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 pan-Islamist, bin Laden organized and funded numerous jihadist or anti-Western militants and terrorist attacks worldwide. Al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 (9/11) directly killed 2,977 victims, causing the global war on terror.
Bin Laden was raised into Sunni Islam by his wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. He left the country to help the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviet Union in the Soviet–Afghan War. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreigners into the mujahideen, and in 1988, he founded al-Qaeda to enact violent jihad worldwide. After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. His public opposition to the Saudi royal family led to his 1991 expulsion from the country.
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