330 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 4 / 2014 not been involved in the foundation of al Qaeda. Over time, Zawahiri became an important ideologue and the second-in-command in the organisation after his group merged with al Qaeda in 1998. In 1996, bin Laden and senior members of al Qaeda were expelled from Sudan when the Sudanese Government ceded to international pressure and after losing the patronage of Sheikh Turabi when he fell out of favour with President al-Bashir. From here, they returned to Afghanistan, where they initially sought refuge in the Jalalabad area which was under the control of the Taliban at the time. It was from here that they orchestrated and carried out the terrorist attacks that catapulted al Qaeda to world fame and gave it pre-eminence over other jihadist organisations. Al Qaeda was built around combatants from different countries who gathered in Afghanistan in a bid to wage a jihad against the Soviet invasion. Later on it joined forces with an Egyptian group, many of whose members had also fought in Afghanistan in a jihad against the “apostate” regimes, starting with the Egyptian one. The disparate origins of the members was at the core of the organisation’s ideology. Two elements distinguished al Qaeda: the Afghan jihad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, the international jihadist community saw it as a triumph of the Islamic faith over the atheist superpower. Although the defeat of the USSR cannot be attributable solely to the mujahideen, it was engraved in jihadist ideology as a success story which proved what the jihad could do for Muslims. It was also in Afghanistan that the jihad doctrine of Abdullah Azzam17 penetrated to the ideological foundations of al Qaeda. Moreover, the all-important Arab-Israeli conflict in Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad ideology is very much present in the thinking of al Qaeda.18 The Zawahiri faction brought with it the convictions of Sayyid Qutb19 in relation to the leaders in Muslim countries. It comes as no surprise that Zawahiri was part of the organisation that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981. One of the goals of the Islamic jihad was to overthrow the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. This mixture of ideology led al Qaeda to point to the culprit of the problems of Muslims worldwide: according to the organisation, the Muslim community was divided by artificial borders imposed by Western powers in the early and mid-20th century. Furthermore, it believed that the leaders in the 17 Abdullah Azzam claimed that the jihad in defence of Islam was an individual obligation of every Muslim and that it should be undertaken on one’s own behalf. For more information on Azzam’s influence on Arab extremism in the 1980s, see BERGER, Peter L., The Osama Bin Laden I Know, New York, Free Press, 2006, pp.24-48. 18 RIEDEL, Bruce, The Search for Al Qaeda, its Leadership, Ideology and Future, Washington, Brooking Institution Press, 2010, p.136. 19 I.e., the legitimacy of waging a jihad against the regimes of Muslim countries that were considered apostate by Qutb.
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