Al-Qaeda

• 1. Introduction

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  Al-Qaeda's emir, Osama bin Laden, once sent a Portuguese convert to Islam to Rome with orders to kill an exiled king. The target was Mohammed Zahir Shah of Afghanistan. Bin Laden wanted to stop him from returning home and possibly heading a new government. On the 4th of November 1991, the man, Paulo Jose de Almeida Santos, entered the king's villa posing as a journalist. He stabbed the king several times in the neck. A tin of cigarillos in the king's breast pocket deflected the blade, and the king recovered in hospital. General Abdul Wali, a former commander of the Royal Afghan Army, caught the attacker, who then served ten years in an Italian jail.

  That failed plot belongs to the story of a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni Islamist jihadists. They describe themselves as a vanguard that will spark a global Islamist revolution and unite the Muslim world under one caliphate. The United Nations and more than two dozen countries have designated al-Qaeda a terrorist organization. Yet basic questions about it remain unsettled. Where did its name come from? Was it ever a tightly run organization, or a loose idea that American prosecutors gave a shape? Who paid for it? And what was left once its early leaders were gone?

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• 2. Origins of the Name

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  The word al-Qaeda comes from the Arabic noun al-qāʿidah, meaning "the foundation" or "the base." The opening al- is simply the Arabic word for "the." Two of the Arabic consonants have no match in English, so spellings and pronunciations vary. Al-Qaida, al-Qa'ida and el-Qaida all appear in print.

  As a doctrine, the idea came first. In an April 1988 issue of Al-Jihad magazine, the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam used it for a committed vanguard of Muslims who would wage armed jihad around the world. Azzam cited the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century and the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s as proof that his call could succeed. He wrote that it was time to think about a state that would be "a solid base for the distribution of the (Islamic) creed."

  Bin Laden offered a humbler origin in 2001. He said the name was established "by mere chance." In his telling, the late Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri built training camps for mujahideen fighting what bin Laden called Russia's terrorism, and the camp was called al-Qaeda. "The name stayed," he said.

  Two documents seized from the Sarajevo office of the Benevolence International Foundation complicate that story. Both record minutes of meetings held to set up a new military group, and both use the term al-Qaeda. Some argue they prove a group by that name was established in August 1988, rather than a camp nickname being adopted.

  Robin Cook, a former British Foreign Secretary, offered a third reading. He argued the word should be translated as "the database." To him it meant the computer file of thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with CIA help to defeat the Soviets.

  In April 2002 the group took the name Qa'idat Al-Jihad, meaning "the base of Jihad." Diaa Rashwan said this apparently followed a merger. The overseas branch of Egypt's Al-Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, had joined the groups bin Laden brought under his control after returning to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. That merger put Egyptian veterans beside bin Laden's own followers, a mix whose intellectual debts ran back to an Egyptian writer of the 1950s.

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• 3. Roots and Charter

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  In the 1950s and 1960s, the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb preached that the Islamic world was no longer truly Muslim. Because sharia law was missing, he argued, Muslim societies had slid back into jahiliyyah, the ignorance that came before Islam. His cure was a vanguard of righteous Muslims who would build "true Islamic states," impose sharia and strip out non-Muslim influence. He pictured them separating from the wider society first. Then they would wage armed jihad against tyrannical regimes, as the early Muslims did in the Islamic State of Medina under Muhammad.

  Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a close college friend of bin Laden, remembered the two trying to learn what Islam says about how people eat, marry and talk. "We read Sayyid Qutb," he said. "He was the one who most affected our generation." Qutb's influence reached Zawahiri through family. Zawahiri's uncle and maternal patriarch, Mafouz Azzam, was Qutb's student, protégé, personal lawyer and an executor of his estate.

  The movement grew in the years after the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and during the Afghan Jihad of 1979-89. Its supporters also looked back to the 19th century, to Syed Ahmad Barelvi, an Indian Muslim revivalist who died in 1831. He had led a jihad against British India from the frontier regions of Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Pakistani journalist Husain Haqqani calls his revival of jihad the prototype for later militant movements in South and Central Asia.

  The organization itself took shape in a series of meetings in Peshawar during 1988. Those present included Azzam, bin Laden, Mohammed Atef, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and other veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. They built on the networks of Maktab Al-Khidamat and chose the word "vanguard" for the job.

  The founding charter, titled "Al-Qaeda's Structure and Bylaws," set four general goals. They were to promote jihad awareness in the Islamic world, to train and equip cadres through instruction and real combat, to support the jihad movement as far as possible, and to coordinate jihad movements into one unified international effort. Its policies rejected any negotiation with secular and national parties, whom it called tyrants and promised to oppose as constant enemies. They also demanded economic independence and called secrecy "the main ingredient of our work."

