• December 1998: The bin Laden-linked “Islamic Aden-Abyan Army” kidnapped sixteen Westerners in Yemen. The Islamists executed three British citizens and one Australian when Yemeni forces tried to rescue the hostages.19 A Yemeni official and Yemeni tribal sources claimed the kidnappers were “following bin Laden’s lead” and the operation was “in response to a fatwa made by Osama bin Laden that sanctioned the killing of Westerners.” In early 1999 the group’s leader, Zayn-al-Abidin al-Muhdar, said the kidnappings were carried out “for the sake of Bin Laden.”20
• 18–19 December 1998: Because of threats in bin Laden’s statement supporting the “Iraqi people” during U.S. and U.K. air strikes on Iraq, “most American embassies in sub-Saharan Africa were ordered closed for two days.” Thirty-eight embassies and three consulates were closed on 18–19 December 1999.21
• January–August 1999: Threats attributed to bin Laden, or U.S. government perceptions that bin Laden was about to attack, resulted in the temporary closing—twenty-four hours or more—of seventy U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service said this number marked “an all-time high,” and Mary Anne Weaver marveled in the New Yorker that the closings showed that even without attacking “he [bin Laden] was holding the United States government hostage.”22
• 16 February 1999: Uzbek authorities claimed bin Laden, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and a “Jordanian citizen named Khattab, who lives in Chechnya,” were responsible for “a series of bomb explosions” in Tashkent on 16 February. Media reports claimed one goal of the attacks was to assassinate Uzbek president Islam Karimov. According to Moscow’s Kommersant, Karimov may have been targeted because he “is actively exploiting his image as an implacable warrior against fundamentalism and Wahabism to strengthen his ties to the West.” Six bombs were detonated in Tashkent, killing 16 and wounding 128. The attackers are reported to belong to Tahir Yoldashev’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is trained and supported by bin Laden and the Taliban. Later, in August 1998, the IMU kidnapped four Japanese geologists working in Kryrgzstan. The geologists were released in October 1998 after a $3 million ransom was paid. The IMU fighters then withdrew after engaging Kyrgyz and Uzbek forces.23
• May–June 1999: Bin Laden-trained Kashmiri insurgents and members of bin Laden’s Arab Afghan cadre participated in the Pakistani military’s incursion into the Kargil area of Indian-held Kashmir. Indian military and police authorities claimed bin Laden was planning a bigger role in Kashmir, and the Indian media said Muslims in Kashmir increasingly were looking to bin Laden to “save them from India.” Even before the Kargil operation, a reporter from London’s Sunday Times quoted noncombatant Kashmiris as saying, “Our ‘father’ bin Laden has sent brothers from Afghanistan to wage jihad,” and “Bin Laden is coming—he will purge the Indian army from Kashmir.”24
• June 1999: The U.S. government temporarily closed its embassies in Senegal, Gambia, Liberia, Togo, Namibia, and Mauritania. U.K. embassies in Senegal, Gambia, Namibia, and Madagascar also were closed. U.S. officials said the closings were the result of bin Laden-related surveillance. Earlier in June, the State Department warned U.S. travelers “against terrorist threats that focused mainly on bin Laden.”25
• July 1999: In a direct response to bin Laden’s August 1998 attacks in East Africa, the U.S. Congress appropriated nearly $1.5 billion to strengthen the security of U.S. facilities overseas. Overall, in the years following bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of Jihad, the U.S. government’s counterterrorism budget nearly doubled, from $5.7 billion in 1996 to $11.1 billion under the Clinton administration. The total budget was larger, the Washington Post wrote, because the $11.1 billion figure does not “include intelligence spending, which remains classified.”26
• July 1999: The FBI suspended tourist tours of its headquarters. The suspension was based on “intelligence” showing bin Laden planned to attack the Hoover building.27
• July 1999: U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen canceled a trip to Albania “in part because of fears of a terrorist attack by followers of Osama bin Laden.”28
• 6–14 August 1999: In a handwritten note to Reuters, the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (AAIA) claimed responsibility for the 14 August 1999 bombing of a Yemeni military aircraft; seventeen Yemeni military officers were killed, including several senior Army officers. The AAIA also claimed credit for killing six people in a grenade attack on a Sana market on 6 August.29
