In the direct aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I imagine Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, in
general, had complicated feelings.
On the one hand, this was a period for them to celebrate.
The most significant attack in their history, a stab directly into symbols of American financial
and military power, was a huge success.
However, they knew the US would not just take such an attack lying down.
Within a week, the United States announced a global war on terror which continues to
this day and would spend every last dollar they had and sacrifice thousands of their
young people to get their revenge.
What was next for both America and Al-Qaeda?
How did we get from there to the murky situation we’re in today?
Let’s take a look.
Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Bush administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld told their
underlings they needed to find a way to link this attack by Al-Qaeda, a Jihadist Salafi
group, and Saddam Hussein, the secular Arab nationalist leader of Iraq.
NATO argued the 9/11 attacks satisfied something in their alliance called article five, which
meant member countries were required to aid in military retaliation.
After the announcement of the War on Terror, the goal to get Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden quickly
turned into a global project.
On October 7th, the US and British militaries began a bombing campaign of Afghanistan to
disable the infrastructure of Al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies.
The invasion itself was pretty short.
The Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan ended 2 months after the bombing began, and started
what would become an endless campaign of occupation and insurgency.
Those plans to invade the utterly unrelated country of Iraq came soon after.
In early 2003, the United States was laying destruction upon Iraq after telling the world
they were working with Al-Qaeda, then when that turned out to not be true the new story
was that Iraq was trying to get the means to make a nuclear bomb, and when that turned
out to be false… well the US had already destroyed the country, and there wasn’t
much to do at that point.
I mean that’s technically a war crime and all, but when has America ever felt the need
to follow international law?
Anyways, this is a video about Al-Qaeda, not why George Bush is a war criminal.
Though that’s a video, I really wanna make.
Al-Qaeda wasn’t doing much in Iraq until after the US invasion.
The Baathist party there suppressed that kind of stuff.
The first bombing by Al-Qaeda in Iraq was in August of 2003, and their campaign was
focused on trying to attack the Shia majority of the country and incite a civil war on Shia
Sunni lines.
These attacks involved kidnappings, attacking voters, attacking sites where the US was torturing
prisoners good job on that one America, and general bombings to try and incite violence
between Sunnis and Shias.
By 2006, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was working closely with other Sunni militants in the country
and decided to break off from Al-Qaeda to make the Islamic State of Iraq or ISI.
Eventually, this spilt over into the Syrian civil war when it broke out and expanded into
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Aaaaand there goes my monetisation.
Outside of Iraq, the War on terror put Al-Qaeda in the centre of this movement of Sunni extremist
militants.
Groups in the same world began to pledge their loyalty to Al-Qaeda and build a network.
For example, Al-Qaeda began to focus on countries like Yemen and Somalia once the US got overinvested
in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they ran their insurgency
campaign after the US invasion.
They build relationships with groups like Al-Shabaab in Sudan, who eventually pledged
allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2012.
Their work in Yemen gave Saudi Arabia carte blanche for its genocidal war in Yemen they
began in 2015 and continue to this day, with almost no one talking about it.
They even managed to make a network in India, with an intention to use India as a staging
ground to make further attacks in places like Myanmar and Bangladesh.
This was very recent, and oddly enough suspected to be a PR stunt without a ton of weight.
Once the young ISIS came on the scene, which we will talk about later, with their deep
fried maymays and social media prowess, Al-Qaeda might be trying such publicity stunts just
to stay relevant.
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Remember when I said this?
[1 part activity 2 parts brandfing] Well, Al-Qaeda relied on that to build this
narrative they would be the organisation which Sunni terrorists would rally behind.
Osama Bin Laden’s connections, resources, and leadership skills were a vital part of
that.
In 2011, a small team of navy seals underwent a covert operation in Pakistan.
The Americans found where Bin Laden had been hiding, and broke in.
On the first of May in 2011, President Barack Obama announced the Americans had killed Bin
Laden in that firefight.
By then almost a decade had passed since 9/11, and the victory was full of controversies.
Pakistan was more than a little miffed the US had blatantly violated their territory
with a military invasion.
Also, I might be alone here, but the celebration which followed the announcement of his death
was merely ghoulish.
I don’t know about you guys, but I think the justice for all those who died that day
was gone when bin Laden was killed without a trial.
We don’t know the details of what happened, and probably won't for some time, but justice
didn’t really get served.
Today, Al-Qaeda struggles to stay relevant.
With ISIS taking up much of the energy of the world’s attention since 2014, as well
as other groups like Boko Haram, it’s a bit hard now to establish themselves as the
de facto core of this movement.
Without Bin Laden, their resources, connections, and leadership are at risk.
Who really knows what’s next for them if anything.
However, I wonder if that means Al-Qaeda really lost.
9/11 fundamentally changed America in ways I think Bin Laden anticipated.
He showed the commitment to the freedom they held was only skin deep, and quickly tossed
aside to combat a threat they had more than enough resources and power to fight.
It dragged America into two massive wars which put the country in vast amounts of debt which
in turn cracked the US economy.
Lastly, Bin Laden believed the west was the enemy of Islam, and with the way, the west
has acted since 9/11 Islam hates us
Are we really proving him wrong?
Thank you to 12tone for the theme as well as patrons Don and Kerry Johnson, Michael
Kirschner, Martin King, Scott Smith, Luis Eneas Guarita, Mary D'Onofrio, James McNeice,
and Garrick Kwan.
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