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Al-Qaida, Osama bin Ladin, the Taleban, and their supporters

Modified 23 September 2005

Do note that in places I have to rely on the interpretation of others, as many pages are in languages I don't read -- Urdu, Arabic, etc.

Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islami, or Taliban -- Actually a political-military group created by Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence service), the Taleban are Pashtun religious students (``taleban'' means ``student'' in Turkic and other central Asian languages) who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border. See the Afganistan section for the recent history of Afghan political movements, and see the Pakistan section for current and upcoming Pakistani militant movements. The Taliban were only recognized as the national government of Afghanistan by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.

  • Taliban Online --
  • http://www.taliban.com/ -- the original Taliban web site, as of 15 Sep 2001 the hostname no longer resolved.
  • http://www.taleban.com/ -- the second Taleban web page, it had claimed to be ``the official one'', as of 15 Sep 2001 the DNS servers (DNS{1,2,3}.INTERLAND.NET) returned a bogus A record of 127.0.0.1. As per whois, it was then registered to: Mujahib, Abdul Hackeem (AHM19) admin@taleban.com; Afghan Taleban Mission to the U.N. (TALEBAN-DOM); 55-16 Main Street Suite 1D; Flushing, NY 11355; +1-718-359-0457. This page has been hacked from time to time -- in the spring of 2001, and again in August 2001, to name just twice that I've noticed. Both times apparently by Russians, with taunts aimed at the Chechen separatists. The Chechens are thought to be supported by the Taleban, or perhaps it's better to say that both the Taleban and the Chechen separatists are supported by the same parties. See the Qoqaz sites in the Chechnya section for more on that connection.
  • Not exactly the Taliban -- but some clever satire apparently misunderstood by both anti- and pro-Taliban types: http://www.taliban.org/

al-Qaida and Osama bin Ladin -- funded the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August, 1998. ``The organization that eventually evolved into al-Qaida (the name means 'the base' in Arabic) began as the Makhtab al Khadimat, the Office of Services, the Peshawar, Pakistan [....]'' ["New York Times", 9 June 2002, pp 1,26,27].

An excellent article in The New Yorker (2 Aug 2004, pp 40-53) describes al-Qaida's use of the Internet. There are two online magazine, Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Jihad) and Muaskar al-Battar (Camp al-Battar). The real operational and recruiting material is now hosted on hacked servers, the Arkansas Department of Highways and Transporation found itself hosting al-Qaida pages for a few days in July 2004. Sympathizers get on e-mail lists and receive daily updates as to where to find the current site.

David Blankenhorn wrote a very good overview of the terminology of jihadi or jihadist [see Chicago Tribune, 16 Feb 2003, section 2, pp 1, 3, 4] showing that those labeling themselves as jihadi are "a minority of a minority of a minority", a statistically insignificant fraction of Muslims:

  • A Muslim is an adherent of the religion of Islam -- the word Muslim literally refers to a surrenduring to the will of God.
  • A small minority of Muslims are Islamists, meaning that they view Islam as an idealized model of political and legal systems, and want Islam as a national religion.
  • A small minority of the Islamists, a minority that itself is divided into several ununified factions, are Salafists, meaning Revivalists, that look to an unchanged model of Islamic law and practice based on the experiences of the Prophet Muhammed. The Salafists are split into so many factions because of disagreement over just what the historical model should be.
  • Among the Salafists, a very small fraction call themselves Jihadis, and feel that violence is justified in the establishment of the Salafist ideal. Jihad is a classical Islamic term with multiple meanings, and this is a misuse of its primary meaning.
  • Among the Jihadis, only a few are also Takfiris, who believe that violence is justified against all non-Jihadis, even other Muslims. Osama bin Ladin, al-Qaida, and their allies are Takfiris.

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