Word: sovietize
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...Qaeda had its origins in the long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah--the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam...
...Saudi port of Jidda, al-Zawahiri successfully sued Egyptian authorities who attempted to prevent him from leaving the country. It may have been in Jidda that he first met bin Laden. Within a year, he was working in Peshawar, Pakistan, giving medical care to bin Laden's anti-Soviet fighters...
...Afghanistan collapsed into factional fighting following the Soviet defeat in 1989, al-Zawahiri ushered back to Egypt many of the Arab veterans of the war. There they became Al Jihad operatives, dedicated to Mubarak's overthrow. Meanwhile, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden relocated to Sudan. Most of the missions that al-Zawahiri launched into Egypt, including separate attempts to assassinate the Prime Minister and a former Interior Minister, ended in failure. The successful bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan was the demented high point of the campaign. Mubarak's security forces responded with a ferocious crackdown in which hundreds...
...fact, says Harvard's Matthew Meselson, a Nobel-prizewinning biologist who did an in-depth study of an anthrax accident at a Soviet bioweapons plant in Sverdlovsk in 1979, "there is no theoretical or experimental basis to believe in any sort of minimum threshold." A dozen or even fewer spores could be sufficient to kill, he suspects, under the right circumstances...
...intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads. Al-Qaeda also made it known that loose components such as enriched uranium would do too. Relatively new to the free-for-all thieving of the post-Soviet republics, bin Laden was fleeced at least twice, getting fooled by black marketeers who tried to sell him low-grade, radioactive rubbish--in one instance claiming it was "red mercury," a fictional Russian weapon...