Defining al Qaeda
Al
Qaeda, the group established by Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, was never
very large -- there were never more than a few hundred actual members. We often
refer to this group, now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, as the al Qaeda core or al
Qaeda prime. While the group's founders trained tens of thousands of men at
their camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, they initially viewed themselves as a
vanguard organization working with kindred groups to facilitate the jihad they
believed was necessary to establish a global Islamic caliphate.
Most
of the men trained at al Qaeda camps were members of other organizations or
were grassroots jihadists. The majority of them received basic paramilitary
training, and only a select few were invited to receive additional
training in terrorist tradecraft skills such as surveillance, document forgery
and bomb making. Of this select group, only a few men were invited to join the
al Qaeda core organization.
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