• August 1999–April 2002: After entering Dagestan on 2 August 1999, a Chechen Islamist force—led by Ibn Khattab and veteran Arab Afghans—fought Russian forces in Chechnya and Dagestan. The insurgents also appeared responsible for three skilled car bombings that killed almost three hundred Russians on 4 September in Dagestan, and 8 and 13 September in Moscow. Increasingly, bin Laden and his allies viewed the Caucasus region as a pivotal battleground; bin Laden told Pakistani journalists “the mujahedin of Chechnya … were fighting for Islam and it was his moral responsibility to provide them with every kind of help,” and other Muslim media said al Qaeda viewed “jihad against the Russians and Orthodox Christians, first in Kosovo and now in Chechnya, as a continuation of the great jihad the Arab Afghans waged to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.” In October 1999, Khattab said the “day Russia loses Dagestan, it will lose the whole of the Caucasus.” He then echoed bin Laden on the killing of civilians, telling Al-Watan Al-Arabi the war “has been shifted to all Russian cities and would be directed against all Russians of all ages and ethnic backgrounds.”30
• December 1999: The discovery by Jordanian authorities of plans by bin Laden’s fighters to attack hotels and Christian holy sites in Jordan, and the U.S. Customs Service arrest of an Algerian smuggling explosives from Canada into Washington State, prompted travel warnings, intensified airport security, and caused the deployment of hundreds of Customs officers to the northern and southern U.S. borders. Citing a heightened bin Laden threat to crowds gathered for millennium celebrations, the U.S. State Department warned Americans overseas to avoid large crowds. This warning—and the capture of the explosives-laden Algerian—caused widespread unease across the United States. The mayor of Seattle, for example, canceled his city’s millennium celebrations, and the U.S. Congress began “pressuring Canada to tighten controls along the border between the two countries” after a U.S. Department of Justice official told the press that Washington is “concerned that Canada’s laws do facilitate the entry into the United States of individuals who may pose a terrorist threat.”31
• 24–31 December 1999: On 24 December, five Kashmiri insurgents hijacked an Air India flight carrying 155 passengers and crew and diverted it to Kandahar airport. The plane and passengers were released on 31 December after New Delhi agreed to release from prison senior HUM leader and Islamist scholar Masood Azhar—who had been jailed for more than six years—and two other veteran Kashmiri insurgents. Speaking in Pakistan after his release, Azhar said the hijacking was a great success. He said that “those who could hijack an Indian plane and get their people released could also rebuild the Babri Masjid [mosque] and get occupied Kashmir liberated.” Taunting the Indians, Azhar asked “Where is your 1.3 million-man army? Where is your RAW [India’s intelligence service]? Can they grab these five people who shattered your security system?” Azhar also hinted that bin Laden might have had a role in the hijacking when he called him “the world’s greatest Holy warrior and asset of the Muslim world to be proud of.”32
• 1–4 July 2000: Because of concerns about possible attacks by bin Laden-associated groups, the U.S. government canceled celebrations in Belgium and Jordan marking American independence day. The cancellation moved Jordanian officials to denounce the U.S. action as an attempt to force Jordan to support Washington’s policy on the Arab-Israeli peace process by acting to hurt tourism and thereby Jordan’s economy.33
• 2–3 July 2000: Chechen Islamist insurgents staged five attacks. According to Russian military sources, the
attacks killed thirty-three, wounded eighty-four, and left six missing. The assaults included suicide attacks on “hard military tactics,” suggesting that, as in Kashmir, leadership and tactics are passing to the hands of veteran Arab Afghans.34
• 8–22 August 2000: On 8 August, a bomb blast killed 12 Russians and wounded 108 near a highway underpass in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. Russian authorities claimed the bombers were trained in “Chechen camps for saboteurs, where the subject of mines and explosives is taught by Osama bin Laden’s instructors.” On 22 August, a suicide bomber destroyed a café in Grozny, killing nine Russians and wounding twenty.35
