Osama bin Laden was a militant Islamist and the co-founder of al-Qaeda,Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 110 in conjunction with several other Islamic militant leaders, issued two fatawa – in 1996 and then again in 1998that military personnel from the United States and allied countries until they withdraw support for Israel and withdraw military forces from Islamic countries. He was indicted in United States federal court for his alleged involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and was on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list until his death.
Bin Laden was never indicted for the September 11, 2001 attacks, despite claiming responsibility for them in videos released to the public.
Jihad in Afghanistan
Bin Laden's wealth and connections assisted his interest in supporting the mujahideen, Muslim guerrillas fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. His old teacher from the university in Jeddah, Abdullah Azzam, had relocated to Peshawar, a major border city in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. From there, Azzam was able to organize resistance directly on the Afghan frontier. Peshawar is only east of the Khyber Pass, through the Safed Koh mountains, connected to the southeastern edge of the Hindu Kush range. This route became the major avenue of inserting foreign fighters and material support into eastern Afghanistan for the resistance against the Soviets.
After leaving college in 1979, bin Laden joined Azzam to fight the Soviet Invasion, and lived for a time in Peshawar. According to Rahimullah Yousufzai, "Azzam prevailed on him to come and use his money" for training recruits.Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of the English-language daily The News International, in a statement to Reuters in Peshawar on 29 December 2001. Yusufzai met bin Laden twice in Afghanistan in 1998. In the early 1980s, bin Laden lived at several addresses in and around Arbab Road, a narrow street in the University Town neighborhood in western Peshawar, Yusufzai said. Nearby in Gulshan Iqbal Road is the Arab mosque that Abdullah Azzam used as the jihad center, according to a Reuters inquiry in the neighborhood.
By 1984, with Azzam, bin Laden established a Saudi Arabian funded organization named Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK, Office of Order in English), which funneled money, arms and Muslim fighters from around the Arabic world into the Afghan war. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family fortune,Lawrence Wright estimates his "share of the Saudi Binladin Group" in about fall 1989 as "amounted to 27 million Saudi riyalsa little more than [US]$7 million." Wright, (2006), p. 145) paid for air tickets and accommodation, dealt with paperwork with Pakistani authorities, and provided other such services for the jihad fighters. In running al-Khadamat, bin Laden set up a network of couriers traveling between Afghanistan and Peshawar, which remained active after 2001, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai. It was during this time that Bin Laden met his future al-Qaeda collaborator, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member and later head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Alleged CIA involvement
Whether bin Laden and his group are "blowback" from CIA's Operation Cyclone to help the Afghan mujahideen is a matter of some debate.
Robin Cook, UK Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001 and Leader of the House of Commons from 2001 to 2003, has written that bin Laden was, "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies" and that the mujahideen that formed al-Qaeda were "originally ... recruited and trained with help from the CIA".
However, CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997, calls the idea "that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden ... a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. ... Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. ... The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him."
Break with Azzam
Bin Laden was recruited to be part of Azzam's Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Bureau), the support network of Arab fighters in Pakistan that was helping resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. For a while, bin Laden worked at the Services Bureau working with Abdullah Azzam on Jihad Magazine, a magazine that gave information about the war with the Soviets and interviewed mujahideen. Although bin Laden and the other Afghan Arabs were considered a minor "sideshow" in the war, bin Laden did establish a camp in Afghanistan and, with other volunteers, fought the Soviets and Marxist Afghan troops. One of his most significant battles was the Battle of Jaji, which was not a major fight, but it earned him a reputation as a fighter.As time passed, Ayman al-Zawahiri encouraged bin Laden to split away from Abdullah Azzam. This stemmed from al-Zawahiri's differences with Azzam such as their conflicting interpretations of the jihad. Some believe that al-Zawahiri's motive was driven by his desire to exploit bin Laden's finances as well as the ambition to control the fractured Egyptian jihadist movement and so al-Zawahiri favored an aggressive view. On the other hand, Azzam pushed for a limited and defensive conception of jihad, where it becomes obligatory only when the enemy enters the land of Muslims. This doctrine, however, proved ambiguous and invited several interpretations. Bin Laden began gravitating towards Zawahiri's position as he pursued a more expansive warfare strategy that allowed "insurrections against apostate Muslim regimes." Azzam rejected this because he eschewed intra-Muslim conflict and the dispute finally led to a power struggle, which bin Laden won. By 1988, he finally broke away from his mentor, establishing al-Qaeda with the most extremist of the Muslim militants from Azzam's network and began a radical form of jihad that pursued the violent overthrow of governments in the Muslim world deemed apostate.
