March 10, 1957 - Osama bin Laden

The organization he built became the principal vehicle for transnational jihadist violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, responsible for coordinated attacks across multiple continents and culminating in the September 11, 2001 strikes that killed nearly three thousand people in the United States. His effectiveness lay partly in his ability to recruit, finance, and network across borders — skills developed during the Soviet-Afghan War — and partly in a ideological framework that framed violence as religious duty on a global scale.

From Wikipedia

Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. A Salafi jihadist, bin Laden worked to establish a pan-Islamist caliphate by using al-Qaeda to organize and fund jihadist militants and terrorists worldwide. Al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 directly killed 2,977 victims, and caused the global war on terror.

Bin Laden was raised into Sunni Islam by his wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. He left the country during the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) to help the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreigners into the Afghan mujahideen while funding and arming them. In 1988, bin Laden founded al-Qaeda. After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, he commanded a mujahideen force in the 1989–1992 Afghan Civil War.

⚠ Report a problem with this article