The terrorist President Bush wants “dead or alive” has been fighting a holy war against the United States for many years and his operations span the globe. Here is brief description of Usama bin Laden and his activities, drawn from the new book “Usama bin Laden’s al-Quaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network” by Yonah Alexander and Michael Swetnam.
Born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was the 17th son of 51 children. He joined the mujahadeen (“holy warrior”) resistance movement in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion and, in 1984, built a recruiting outpost which later served as the base for his own operation’s camps and training facilities. These efforts had, by 1989, when the Soviets finally withdrew, expanded into a network called al-Quaida (“the base”) which today has links in 55 countries.
Bin Laden later moved his headquarters to Sudan, where he established construction, agriculture, investment and transportation companies. With government contracts, they provided revenue and cover for procuring explosives, weapons and chemicals. From that base, bin Laden funded and led terrorist operations; tried to unite radical Muslim organizations including the Hezbollah and those within Iran; and denounced more moderate Muslim governments, such as Saudi Arabia, which had frozen his assets and withdrawn his citizenship, for compromising with the West. In 1996, under international pressure, Sudan asked bin Laden to leave and he returned to Afghanistan.
In the last five years, bin Laden’s jihad against America has grown more vocal and more intense. On August 23, 1996, he issued a Declaration of Jihad against the United States, directed especially at Muslims in the Middle East. He condemned what he called a “conspiracy between the USA and its allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations” and called on Muslims “to take part in fighting against the … Americans and the Israelis.”
In an interview published in The Call of Islam magazine in late 1996, bin Laden said that “Muslims must prepare all the possible might” to fight the “Judeo-Christian campaign against the Muslim world.”
On February 23, 1998, the fifth anniversary of the first World Trade Center attack, bin Laden and other jihad leaders issued a statement titled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” It stated that killing “Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” It needed no interpretation: “We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
Though funded primarily by bin Laden, al-Quaida’s terrorist activities receive support from sources around the world. These include Islamic clergy funneling millions of dollars to bin Laden in the form of alms; funds through the Dubai Islamic Bank, controlled by the United Arab Emirates; individual Saudi bankers; and companies and charitable aid organizations in the United States.
With this support, al-Quaida’s jihad operations exist throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa and both North and South America. More than 30 affiliated organizations exist on four continents. Together, their tactics include bombing, hijacking, kidnapping, assassination and suicide missions. Their attacks on America date back nearly a decade.
In December 1992, bin Laden’s organization exploded a bomb in Yemen intended to kill U.S. troops en route to Somalia and financed the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which killed eight and injured more than 1,000 people. Al-Quaida trained the terrorists who killed 18 U.S. troops in Somalia in October 1993 and exploded a bomb in Saudi Arabia that killed five Americans in November 1995. The group exploded a truck bomb outside a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia in June 1996, killing 19 servicemen and wounding hundreds. Al-Quaida financed the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which wounded thousands and killed 234 people, including 12 Americans. The group is also responsible for the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October which killed 17 American sailors and wounded 39 others. And now bin Laden is the prime suspect in the attacks on September 11, 2001. Some 266 people perished aboard the four suicide planes, more than 120 more are presumed dead at the Pentagon, and more than 5,400 remain missing in New York.
Bin Laden, then, is implicated or suspected in killing nearly 5,900 Americans (and hundreds of others), wounding thousands more, and causing untold destruction of American property. He has vowed to destroy America using whatever means necessary and called on Muslims everywhere to kill Americans on sight and plunder their property. And now the group is actively seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. It’s no wonder he tops the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list.
