Word: laden
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fired by Somalia-based militants when they blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998, killing 213 and 11 people, respectively. But Afghanistan, and later Pakistan, became the focus of the militant Islamic threat after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden moved himself and his main base of operations there in 1996, after he was expelled from Sudan, eventually to perpetrate the attacks of 9/11. (See pictures of the life of Osama bin Laden...
...flaw in bin Laden's strategy of trying to capture the imagination of the Muslim masses through spectacular acts of terrorism was obvious even in the immediate wake of 9/11. In much of the Arab and Muslim world, there was a pervasive refusal to believe that Muslims had been responsible for the attacks, even after bin Laden claimed responsibility. The denial inherent in the tendency common from Egypt to Indonesia to blame Mossad or the CIA for 9/11 reveals a damning negation of al-Qaeda's tactics. So repulsive was the mass murder of innocents to ordinary Muslims that most...
...Even in countries where al-Qaeda had hoped to capitalize on resentment against American influence, its networks were largely rolled up by security services as the population looked on indifferently. By invading Iraq, the Bush Administration probably did a far more effective job than bin Laden of weakening U.S. influence in the Muslim world and rallying its youth to resistance. Yet even in Iraq, al-Qaeda's efforts to gain control of the resistance failed because its ideology and tactics were so loathsome to even the bulk of the Sunni insurgents fighting the Americans that they eventually made common cause...
Similarly, in Afghanistan, bin Laden's erstwhile stomping ground, the fight against the U.S. is being waged by the Taliban, which may once have been an ally of al-Qaeda but now exists entirely independently of bin Laden's movement and will ultimately make its strategic decisions based on its national interests. The sobering reality for bin Laden is that even among those dedicated to resisting the U.S. and its allies, his ideology of global jihad against the "far enemy" (the U.S.) has failed to supplant the more pragmatic Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hizballah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood...
...succeed in launching al-Qaeda's revolution. The years since 9/11 have seen events in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan escalating Muslim hostility toward Israel, the U.S. and those Arab regimes deemed too willing to do Washington's bidding. But even so, al-Qaeda remains a marginal factor. Bin Laden may have imagined that 9/11 would anoint him the head of a resurgent caliphate in the making, but instead it has reduced him and his movement to a life of duck-and-cover in Pakistan's wild frontier - and a political address otherwise known as oblivion. History marches on without...