Terrorism Paper 11/16/09 There are several terrorist groups throughout the world today. All the terrorist groups have one common goal and that is to rid the world of Americans and western influence from the Muslim world. There is one organization that has ties to most of all the terrorist groups in the world and is the most infamous group in the world today and that is the group called Al-Qaeda The word Al-Qaeda means “the base” in Muslim. As an international terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden. The group seeks to rid Muslim countries of western influence and replace them with fundamentalist Islamic regimes. Al-Qaeda grew out of the of the ashes of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1988, after it helped expel the Soviet
Due to its radical beliefs, many Muslims consider al-Qaeda’s beliefs as a “distortion of their faith.” Al-Qaeda has history of attacking Muslim governments, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, because they view their nations as godless, and therefore, in direct conflict with their religious beliefs. For this, and many other reasons, many Muslim countries are part of the U.S.-led coalition against al-Qaeda. September 11th was part of an increasingly deadly trend in the evolution of terrorism. Comparing the present to that of the last decade, there are now fewer terrorist attacks, but their intentions are to kill more people. Experts attribute this trend of “fewer attacks, more fatalities” to an increase in religiously motivated terrorism. This type of terrorism lacks some of the restraints than that of earlier versions of terrorism. Experts hypothesize that the popularized hijackings and kidnappings in the 1960s and 1970s have been reduced to simpler, but sometimes more deadly bomb operations, due to the world’s increased awareness and security. Before the 1990s, some terrorist groups operated under the belief that too much violence could backfire. In other words “terrorist groups wanted to find the proverbial sweet spot: they sought to use enough shocking violence to bring attention to a cause they felt had been neglected, but they did not want to use so much violence