  The long-term aim was a supra-national caliphate headed by an elected caliph descended from the Ahl Al-Bayt, the family of Muhammad. The nearer aims were expelling American troops from the Arabian Peninsula and toppling governments allied with the United States. The model of government was the Rashidun Caliphate. Elections to choose rulers through Shura leadership councils were acceptable. Parliaments where Muslim and non-Muslim legislators write laws of their own choosing were not.

  In the second edition of his book Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, Zawahiri demanded a caliphate founded on "the sovereignty of sharia and not on the whims of the majority." He added that the ummah would choose its rulers and bring them to account if they deviated.

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• 4. Shape of the Network

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  Five named committees sat beneath bin Laden, alongside a shura council of senior members. The Military Committee trained operatives, acquired weapons and planned attacks. The Money and Business Committee handled finance. The Law Committee reviewed sharia and judged whether a course of action conformed to it. The Islamic Study and Fatwah Committee issued religious edicts, including a 1998 edict telling Muslims to kill Americans. The Media Committee ran a newspaper called Nashrat al Akhbar, meaning "Newscast," which no longer exists. In 2005 the group formed As-Sahab, a production house for its video and audio.

  Its stated philosophy centralized decisions but decentralized execution. Top leaders set the ideology and strategy and kept their messages simple. Mid-level groups had autonomy, though they had to consult top management before large attacks and assassinations. After the war on terror began, the leadership grew isolated, and the organization split into several regional al-Qaeda groups. Nasser Al-Bahri, who guarded bin Laden for four years before 9/11, described a formal administrative structure and a vast arsenal in his memoir.

  The first members were mostly Egyptians and Saudis, with some Yemenis and Kuwaitis. Later came North Africans, Jordanians, Palestinians and Iraqis. In the decade after 9/11, non-Arabs joined too, among them Pakistanis, Afghans, Turks, Kurds and European converts to Islam. One estimate holds that 62 percent of members have a university education.

  Counts of the membership vary enormously. Documents captured in the 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound put the core membership in 2002 at 170. A 2006 estimate found several thousand commanders in 40 countries, while a later belief held that no more than 200-300 active commanders remained. At the other extreme, one account counts about 20 functioning cells and 70,000 insurgents across sixty nations in 2001. The same account puts those under al-Qaeda's command and allied militias at roughly 250,000 by 2018.

  A 2004 documentary, The Power of Nightmares, went further. It argued that al-Qaeda was so loosely linked that it consisted only of bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. It pointed to the small number of convicted members, despite many arrests on terrorism charges, as a reason to doubt that a widespread entity matching the description existed.

  The author Adam Curtis argued separately that a formal al-Qaeda is primarily an American invention. In his account, the name reached the public at the 2001 trial of bin Laden and four men accused of the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. To charge bin Laden in absentia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the Justice Department had to show he led a criminal organization. Curtis wrote that bin Laden and Zawahiri had become the focus of "a loose association of disillusioned Islamist militants," and that there was no organization. Bin Laden himself told an interviewer in 2001 that the West wrongly portrays "an 'organization' with a specific name."

  The name and structure came from the testimony of Jamal Al-Fadl, who said he was a founding member and a former employee of bin Laden. Several sources question his reliability, citing a history of dishonesty and a plea bargain after he was convicted of conspiring to attack US military establishments. His own defense attorney, Sam Schmidt, said he believed Al-Fadl lied about a unified image of the organization. "It made al-Qaeda the new Mafia or the new Communists," Schmidt said.

  Many Western analysts do not believe the global jihadist movement is driven at every level by al-Qaeda's leaders, though bin Laden held considerable ideological influence. Bruce Hoffman disagreed. He saw a cohesive network strongly led from the Pakistani tribal areas.

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• 5. The Golden Chain

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  In March 2002, Bosnian police raided the Sarajevo office of the Benevolence International Foundation and seized a list of sponsors. It carried twenty-five names, twenty of them very wealthy Saudi and Gulf financiers, including bankers, businessmen and former ministers. Bin Laden's own name appeared seven times among the beneficiaries. Jamal Al-Fadl vouched for the list's authenticity and gave it the name "Golden Chain." At the top, the US Department of Justice's translation shows a line from the Quran: "And spend in the cause of God."

  The raid also turned up a computer file titled "Tarekh Osama," or "Osama History." It held photographs of al-Qaeda's early days, along with letters and documents, some in bin Laden's handwriting. Bin Laden's confidant Enaam Arnaout, who headed the Sarajevo office, had been entrusted with the material and considered the office the safest place for it. Investigators found a clear link between Arnaout and bin Laden, and charges followed.

  Even the list's age is disputed. Some accounts say it dates from 1988, while the US counter-terrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke says 1989. The American government presented it in the criminal case United States v. Arnaout, filed in 2003. It has never released the full document, so the complete roster of names is a matter of conjecture.

