Terrorism, War on

Bin Laden, an exile and multimillionaire, developed a terrorist group called al Qaeda (Arabic for “the Base”) in the 1990s with the goals of expelling Westerners from the Islamic world and establishing Islamist rule throughout the Middle East. Bin Laden had first acquired a taste for terror and guerrilla warfare during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, in which he served first as a financier and organizer, and later as a commander. After spending time in Sudan, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in the late 1990s, establishing a relationship with the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban government and using the country as a training and staging area for future operations. Afghanistan offered a friendly government and an isolated, almost inaccessible sanctuary.