Al Qaeda traces its roots to the Cold War,
in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In the 1980s, Muslim fighters called the Mujahideen fought the
Soviets with backing from the Gulf Arab states and the US.
Many of the Mujahideen were foreigners;
followers of the hard line Salafi and Wahhabi schools
of Sunni Islam, who saw it as a holy duty to fight the spread
of communism and secularism.
The United States oscillates.
It doesn't really know who its enemies are.
The Saudi Wahhabi religious tradition was seen as an asset
that could be deployed in foreign policy in order to
destroy leftists, nationalists, and also communist influences.
(Gunshots)
Everybody knew the Wahhabi system was infiltrating.
Quite honestly, that wasn't the concern.
Half the population of Afghanistan was either killed,
wounded, or driven into exile, and that was the focus.
They achieved the objective of defeating the Soviet Union,
but then there was no containment strategy
to find them ways of being rehabilitated
when they came back to their country of origin.
The seeds of an idea were forming in the mind
of one of the war's most respected Arab commanders;
a young Osama bin Laden.
(Gunshot)
He decided to rid the Muslim world of all outside influence.
In order to better understand bin Laden's ideology,
we spoke to Abu Qatada, a Salafi cleric who has
repeatedly been accused of links to al Qaeda and was deported
from the UK to Jordan on charges of terrorism.
(Speaking foreign language)
How would you describe the Jihad movement?
Why is it that America, or the West, became the target?
bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia a hero,
and he put his network of jihadists fighters
to work again, this time in Yemen, launching attacks
against socialists under the name al Qaeda .
But the end of the Cold War brought more pressing regional
crises, and when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990,
eatening Saudi Arabia, Laden offered up his forces
to fight the Iraqis.
The Saudi regime declined bin Laden's offer,
and fatefully they turned instead to the United States.
The US troops in Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War,
and the fact that he was turned down when
he had the opportunity to have Muslims protect Saudi Arabia,
that just drove him to turn against
the United States in particular.
What finally pushed bin Laden over the edge
was the US's decision to launch a military intervention
in the Somali Civil War,
and using the Yemeni port city of Aden as their staging post
for operations in East Africa.
He convinced his followers the US was surrounding
the Middle East, was going to take over the whole thing,
and drive out Islam.
And he thought, "I can do something about that.
I can drive them back."
So this is the Gold Mohur Hotel.
It got completely destroyed last year in the battle for Aden.
It's also the site of al Qaeda's first attack
on a Western target.
In December of 1992, bin Laden loyalists planted a bomb in
the hotel, thinking there were American marines staying there.
The bomb ended up killing an Austrian tourist
and a hotel employee, but it caused the Americans
to stop using Aden as a fuelling point, and proved to bin Laden
that he didn't need ground troops to fight his enemies.
He could use terror instead.
This is the starting point of what has become a global jihad
and a war against the West.