Abdul Subhan Qureshi, a software engineer-turned-bomb-maker often referred to as “India’s Bin Laden”, was arrested after a brief exchange of fire from Ghazipur in Delhi, calling it a breakthrough just before Republic Day celebrations. What is motivating these young guys towards terrorism is just the religious conditioning in the name of Jihad. In the recent past, Jihad or service to Allah is taken as violence. The term ‘jihad’ has accrued both violent and non-violent meanings. According to John Esposito, it can simply mean striving to live a moral and virtuous life, spreading and defending Islam as well as fighting injustice and oppression, among other things. The relative importance of these two forms of jihad is a matter of controversy. According to scholar of Islam and Islamic history Rudolph Peters, in the contemporary Muslim world, Traditionalist Muslims look to classical works on fiqh in their writings on jihad, and “copy phrases” from those; Islamic Modernists emphasise the defensive aspect of jihad, regarding it as tantamount to bellum justum in modern international law; and fundamentalists view it as a struggle for the expansion of Islam and the realisation of Islamic ideals. Anyways, now the question is that, whatever Osama has left for the service of Allah, would be used for the betterment of Muslims or for the violence?
Bin Laden was born to the family of billionaire Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden in Saudi Arabia. He studied at university in the country until 1979, when he joined Mujahideen forces in Pakistan fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped to fund the Mujahideen by funnelling arms, money and fighters from the Arab world into Afghanistan, and gained popularity among many Arabs. In 1988, he formed al-Qaeda, he was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, and shifted his base to Sudan, and until U.S. pressure forced him to leave Sudan in 1996. After establishing a new base in Afghanistan, he declared a war against the United States, initiating a series of bombings and related attacks. Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings.
Al Qaeda’s leaders were increasingly worried about spies in their midst, drones in the air and secret tracking devices reporting their movements as the US-led war against them ground on, documents seized in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout and reviewed some news agencies revealed earlier. The cache of 113 documents, translated and declassified by US intelligence agencies, are mostly dated between 2009 and 2011, the documents – the second tranche from the raid to have been declassified since May 2015 – depict an al Qaeda that was unwavering in its commitment to global jihad, but with its core leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan under pressure on multiple fronts. In one document, bin Laden issued instructions to Al-Qaeda members holding an Afghan hostage to be wary of possible tracking technology attached to the ransom payment. In one of the declassified documents, Bin Laden outlined how at least $29 million stashed in Sudan should be apportioned after his death, requesting that most of it be used to continue global “jihad”.
From 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the War on Terror, as the FBI placed a $25 million bounty on him in their search for him. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, where he lived with a local family from Waziristan, during a covert operation conducted by members of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group and Central Intelligence Agency SAD/SOG operators on the orders of then the U.S. President Barack Obama.
After leaving college in 1979, bin Laden went to Pakistan, joined Abdullah Azzam and used money and machinery from his own construction company to help the Mujahideen resistance in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Under CIA‘s Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahideen and “Afghan Arabs” from forty Muslim countries through Pakistan’s ISI. Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-star general in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI. By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam established Maktab al-Khidamat, which funnelled money, arms and fighters from around the Arab world into Afghanistan. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden’s inherited family fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, paid for paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihadi fighters. Bin Laden established camps inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan and trained volunteers from across the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet puppet regime, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan; he would also participate in some combat activity, such as the Battle of Jaji. It was during this time that he became idolised by many Arabs.
One fine day, the operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was ordered by United States President Barack Obama and carried out in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation by a team of United States Navy SEALs with support from CIA. Finally he was gunned down, after his death many stories surfaced but there was no authentic report about those claims. When Osama was alive he was the threat to America even after his death he made his organization financially strong to deal with Americans and rest of the world.
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