7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7government and of his own family. His objection to the
presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian
Gulf War led to a growing rift with his country’s leaders.
By 1993 he had purportedly formed a network known as
al-Qaeda (“the Base”), which consisted largely of militant
Muslims bin Laden had met in Afghanistan. The group
funded and organized several attacks worldwide, includ-
ing detonating truck bombs against American targets in
Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing tourists in Egypt in 1997, and
simultaneously bombing the U.S. embassies in Nairobi,
Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. These attacks
altogether killed nearly 300 people. In 1994 the Saudi gov-
ernment confiscated bin Laden’s passport after accusing
him of subversion, and he fled to Sudan, where he orga-
nized camps that trained militants in terrorist methods,
and from where he was eventually expelled in 1996. He
later returned to Afghanistan, where he received protec-
tion from its ruling Taliban militia.
In 1996 – 98 bin Laden, a self-styled scholar, issued a
series of fatwās (“religious opinions”) declaring a holy war
against the United States, which he accused, among other
things, of looting the natural resources of the Muslim
world and aiding and abetting the enemies of Islam. Bin
Laden’s apparent goal was to draw the United States into
a large-scale war in the Muslim world that would over-
throw moderate Muslim governments and reestablish the
Caliphate (a single Islamic state). To this end, al-Qaeda,
aided by bin Laden’s considerable wealth, trained mili-
tants and funded terrorist attacks. It had thousands of
followers worldwide, in places as diverse as Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, Libya, Bosnia, Chechnya, and the Philippines.
Following the September 11 attacks, the United States led
a coalition in late 2001 that overthrew the Taliban and
sent bin Laden into hiding. Nearly three years passed,
during which time U.S. forces hunted bin Laden along