• 12 October 2000: In Aden, Yemen, the U.S. destroyer Cole was nearly sunk by suicide bombers twenty days after bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, said, “Enough of words, it is time to take action against this iniquitous and faithless force [the U.S.] which has spread its troops through Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.” The attack left seventeen U.S. sailors dead and thirty-nine wounded. The Cole was in dry dock for a year and cost more than $250 million to repair. After the attack, President Clinton ordered all U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf “to pull out of port and head to the relative safety of open waters.” Concurrently, the U.S. Navy ordered its ships to stop using the Suez Canal for fear of additional attacks. In February 2001, bin Laden praised the Cole attack. The Cole, he said in a poem, “sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and false power. To her doom she moves slowly. A dinghy awaits her riding the waves. In Aden, the young men stood up for holy war and destroyed a destroyer feared by the powerful.” Hinting of more attacks, bin Laden said “your brothers in the East readied their mounts … and the battle camels are prepared to go.”36
• 30 October–15 November 2000: Chechen Islamist insurgents carried out more than one hundred attacks against Russian forces in Chechnya. Nearly half of the attacks were in the cities of Grozny and Gudermes, which the Russians claimed to control. Even with the loss of two hundred soldiers per month, President Vladimir Putin has said that “it would be an unforgivable mistake to retreat and abandon the republic again.”37
• 24–30 December 2000: Islamist insurgents in Indonesia and the Philippines staged anti-Christian attacks in eight Indonesian cities, Manila, and Jolo. The 24 December bombings in Indonesia were aimed at Christian churches holding Christmas Eve services, killing eighteen and wounding ninety-six. The Indonesian authorities said the attacks were to “a concerted attack on Christians as they celebrated Christmas.” The casualty toll would have been higher, but authorities defused half the bombs that had been planted. The bombings in Manila on 30 December killed twenty-two and wounded about one hundred people; a Catholic priest was murdered in Jolo two days earlier.38
• 11 September 2001: In a surprise attack, al Qaeda fighters commandeered four U.S. commercial airliners and flew two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed en route to its target. More than three thousand people were killed and the U.S. economy was disrupted. It has been estimated that by the end of 2003, the U.S. economy will lose 1.8 million jobs and estimates of total damage to the economy range from $100 billion to $300 billion—all attributable to the attacks. In addition, the U.S. military response to the attacks had cost $6.4 billion by late January 2002, and the planned budget for fiscal year 2003 showed increases of more than $65 billion for defense and homeland security. These human and financial losses, according to the New York Times, were inflicted by al Qaeda at the cost of nineteen dead fighters and about $300,000. The New York Times reports that the fighters brought about $40,000 into the country on their persons and about $240,000 was sent to them by wire transfers.39
• 7 October 2001–20 April 2002: Al Qaeda and, as far as can be determined, Osama bin Laden so far have survived the U.S. military offensive initiated against them on 7 October. This fact, bin Laden’s repeated public statements promising even more damaging attacks on the United States, and multiple FBI warnings of imminent attacks inside the United States, have again reinforced bin Laden’s stature as the most effective and potent anti-American force in the Muslim world.
• 7 October 2001: U.S. and UK air forces bombed Taliban bases in Afghanistan, starting the U.S.-led invasion and guerrilla war bin Laden long wanted.
• 1–15 December 2001: After two weeks of U.S. air bombardment of al Qaeda forces in the Tora Bora Mountains, the Northern Alliance failed to fully engage al Qaeda; bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and most of their fighters escaped to Pakistan. Of this victory, bin Laden said, “If all the forces of world evil could not achieve their goals on a one square mile area against a small number of mujahideen … how can these evil forces triumph over the Muslim world?”40
• 23 January 2002: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi while going to interview Shaykh Sayyid Giliani, leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra, a group based in Pakistan and North America and tied to al Qaeda and Kashmiri guerrillas. Pearl was beheaded. His remains were found in May 2002.
