Al-Qaeda (50 page)

3. By the mid 1990s many long-term Islamic militants, often veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, had congregated in Afghanistan. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who had excellent connections in the Gulf, was one. He went on to be a key planner of the 11 September attacks and was arrested in 2003.

4. Another veteran of the war against the Soviets, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led his own militant group from a base in west Afghanistan in the late 1990s after a period imprisoned in his native Jordan. A rival, not, as the US claimed, an ally, of bin Laden, he has been heavily involved in militant attacks in Iraq.

5. A five-year terror campaign in the early 1990s, which included an attempt to demolish the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, ended in Ramzi Yousef’s arrest and imprisonment. Yousef, a Pakistani, was one of many freelance operators active at the time.

6. Algerian Ahmed Ressam was one of the thousands of young men from all over the Islamic world who traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1990s to seek training and assistance for terror attacks. He was arrested on his way to bomb Los Angeles airport in 1999.

7. The leader of the 11 September hijackers, Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta was radicalized in Germany and made his way to bin Laden’s camps to get help in executing his planned strikes, which possibly included an attack using planes.

8. Indonesian Imam Samudra played a key role in the cell that blew up a nightclub in Bali in October 2002. He said he was disgusted by the ‘adulterous practices’ of the ‘white people’ he saw there.

9. By 2001 the Taliban leadership had moved so far towards the international ideology of ‘al-Qaeda’ that, prompted by backers in the Gulf, they ordered the destruction of the 2000-year-old statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, arguing that they were ‘graven images’.

10. Volunteers were drawn to Afghanistan to get training to fight for the Taliban or in Chechnya and Kashmir. The best were selected by bin Laden’s lieutenants for instruction in their own specialized camps.

11. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Militant Islam comes to America – this was not, as often said, the work of bin Laden. Several groups, including Egyptian and Pakistani militants, attempted attacks in the early 1990s in the US.

12. As Algeria descended into a maelstrom of violence in the early 1990s, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) struck at their former colonial overlords, hijacking a French jet in 1994 with the aborted aim of flying it into the Eiffel Tower.

13. Violence in Kashmir dates back decades. In the 1990s Pakistani-backed jihadi groups, such as the one responsible for this Srinagar car-bombing in 2000, dominated at the expense of local insurgents. Now the trend may be reversing.

14. Caucasian rebels have rallied to the flag of Islam for nearly 150 years. Moscow has repeatedly tried to paint Chechen rebels as ‘al-Qaeda’. In fact local jihadis, like these in Grozny, have their own sources of funds and recruits.