Hurriyet Daily News
Osama bin Laden put 'holy war' on global agenda
Monday, May 2, 2011
ISLAMABAD – Agence France-Presse
With one spectacular attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden put Islamist "holy war" on the global agenda of the 21st century - and became a household name around the world.
Bin Laden believed the carnage in 2001 - which left around 3,000 people dead - had been aided by God. "America has been hit by Allah at its most vulnerable point," the Saudi-born fundamentalist said.
Just as he had hoped, the hijacked planes that crashed into the Twin Towers as well as Washington and Pennsylvania ushered in a dramatic era of confrontation between the West and Islamic militants.
Though the attack made him the world's most wanted man, and forced him into hiding, it served as inspiration for a global jihadist movement that would grow far beyond any need for his guiding hand.
From the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the 2005 attacks on London's transport system to the emboldened Islamic militants of Pakistan, much in the modern world seemed to flow from that one fateful Tuesday in America.
There was little early sign the soft-spoken bin Laden, reckoned to have dozens of brothers and sisters in his vast and wealthy family, would one day be synonymous with global terror.
Born in Riyadh in 1957, exact date unknown, he was tall even as a youngster and stood about two meters as an adult. He took an engineering degree in 1975 and, though later remembered by those who knew him as always pious, his serious transformation took place four years later.
The year 1979 was a watershed for many young Muslims - the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Egypt's peace treaty with Israel all helped radicalize a generation of frustrated believers. Afghanistan became the first focus of his newfound idealism.
Inspired by the initial Muslim resistance to the Russian occupation, a campaign backed by the United States, bin Laden started raising funds and recruiting fighters from across the Islamic world. In 1984 he moved to the Pakistani city of Peshawar, a staging point for mainly Arab militants who - funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia, his future foes - fought jihad against the Soviets.
Stories abounded of the soft-spoken gentleman who visited the militant camps, spreading his largesse and encouraging weary fighters to press on with the battle. "One day in Afghanistan is like one thousand days in an ordinary mosque," Bin Laden said.
The eventual defeat and departure of the mighty Soviet army was seen as a glorious victory, and persuaded bin Laden not to disband the network of financiers and recruits ready to fight for Islam.
Instead, he soon found another cause to rally round back in Saudi Arabia, where the kingdom's rulers had allowed in U.S. troops after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The presence of "infidel" forces in the kingdom - home to Mecca and Medina, the holiest sites in Islam - galvanized his anger. His criticism of the monarchy was so bitter that he was expelled and his citizenship revoked.
Bin Laden then took his four wives and 10 children to Islamist-governed Sudan, where a regime that was fighting an internal war against Christian and animist rebels was more than happy to welcome him.
In five years there he consolidated the operations of his group - dubbed al-Qaeda, or The Base - and joined forces with Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian militant who became his deputy and later the "public face" of the organisation.
Bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, around the same time that Western intelligence agencies began to link al-Qaeda to attacks on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and the failed Somalia operation recalled in the film "Black Hawk Down." His next stop was Afghanistan, where he found another group of supporters in the hardline Taliban.
Bin Laden provided cash and fighters as the Taliban imposed their strict version of Islam on the country. In exchange, they let him run the training camps that would turn militant Islam into a global force to be reckoned with.
According to the official U.S. 9/11 inquiry, the CIA estimated that as many as 20,000 militants trained in the camps before Sept. 11. In a 1997 interview with CNN, one of the few times he met Western reporters, bin Laden clearly stated his goals for all the world to hear. "We declared jihad against the U.S. government, because the U.S. government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical," he said.
Whether he would be captured and killed or not, bin Laden had fulfilled his life's mission on 9/11 - galvanizing Muslim militants worldwide in the struggle to make Islam one day reign supreme.
During his years on the run, bin Laden would have seen how his beliefs had caught fire with young and often angry idealists around the globe. "Jihad will continue," he said not long after Sept. 11. "Even if I am not around."
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=osama-bin-laden-put-holy-war-on-global-agenda-2011-05-02
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