• 27 February–2 March 2002: After Muslims burned cars of a passenger train in Godhra, in India’s Gujarat State—killing fifty-eight Hindus, wounding forty—Hindu mobs rioted in Ahmedabad, killing more than two thousand, mostly Muslims. Reports claimed the Hindu government “turned a blind eye” to the killings and property destruction. Satellite television coverage of the riots again validated for Muslims bin Laden’s contention that the West would not intervene to stop the killing of Muslims.
• 3–18 March 2002: A U.S. military offensive into the Shahi Kowt area of eastern Afghanistan ended in failure when most of al Qaeda’s force escaped into Pakistan. The U.S. military’s Afghan auxiliaries were again reluctant to fight. U.S. forces suffered eight killed and about one hundred wounded; many casualties came from an undetected al Qaeda ambush in the helicopter landing zone. Initial U.S. estimates claimed seven hundred to one thousand al Qaeda fighters were killed, but only a few dozen bodies were recovered.
• 17 March 2002: An attack on the Protestant International Church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave killed five and wounded forty-six; two dead and nine wounded were Americans. The church was attended by foreign diplomats, their families, and other expatriates.
• 5 April 2002: Four thousand men in Sakaka in al-Jawf Province demonstrated against Riyadh’s support for Israel and the United States. Five hundred Saudi riot police were sent to control the area.
• 11 April 2002: An al Qaeda fighter detonated a truck bomb at a synagogue on Tunisia’s Djerba Island, killing fourteen German tourists and seven others. Al Qaeda’s post-attack statement said, “The Jewish synagogue in Djerba village was targeted by one single person, the hero Nizar (Sayf-al-Din al-Tunisi)…. It followed the same pattern and course of the blessed jihad in defense of our Islam’s sacred places and in support for the jihad of our Muslim brothers in all parts of the world.”41
• 17–18 April 2002: On 17 April, Chechen guerrillas killed six Russian soldiers in Noviye Atagi, a village ten miles southeast of Grozny. On 18 April, guerrillas detonated a mine in a roadway in Grozny, killing seventeen Russian servicemen.
• 8 May 2002: In Karachi, a car bomb was driven into a minibus carrying French naval technicians who were working for Pakistan’s navy. Eleven French workers were killed, twelve wounded; two Pakistanis were killed and twelve wounded. Al Qaeda said that “the armed operation that targeted the French military technicians has come to show the weakness of this regime [Pakistan’s] and prove that what the regime had built [has] started to crumble like a deck of cards.”42
• 17 June 2002: A car bomb exploded outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, killing eleven and wounding more than forty.
• 4 July 2002: Egyptian Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet killed two U.S. citizens at the El Al counter in Los Angeles airport. He was killed by El Al security.
• 13 July 2002: Grenades were thrown at an archaeological site near Manshera, Pakistan, wounding twelve, including seven Germans, one Austrian, and one Slovak.
•
5 August 2002: Islamists raided a Christian school for the children of foreign aid workers northwest of Islamabad. Six staff members were killed.
• 10 August 2002: A Christian church in Taxila, Pakistan, was bombed. Five people were killed, including three nurses, and twenty-five were wounded.
• 19 August 2002: Chechen guerrillas shot down a Russian MI-26 helicopter using a STRELA surface-to-air missile, killing 118 and wounding twenty-nine.
• 27 August 2002: In Beijing, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced U.S. support for Chinese military actions against Uighur separatists in western China, saying the United States agreed that the Uighurs had “committed acts of terrorism.” In Washington, the State Department adds the East Turkistan Islamic Movement to its list of proscribed terrorist organizations.
• 6 October 2002: An al Qaeda suicide bomber sailed an explosives-laden boat into the 290,000 ton, French-owned tanker Limburg off Aden, Yemen. The tanker was carrying 397,000 barrels of Saudi crude to Malaysia. The attack was a warning to France, said al Qaeda’s claim for the bombing, as well as to “the regime of treason and treachery in Yemen [that] did all it could … to hunt down, pursue, and arrest the Muslim mujahid youths in Yemen.” The attack was the second success in al Qaeda’s maritime jihad and was meant to “stop the theft of the Muslims’ wealth [i.e., oil] for which nothing worth mentioning is paid.”43
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