Al-Qaeda is a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni Jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate. Its membership is mostly composed of Arabs, but also includes people from other ethnic groups. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian, economic and military targets of the US and its allies; such as the 1998 US embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing and the September 11 attacks. The organization is designated as a terrorist group by NATO, the UN Security Council, the European Union, and various countries around the world.
Islamism is a religio-political ideology. The advocates of Islamism, also known as "al-Islamiyyun", are dedicated to realizing their ideological interpretation of Islam within the context of the state or society. The majority of them are affiliated with Islamic institutions or social mobilization movements, often designated as "al-harakat al-Islamiyyah." Islamists emphasize the implementation of sharia, pan-Islamic political unity, the creation of Islamic states,, and rejection of non-Muslim influences—particularly Western or universal economic, military, political, social, or cultural.
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, , commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", was a blind Egyptian Islamist militant who served a life sentence at the Federal Medical Center, Butner near Butner, North Carolina, United States. Formerly a resident of New York City, Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1995. His prosecution grew out of investigations of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The Armed Islamic Group was one of the two main Islamist insurgent groups that fought the Algerian government and army in the Algerian Civil War.
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian-born pan-Islamist militant and physician who served as the second general emir of al-Qaeda from June 2011 until his death in July 2022.
The Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front is an Islamist militant organization. The group's self-proclaimed goal is to dismantle Turkey and form the State of Grandsublime, a Sunni Islamic federate state in the Middle East. They are notably hostile to Shia, Alevi, Christian and Jewish interests. IBDA-C carries on its pro-Islamic legacy with a newly born radicalism that wishes to restore religious rule to Turkey of whose government it finds illegal with an added willingness to commit acts of terrorism.
Al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah is an Egyptian Sunni Islamist movement, and is considered a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom and the European Union, but was removed from the United States list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in May 2022. The group was dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state; the group has committed to peaceful means following the coup that toppled Mohamed Morsi.
Islamic terrorism refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists.
Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, abbreviated as JTJ or Jama'at, was a Salafi jihadist militant group. It was founded in Jordan in 1999, and was led by Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for the entirety of its existence. During the Iraqi insurgency (2003–11), the group became a decentralized network with foreign fighters with a considerable Iraqi membership.
Takfiri is an Arabic and Islamic term denoting a Muslim who excommunicates one of his/her coreligionists, i.e. who accuses another Muslim of being an apostate.
The Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front is a Marxist–Leninist communist party in Turkey. It was founded in 1978 as Revolutionary Left, and has been involved in a militant campaign against the Republic of Turkey since the 1980s. It was renamed in 1994 after factional infighting. It is classified as a terrorist group by Japan, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Osama bin Laden authored two fatāwā in the late 1990s. The first was published in August 1996 and the second in February 1998. At the time, bin Laden was not a wanted man in any country except his native Saudi Arabia, and was not yet known as the leader of the international terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Therefore, these fatāwā received relatively little attention until after the August 1998 United States embassy bombings, for which bin Laden was indicted. The indictment mentions the first fatwā, and claims that Khalid al-Fawwaz, of bin Laden's Advice and Reformation Committee in London, participated in its communication to the press.
Terrorism in Egypt in the 20th and 21st centuries has targeted the Egyptian government officials, Egyptian police and Egyptian army members, tourists, Sufi Mosques and the Christian minority. Many attacks have been linked to Islamic extremism, and terrorism increased in the 1990s when the Islamist movement al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya targeted high-level political leaders and killed hundreds – including civilians – in its pursuit of implementing traditional Sharia law in Egypt.
The Islamic Jihad Union is a militant Islamist organization founded in 2002 as a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Headquartered in North Waziristan, a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, the group has been affiliated with both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Carried out by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the 19 November 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan was retaliation against the diplomatic staffers who were accused of gathering intelligence on Jihad factions inside Pakistan. It was the deadliest attack against the Egyptian government, since it had been declared apostate three years earlier by Islamic militants.
Mujahideen, or Mujahidin, is the plural form of mujahid, an Arabic term that broadly refers to people who engage in jihad, interpreted in a jurisprudence of Islam as the fight on behalf of God, religion or the community (ummah).
Takfir wal-Hijra, was the popular name given to a radical Islamist group Jama'at al-Muslimin founded by Shukri Mustafa which emerged in Egypt in the 1960s as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the group was crushed by Egyptian security forces after it murdered an Islamic scholar and former government minister in 1977, it is said to have "left an enduring legacy" taken up by some Islamist radicals in "subsequent years and decades."
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, formerly called simply Islamic Jihad and the Liberation Army for Holy Sites, originally referred to as al-Jihad, and then the Jihad Group, or the Jihad Organization, was an Egyptian Islamist group active since the late 1970s. It was under worldwide embargo by the United Nations as an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. It was also banned by several individual governments worldwide. The group is a proscribed terrorist group organization in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Terrorism in France refers to the terrorist attacks that have targeted the country and its population during the 20th and 21st centuries. Terrorism, in this case is much related to the country's history, international affairs and political approach. Legislation has been set up by lawmakers to fight terrorism in France.
Terrorism in Turkey is defined in Turkey's criminal law as crimes against the constitutional order and internal and external security of the state by the use of violence as incitement or systematic to create a general climate of fear and intimidation of the population and thereby effect political, religious, or ideological goals. Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, both organized groups, lone wolf, and international spy agencies have committed many acts of domestic terrorism against Turkish people.