  The list was one piece of a wider system. In the 1990s, money came partly from bin Laden's personal wealth, the heroin trade, and donors in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Al-Qaeda usually did not pay out funds for individual attacks and very rarely used wire transfers. The Sarajevo documents showed it widely exploited charities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization and the Muslim World League. Zawahiri's brother worked for the first in Albania and recruited for al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda's leader openly named the second as one of three charities it relied on.

  Much of the money moved through the hawala banking system. Around 1,000 hawaladars operate in Pakistan alone, outside regulated banks. US-led efforts against terrorist financing were most successful in the year right after September 11. The 9/11 Commission Report estimated that al-Qaeda needed $30 million a year to operate. The money committee also procured false passports, paid members and oversaw profit-driven businesses.

  US authorities have also accused individuals of financing the group. In 2013 the US Treasury designated Abd Al-Rahman Al-Nuaimi, a Qatari citizen who founded the Swiss-based non-governmental organization Alkarama, as a terrorist. It said he had facilitated significant financial support to al-Qaeda in Iraq, and he was accused of overseeing a $2 million monthly transfer. A diplomatic cable leaked in 2009 put the wider concern bluntly: "terrorist funding emanating from Saudi Arabia remains a serious concern."

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• 6. Road to September

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  In 1990, when Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait, bin Laden offered Saudi Arabia the help of his mujahideen. The Saudi government rebuffed him and turned to the United States instead. The arrival of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula pushed bin Laden to declare jihad on both the US and the Saudi rulers, whom he denounced as murtadd, or apostates. From 1992 al-Qaeda based its headquarters in Sudan, until it was expelled in 1996. It then moved to Afghanistan under the Taliban. In 1996 and 1998, bin Laden issued two fatwas demanding that US troops leave Saudi Arabia.

  On the 29th of December 1992, two bombs went off in Aden, Yemen, at the Movenpick Hotel and in the parking lot of the Goldmohur Hotel. The aim was to kill American soldiers on their way to Somalia for the famine relief effort called Operation Restore Hope. No soldiers were staying there. An Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker died, and seven others, mostly Yemeni, were badly hurt. Inside al-Qaeda the bombing counted as a victory that frightened the Americans away. In the United States it was barely noticed.

  In 1996, bin Laden personally engineered a plot against President Bill Clinton, who was in Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. Intelligence agents intercepted a message before the motorcade left and alerted the Secret Service. Agents later found a bomb planted under a bridge.

  On the 7th of August 1998, bombs struck the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. The United States answered with Operation Infinite Reach, firing cruise missiles at al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The strikes devastated a base in Khost, but the network's capacity was unharmed. Plots timed for the millennium followed, masterminded by Abu Zubaydah. They included a bombing of Los Angeles International Airport by Ahmed Ressam and attacks on Christian holy sites in Jordan. On the 12th of October 2000, militants in Yemen struck the destroyer USS Cole in a suicide attack, killing 17 sailors. Encouraged by the success of so brazen an attack, the command core began preparing to hit the United States itself.

  The September 11 attacks killed 2,996 people. They included 2,507 civilians, 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers and 55 military personnel, plus al-Qaeda's 19 hijackers. Two airliners were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth, possibly aimed at the US Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted. It was the deadliest foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941, and the deadliest terrorist attack in history.

  Evidence points to suicide squads led by the military commander Mohamed Atta. He was an Egyptian studying in Germany when he was trained, and the Hamburg cell around him was prized for its language skills and knowledge of Western culture. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Hambali were the key planners. In his 2002 "Letter to the American people," bin Laden asked, "Why are we fighting and opposing you?" He answered: "Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." He also claimed the targets were America's "icons of military and economic power." Yet he planned the strike for the morning, when most people in the buildings were present, which maximized casualties.

  Evidence later suggested that the original targets may have been nuclear power stations on the US East Coast. Al-Qaeda changed them out of fear that such an attack "might get out of hand."

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• 7. War on Terror

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  Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was offered a chance to surrender bin Laden and his top associates. The Taliban countered that they would hand bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US supplied evidence of his role. President George W. Bush replied: "We know he's guilty. Turn him over." British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the regime: "Surrender bin Laden, or surrender power."

  The first forces inserted into Afghanistan were paramilitary officers from the CIA's Special Activities Division. The United States and its allies then invaded and, together with the Afghan Northern Alliance, removed the Taliban government. Training camps were destroyed. After being driven from Tora Bora, many al-Qaeda fighters tried to regroup in the rugged Gardez region. By early 2002 the group had taken a serious blow to its operational capacity, though a significant Taliban insurgency remained.

