France 2: al-Qaida, the roots of evil – Le Figaro

TONIGHT ON TV – One day in history tells almost forty years of Islamist terrorism, Osama bin Laden Daech.

How did we get to the attacks of November 13? To answer this question, Laurent Delahousse offers this Sunday on France 2, a documentary that tells the story of al-Qaida and shows how Daech is the heir of the organization founded in 1998 by Osama bin Laden. Rich in expert testimony and archive footage, the origins of jihad describes the rise of Islamist terrorism for nearly forty years. He points to the difficulty or inability, of Westerners to take the measure of the threat. And the mistakes democracies in general and the US in particular.

The documentary begins with Osama bin Laden put in historical context. On November 20, 1979, when the future leader of al-Qaida is only a 22 year old student, held a terrorist attack against the Grand Mosque in Mecca. A group of extremist Muslims of various nationalities performs a hostage and kills several hundred people. The mosque is released by the Saudi army December 4 with the help of France and the GIGN.

Banned from Saudi Arabia

At this time, the young Osama, son of the powerful bin Laden family, close to the Saudi authorities, is far from being a terrorist. Unlike his many brothers and sisters went to study in the West, he remained at home and received a strict religious upbringing. It is natural that in 1980 he accepted the offer of Saudi intelligence to rejoin Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union.

The young millionaire invests in his body and soul new mission. He recruited jihadists who come from the entire Muslim world to bend the USSR, with the support of the United States in 1988. That same year, bin Laden meeting, Pakistan, the Egyptian terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri with which he created in secret al-Qaeda (The Base).

Back in Saudi Arabia in 1990, bin Laden became radicalized and anti-American. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, while the Saudis refuse bin Laden’s offer to intervene with jihadists, marks a break. Banished from his country, bin Laden went into exile in Sudan. There he becomes a terrorist who finance terrorist attacks worldwide. It was not until 1995, after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the CIA qur suspect Osama bin Laden.

The latter returns to Afghanistan in 1996. The terrorist ready allegiance to Mullah Omar, the leader the Taliban. Al-Qaida is led by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and the Pakistani engineer Khalid Sheikh -Mohammed. The organization, modern and structured, develops. Only eight years after its inception the CIA discovers its existence … In May 1998, the US agency plans to remove bin Laden, but Bill Clinton considers too low threat cancels the operation. In the process, the Saudi threat Americans hitting on their soil. It will be September 11, 2001.

The documentary denounces the failure of American power to take al-Qaeda seriously and considers the second Gulf War in 2003 as an error. Finally, it analyzes the gear that led to the birth of Daech on the ruins of Iraq.