Is it right about Al Qaida????

Hina 11(MISS Einstein) · #1 Tuesday, June 02, 2009

According to The New York Times:

Al Qaeda is a terrorist network of Islamic extremists created by Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Mr. bin Laden, the 17th of 51 children of a wealthy Yemeni builder, inherited an estimated $300 million and created Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for "the base." Initially the group brought together Islamic fighters dedicated to driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. After the Soviet pullout, the group eventually found a wider goal: creating a "caliphate'' of Islamic states.

In 1996, Mr. Bin Laden issued a "declaration of war'' against the United States, vowing to drive it from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. In the years before 9/11, Mr. bin Laden had already become America's most wanted terrorism suspect, with a $5 million reward on his head for his alleged role in the August 1998 truck bombings of two American embassies in East Africa that killed more than 200 people, as well as a string of other terrorist attacks. The F.B.I. also named the leader of Al Qaeda as a prime suspect in the suicide bombing of the American destroyer Cole, which was attacked in Aden harbor, on Oct. 12, 2000, with the loss of 17 sailors' lives.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the United States military forces engaged Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, killing and capturing some of its leaders and hobbling the group in the early years.

They had a mandate to bring in Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive," in the words of President Bush. Over the next few years Al Qaeda was driven from its havens in Afghanistan, and many of its leaders were caught or killed.

But in 2007, intelligence reports indicated that Mr. bin Laden and his network had successfully relocated to Pakistan's tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

In March 2002, several hundred bedraggled foreign fighters -- Uzbeks, Pakistanis and a handful of Arabs -- fled the towering mountains of eastern Afghanistan and crossed into Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area. Savaged by American air power in the battles of Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot valley, some were trying to make their way to the Arab states in the Persian Gulf. Some were simply looking for a heaven.

They soon arrived at Shakai, a remote region in South Waziristan of tree-covered mountains and valleys, and in North Waziristan. Venturing into nearby farming villages, they asked local tribesmen if they could rent some of the area's walled family compounds, paying two to three times the impoverished area's normal rates as the militants began to lay new roots.

In many ways, the foreigners were returning to their home base. In the 1980s, Mr. bin Laden and hundreds of Arab and foreign fighters backed by the United States and Pakistan used the tribal regions as a staging area for cross-border attacks on Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Over the years American and NATO forces based across the border in Afghanistan have launched missile strikes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which also fled its base in Afghanistan to regroup in Pakistan with renewed force.

In the spring of 2009, the Central Intelligence Agency sent drone aircraft over the mountains of northwest Pakistan, launching more than three dozen missiles strikes against Al Qaeda as well as Taliban leaders. The missile strikes have reduced Al Qaeda's global reach but heightened the threat to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells in the country and fights to maintain its sanctuaries, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

Although missile strikes and raids carried out by the Pakistani military may be proving effective, having killed as many as 80 Qaeda fighters in the past year, Pakistani officials express growing alarm that the drone strikes in particular are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country.......

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