  The US State Department released a videotape of bin Laden speaking with a small group of associates in Afghanistan. A couple of people questioned its authenticity, but it implicated him and al-Qaeda in the attacks. In September 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded that al-Qaeda operatives had conceived and carried them out. A month later, bin Laden appeared in a videotape released through Al Jazeera. He said he was inspired by Israeli attacks on high-rises in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and wanted to "punish the oppressor in kind."

  By the end of 2004, the US government said it had captured and interrogated two-thirds of the most senior al-Qaeda figures of 2001. Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin Al-Shibh and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri fell in 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, and Saif al Islam el Masry in 2004. Mohammed Atef and several others were killed.

  In 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq and overthrew the Ba'athist regime, which it falsely accused of ties with al-Qaeda. The following year, al-Qaeda launched an Iraqi regional branch. Its forces were embedded in Jama'at Al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, commanded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and specialized in suicide operations. Between 30% and 42% of suicide bombings in the early years were claimed by al-Zarqawi's group. After 2006 the branch morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq, which carried out numerous sectarian attacks on Shias. It later seceded from al-Qaeda and became ISIL.

  Elsewhere, a series of bombings in Istanbul in 2003 killed 57 people and injured 700. Some of the 74 people charged had met bin Laden, and they asked for al-Qaeda's blessing and help without pledging allegiance. In 2009, three Londoners were convicted of plotting to detonate bombs disguised as soft drinks on seven airplanes bound for Canada and the US. The MI5 investigation took more than a year and over two hundred officers. In Somalia, Al-Shabaab members declared allegiance to bin Laden in a 2009 video, but this was an "unrequited courtship" that al-Qaeda largely ignored.

  After pursuing him for almost a decade, the US military killed bin Laden in Pakistan on the 2nd of May 2011. Al-Qaeda vowed to avenge his killing.

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• 8. Plans and Successors

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  In 2005, the newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi published extracts from a document by Saif Al-Adel titled "Al-Qaeda's Strategy to the Year 2020." Abdel Bari Atwan summarized it as five stages. The first was to provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack on US soil. The second was to incite local resistance to the occupiers. The third was to spread the conflict to neighboring countries and draw the US into a long war of attrition. The fourth was to turn al-Qaeda into an ideology that could be loosely franchised, inciting attacks until the US and its allies withdrew. The Madrid train bombings of 2004 had that effect, while the London bombings of the 7th of July 2005 did not. The fifth was the collapse of the US economy by 2020, global instability, and a worldwide jihad leading to a Wahhabi caliphate.

  Atwan called the plan unrealistic. Still, he wrote, "it is sobering to consider that this virtually describes the downfall of the Soviet Union." Fouad Hussein, a Jordanian journalist who spent time in prison with al-Zarqawi, described seven phases along similar lines. The first, "The Awakening," ran from 2001 to 2003. The second, "Opening Eyes," ran from 2003 to 2006 and made Iraq the center of operations. The last, "Definitive Victory," was projected for 2020. More recently, Charles Lister and Katherine Zimmerman have described a new model that seeks to "socialize communities" and build a territorial base with local support.

  After 9/11, the group published a tract titled "A Statement from Qaidat Al-Jihad Regarding the Mandates of the Heroes and the Legality of the Operations in New York and Washington." The critics Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner said it provides "ample theological justification for killing civilians in almost any imaginable situation." Yet the organization has since officially renounced attacks on civilian targets of its enemies. In his 2023 book Free Reading of 33 Strategies of War, Saif Al-Adel urged fighters to prioritize police forces, soldiers and state assets. He asked: "If we target the general public, how can we expect their people to accept our call to Islam?"

  Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, became emir after his death, replacing Saif Al-Adel, who had served as interim commander. Killings thinned the ranks below him. Atiyah Abd Al-Rahman, alleged to be second in command, died on the 22nd of August 2011. Abu Yahya Al-Libi was killed in Pakistan on the 4th of June 2012. Nasir Al-Wuhayshi, who also led al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, died in a US airstrike in Yemen in June 2015. Abu Khayr Al-Masri was killed by a US airstrike in Syria in February 2017. Abu Muhammad Al-Masri, who was involved in the 1998 embassy bombings, was killed in Iran in November 2020 by Israeli agents.

  Zawahiri himself was killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan on the 31st of July 2022. By then al-Qaeda's direct affiliates were Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Indian subcontinent and in the Islamic Maghreb, along with Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin and Al-Shabaab. Jemaah Islamiyah dissolved in 2024, and Hurras al-Din dissolved in 2025.

  A 2023 United Nations report concluded that de facto leadership had passed to Saif Al-Adel, a former Egyptian army officer operating from Iran. He had been a military instructor in al-Qaeda camps in the 1990s and was known for his role in the Battle of Mogadishu. The report said al-Qaeda could not officially declare his leadership, citing the "political sensitivities" of the Afghan government in acknowledging Zawahiri's death. It also cited "theological and operational" challenges posed by his location in Iran.

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