Years later, in 1989, Azzam was blown up in a massive car bombing outside the mosque. Bin Laden is thought by some to be behind the assassination due to the rift about the direction of the jihad at that time.See, for example, Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda (NY: Berkley Books, 2003) 31. Others, however, doubt this claim; Ahmad Zaidan, for instance, author of the Arabic-language book Bin Laden Unmasked, told Peter L. Bergen in an interview, "I rule out totally that bin Laden would indulge himself in such things, after all, Osama bin Laden, he's not type of person to kill Abdullah Azzam. Otherwise, if he be exposed, he would be finished, totally." Bergen also cites Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who speculates that there were more likely candidates than bin Laden: "It could be Hekmatyar, it could be KHAD, it could be the Mossad, the Egyptians [around Ayman al Zawahiri] ... I met with Hekmatyar, an arrogant, self-centered person. I think Hekmatyar had a secret organization to eliminate his enemies."Peter L. Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know (New York: Free Press, 2006) 97.
Founding of al-Qaeda
By 1988, bin Laden had split from Maktab al-Khidamat because of strategic differences. While Azzam and his MAK organization acted as support for the Afghan fighters and provided relief to refugees and injured, bin Laden wanted a more military role in which the Arab fighters would not only be trained and equipped by the organization but also led on the battlefield by Arabic commanders. One of the main leading points to the split and the creation of al-Qaeda was the insistence of Azzam that Arab fighters be integrated among the Afghan fighting groups instead of forming their separate fighting force.The Osama bin Laden I Know by Peter L. Bergen, pp. 74–88.
In 1990, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia a hero of jihad, celebrated in the Saudi press as a pious, courageous warrior who, along with his Arab legion, "had brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union.Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006 p. 146 However, at about the same time Iraq invaded neighbor Kuwait and bin Laden was alarmed at the prospect that foreign non-Muslim troops would enter the kingdom to fight Iraq. He met Saudi Prince Sultan, the Minister of Defense, and offered to help defend Saudi Arabia:
Bin Laden: I am ready to prepare 100,000 fighters with good combat capability within three months. You don't need Americans. You don't need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough.
Prince Sultan: There are no caves in Kuwait. What will you do when he lobs missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?
Bin Laden: We will fight him with faith.
Bin Laden was rebuffed and publicly denounced Saudi Arabia's dependence on the U.S. military, demanding an end to the presence of foreign military bases in the country. Other Saudi Muslims were also greatly upset that non-Muslim troops would be on the same peninsula as the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Anti-government Islamist militants in Saudi Arabia were even more inflamed when the foreign bases remained after the Gulf War was over.
Bin Laden's increasingly strident criticisms of the Saudi monarchy led the government to attempt to silence him. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "with help from a dissident member of the royal family, he managed to get out of the country under the pretext of attending an Islamic gathering in Pakistan in April 1991."National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Another report has bin Laden retrieving his passport from the Saudi government to go to Peshawar in March 1992 to mediate the Afghan Civil War. In any case Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the National Islamic Front, had invited bin Laden to "transplant his whole organization to Sudan" in 1989. Bin Laden's agents had begun purchasing property in Sudan in 1990. Bin Laden moved to Sudan in 1992.
Yugoslav wars (1991–1999)