Osama bin Laden: Declaration of Jihad against Americans

About the Author

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) was the Saudi leader of al Qaeda, an organization dedicated to waging jihad against the United States and Western influence in the Muslim world. He grew up in one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families in the Red Sea city of Jidda. He was in his early twenties when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Like many idealistic young men in the Muslim world, he went to Pakistan to support the anti-Communist jihad, arriving in Peshawar in 1984. Bin Laden lent his organizing and fund-raising talents to the jihad, and he also fought in at least one battle against Soviet forces. Toward the end of the war, in August 1988, he founded al Qaeda in Peshawar. After the Soviet evacuation, he returned to Saudi Arabia and became active in the religious protest movement against the government's decision to host American military forces in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

In the early 1990s, Bin Laden was yet a minor figure among religious dissidents, but his opposition to the government resulted in his expulsion from his homeland and resettlement in Sudan. There he expanded his contacts with militants from different countries, building on relationships formed in Pakistan during the 1980s. In May 1996, the Sudanese government succumbed to pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia to deport him. Bin Laden then moved to Afghanistan, and shortly after establishing new headquarters there, he issued the August 1996 Declaration of Jihad. As long as he resided in Khartoum, he had refrained from issuing inflammatory statements that would complicate Sudan's official relations with Riyadh and Washington. In Afghanistan's anarchic circumstances, he was no longer so constrained. In the next two years he attracted increasing attention as a potential threat to Western interests in the Muslim world. Al Qaeda's attacks on U.S. targets between 1998 and 2001 made him the focus of attention among national security officials and experts in the West. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, forcing him to flee over the border into Pakistan, where he was believed to have found refuge in the rugged mountains of North-West Frontier Province. On May 2, 2011, as part of a covert operation, U.S. Navy Seals shot and killed bin Laden inside his private compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His body was buried at sea.