al Qaeda

Before September 11, 2001, many Americans knew little of al Qaeda or its founder, Osama bin Laden. But the roots of the militant Islamist network, whose name is Arabic for “the Base,” date back to the late 1970s and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Since declaring a ...read more

Nada Bakos, who joined the manhunt team on Season 3 of HISTORY’s Hunting Hitler, is a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and targeting officer who joined the CIA in 2000 and began to study illicit finance networks, with a focus on North Korea. But after the September 11 ...read more

Few journalist-authors have spent as much of their careers chronicling and analyzing terrorism, al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks as Peter Bergen and Steve Coll. As consultants to the comprehensive six-hour film, “The Road to 9/11,” they helped guide the project’s exploration ...read more

Zak Ebrahim’s life changed forever when he was seven years old. It was early November 1990 and his mother woke him up in the middle of the night because his father, El Sayyid Nosair, had just been arrested for assassinating the radical anti-Arab Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the ...read more

In the annals of undercover law-enforcement, few assignments have been as tough—or impactful—as the one Emad Salem signed up for in the fall of 1991. Salem, an Egyptian native who served in his country’s military before immigrating to the United States in 1987, recognized the ...read more

The road to 9/11 was littered with opportunities that the United States missed to cripple al Qaeda and to avert the attacks of September 11, 2001. Throughout the 1990s, small dedicated teams of intelligence analysts and FBI agents toiled in obscurity, as al Qaeda and its ...read more