Editing Al-Qaeda (section)

==Late 1980s: Formation of al Qaeda==
In 1988, Osama bin Laden (with funding from the CIA) formally established al Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan, to continue jihad beyond the Afghan-Soviet War. Ghost Wars recounts this moment, stating, “Bin Laden founded al Qaeda to serve as a base—literally, ‘the base’ in Arabic—for coordinating global jihadist efforts” (Coll, 2004, p. 201). The group aimed to unite Arab fighters from the Afghan war and channel their efforts.

The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson (2004) corroborates this, noting that al Qaeda’s early infrastructure relied on financial networks established during the Afghan war, including bin Laden’s personal wealth and connections to Saudi donors. Thompson writes, “By 1989, al Qaeda had established training camps and financial channels that would sustain its operations for decades” (Thompson, 2004, p. 45). The CIA tied bank, [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International]], aided with this endeavor.

The inhabitants of the five republics of the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), who shared a common Turkish heritage and remained devoutly Islamic, were supportive of the mujahideen in their struggle against their Communist overlords. This support, combined with the massive amount of Muslim recruits to the great jihad from the Arab world, served to create a creeping sense of futility among the Soviet troops.

To drive the "evil empire" to the point of total collapse, the CIA continued to infuse the holy war with munitions and money, until the war in Afghanistan became the Agency's most expensive covert undertaking. By 1985, the Afghan rebels were receiving $250 million a year in dirty money from the CIA to battle the 115,000 Soviet troops occupying the country. This figure was double the number of Soviet troops who had been deployed to Afghanistan in 1984. The annual payments to the Muslim guerrillas reached nearly $1 billion by 1988. 

By this time, the CIA was also shipping highly sophisticated weaponry, including Stinger missiles, to the jihadists, whom they mistakenly viewed as "freedom fighters." In an effort to supply recruits to the jihad, the CIA once again focused its attention on America's black community. This development was understandable. The Agency realized that millions of African Americans, who felt disenfranchised by the system, had converted to Islam, which they saw as "the black man's religion." 

This movement, prompted by such black leaders as Timothy Drew ("Noble Drew Ali"), Elijah Poole ("Elijah Muhammad"), and Malcolm Little ("Malcolm X"), had given rise to hundreds of mosques within America's inner cities.³ By 1980, CIA began to send hundreds of militant Muslim missionaries, all members of the radical Tablighi Jamaat, into American mosques to call on young black men to take up arms in the holy war to liberate their Muslim brothers. Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, one of the first of these missionaries to arrive, convinced scores of members of the Yasin Mosque in Brooklyn to head off to guerrilla training camps in Pakistan with an offer of thousands in cash and the promise of seventy houris in seventh heaven, if they were killed in action. The cash came from the CIA's coffers."