Al-Qaeda What is it?

Al-Qaeda (meaning ‘the Base’) is an international Sunni Islamist movement founded in 1988 by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden. Since 1992 it has carried out terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets across the world in an extreme interpretation of jihad (see Islam), the Islamic doctrine of holy struggle. Most devastatingly, it was responsible for the attacks

on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, which claimed around 3,000 lives and injured 6,300.