed and the country whose nationality he then held.


Attacks were launched on US forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, but it was not until 1998 that Al-Qaeda assumed its current form as a loose collective of terrorist organisations, joining up with the Eyptian formation Al-Jihad and other Islamist groups.

In May that year, at a press conference of which CNN broadcast extracts in August 2002, bin Laden said he had formed a front "to carry out a holy war against the Crusaders and Jews," targetting Americans, civilians and US troops.

"Crusader" is the term bin Laden uses systematically to refer to the Western presence in Islam's holy places.

Later in 1998 twin bomb attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 224 people, and in 2000 an attack on the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, left 17 marines dead.

In addition to the twin tower attacks, Al-Qaeda has been connected to attacks targetting foreigners in Tunisia, Karachi, the Indonesian island of Bali, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Jakarta.

Experts regard Al-Qaeda as a loose network of broadly autonomous bodies that share similar views and are prepared to use similar methods. The name has become a "label," used by the network's supporters in claiming attacks but also by some governments keen to tarnish separatist movements by associating them with international terrorism.

The so-called war on terror launched by Washington three years ago has led to the arrest of several top officials including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the organisation's number three and the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

But bin Laden, despite the efforts deployed to capture him including a 25 million dollar price on his head, remains at large, his whereabouts unknown.