Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was a Libyan national captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after the fall of the Taliban; he was interrogated by American and Egyptian forces. The information he gave under torture to Egyptian authorities was cited by the George W. Bush Administration in the months preceding its 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That information was frequently repeated by members of the Bush Administration, although reports from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) strongly questioned its credibility, suggesting that al-Libi was "intentionally misleading" interrogators.
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) was the official name used by the U.S. government for both the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and the larger-scale Global War on Terrorism. On 7 October 2001, in response to the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush announced that airstrikes targeting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had begun in Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom primarily refers to the War in Afghanistan, but it was also affiliated with counterterrorism operations in other countries, such as OEF-Philippines and OEF-Trans Sahara.
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian-born terrorist and physician who served as the second emir of al-Qaeda from June 16, 2011, until his death on July 31, 2022.
The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), also known as Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya, was an armed Islamist group. Militants participated in the 2011 Libyan Civil War as the Libyan Islamic Movement, and are involved in the Libyan Civil War as members of the Libya Shield Force. Alleged militants include alleged Al Qaeda organizer Abd al-Muhsin Al-Libi who now holds a key command position in the Libya Shield Force.
Omar al-Faruq, also spelled or al-Farouq or al-Farooq, born Mahmoud Ahmad Mohammed Ahmad, was an Islamic militant with high-profile connections with Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia particularly the Philippines and Indonesia.
The following items form a partial timeline of the War in Afghanistan. For events prior to October 7, 2001, see 2001 in Afghanistan.
There have been several videos released showing Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks and is also the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. The main targets of the campaign were militant Islamist and Salafi jihadist armed organisations such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their international affiliates, which were waging military insurgencies to overthrow governments of various Muslim-majority countries. Other major targets included the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which was deposed during an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing insurgency.
Ali Ammar Ashur al-Raqiai, known as Abu Laith al-Libi, was a senior leader of the al-Qaeda movement in Afghanistan who appeared in several al-Qaeda videos. He was believed to have been active in the tribal regions of Waziristan. He also served as an al Qaeda spokesman. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was an "expert in guerilla warfare."
Abu Yahya al-Libi, born Mohamed Hassan Qaid, was a terrorist and leading high-ranking official within al-Qaeda, and an alleged member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Kandahar Central Jail, also known as Sarpuza Prison or Sarposa Prison, is a minimum security prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan. It has been historically used for the incarceration of common criminals of Kandahar Province. In the last two decades, the facility has also been used to hold up Taliban and other insurgents. The name "Sarpuza" is a historical neighborhood in the city of Kandahar. As of 2017, the prison has approximately 1,900 inmates, and its warden is Col. Abdul Wali Hesarak.
Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani is a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was a captive held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Bagram Theater Internment Facility. He has been described as one of the four men responsible for an escape from Bagram, on July 11, 2005. According to Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden of the New York Times, US officials didn't first identify him and Omar al Farouq under their real names, when they first escaped.
The Battle of Kandahar was an attack by Taliban forces on May 7, 2011, in the city of Kandahar. The battle was the biggest Taliban offensive of 2011, marking over 40 total deaths and over 50 total wounded. The fighting demonstrated that, despite heavy losses since 2001, the Taliban forces remain a threat to coalition and Afghan forces, and show that morale in insurgent groups has not died since the death of Bin Laden.
On January 24, 2002, the American military launched an overnight raid against a "large munitions cache" north of Kandahar, as part of its invasion of Afghanistan, claiming that it was a weapons stockpile of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. However, it was later discovered that the target was a compound that the United States had asked to collect weapons for the government of Hamid Karzai, and that the dead and captured were all backers of the American invasion.
Since the late 1990s, several members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had decided to leave the band, most of them joining other armed organizations.
Mohammed Atef was the military chief of al-Qaeda, and was considered one of Osama bin Laden's two deputies, the other being Ayman Al Zawahiri, although Atef's role in the organization was not well known by intelligence agencies for years. He was killed in a US airstrike in November 2001.
The Islamic State had its core in Iraq and Syria from 2013 to 2017 and 2019 respectively, where the proto-state controlled significant swathes of urban, rural, and desert territory, mainly in the Mesopotamian region. Today the group controls scattered pockets of land in the area, as well as territory or insurgent cells in other areas, notably Afghanistan, West Africa, the Sahara, Somalia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The following is an outline of the series of events that led up the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021).
