Usama bin Laden planned and financed a number of terror attacks over two decades leading to Sept. 11, 2001, when four planes were hijacked and used as weapons.
Fox News Digital is republishing this story to honor the Americans killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, as well as their families, who continue to cope decades later.
Usama bin Laden cultivated his reputation as a terror mastermind in the decades before Sept. 11, leaving bodies strewn across continents and repeatedly landing on the CIA’s radar. The devastating attacks on New York City's Twin Towers and the Pentagon would propel the United States into its longest war in history and solidify bin Laden's grisly legacy.
"As a former Marine Corps officer, my career of eight years was very much defined by the Sept. 11 attacks," author and former CIA paramilitary officerBin Laden’s journey to becoming one of the most infamous jihadist leaders of all time began to take shape in 1979. At the urging of his mentor Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, bin Laden dropped out off college and left Saudi Arabia to join the jihad against the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan, Ackerman said.
"We start to see the definition of what al Qaeda and many jihadists term as the ‘near enemy’ versus the ‘far enemy,’" Ackerman said."The ‘near enemy’ were the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, like the regime of Saddam Hussein, or even the Saudi royal family, which many jihadists felt were corrupt and needed to be toppled. The ‘far enemy’ was viewed as the Western democracies, foremost among them the United States, that propped up these despotic regimes in the Middle East.
Azzam wanted to focus on the"near enemy," but bin Laden had his sights set on the West. On Nov. 24, 1989, a car bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed Azzam, effectively ending the debate. Authorities never identified a definitive culprit.
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