Osama bin Laden: Declaration of Jihad against Americans

Osama bin Laden's Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places, issued in August 1996, was his first call for jihad against the United States. Also known as the “Ladenese Epistle,” the document can be taken to represent al Qaeda's declaration of war on Washington. In the context of debates among Muslim militants, Bin Laden's Declaration of Jihad called for adjusting strategy. Instead of fighting local battles, they would wage a global-scale jihad against the Western superpower in response to its assaults on Muslims. The declaration also addresses issues specific to Saudi Arabia, asserting that American forces on Saudi soil constitute a military occupation and that Muslims should expel them.

In terms of Bin Laden's career, the Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places marked a turning point. As a young man in his twenties, Bin Laden joined the Afghan struggle against Soviet forces by 1984. In the early 1990s, he became active in Saudi Arabia's dissident religious current. The Saudi government cracked down on the dissidents, however, imprisoning some and driving others, like Bin Laden, into exile. In 1992 he found refuge in Sudan. The United States and Saudi Arabia suspected Bin Laden of plotting terrorist activities, so they put pressure on the Sudanese government to expel him. In 1996 he moved back to Afghanistan; shortly after arriving there, he published the Declaration of Jihad in al-Quds al-Arabi, a London-based Arabic newspaper. Two years later, al Qaeda carried out its first major terrorist attack on American targets with truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There followed the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.