Al-Qaeda

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Al-Qaeda formed in 1988 during the Soviet-Afghan War, when Osama bin Laden and associates organized a roster of Arab volunteer fighters bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam had recruited for the anti-Soviet mobilization in Afghanistan into a standing network. The group emerged as a Salafi-jihadist militant organization pursuing what it called global jihad against the far enemy, chiefly the United States and its allies, aiming to end their military and political presence in Muslim-majority countries. It carried out numerous attacks against that goal through the 1990s before its most consequential operation, the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, which killed thousands and reshaped a generation of international security policy.

Bin Laden led the organization as its founding leader from 1988 until he was killed in 2011; Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded him and led the network until his own death in 2022. The United Nations and numerous national governments have designated Al-Qaeda a terrorist organization, and analysts today describe it as a decentralized transnational network rather than a single command structure, its affiliates operating with substantial independence across multiple regions.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

What distinguishes Al-Qaeda from militant groups pursuing purely local or nationalist aims is the scope of its stated doctrine: a Salafi-jihadist ideology directed at the far enemy rather than at any single government, seeking to end American and allied military and political presence across Muslim-majority countries and ultimately restore governance under sharia on a transnational scale. That doctrine, rather than territorial control of any specific state, has organized the network's strategy and its recruitment since its 1988 founding, and it is described here to explain the organization's stated aims, never as instruction toward them.

The organization's Iraqi affiliate, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, evolved through several name changes into what declared itself Islamic State in 2014. The two organizations split at that point and became rivals for leadership of the global jihadist movement, each accusing the other of having departed from correct doctrine and strategy, evidence that global jihad as a project has never been doctrinally or organizationally unified even among the movements most committed to pursuing it.