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
On this day in 1991, Islamic militants in Lebanon release kidnapped American journalist Terry Anderson after 2,454 days in captivity. As chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, Anderson covered the long-running civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). On March 16, ...read more
By the time federal authorities arrested Theodore J. Kaczynski (aka the “Unabomber”) at his primitive log cabin in Montana in April 1996, he had managed to outwit the law for more than 17 years. From 1978 to 1995, the former math professor with a genius-level IQ and a massive ...read more
One September morning in 1976, a bomb blew up a car as it was driving up Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. When police arrived at the scene, they found a human foot in the road, and a man lying on the pavement who was missing half his legs. Minutes later, he was dead. That man was ...read more
Feverish and delirious, Bob Stevens arrived at a Florida hospital in the early morning hours of October 2, 2001. The emergency room doctors thought the 62-year-old photojournalist might be suffering from meningitis. But when an infectious disease specialist looked at Stevens’ ...read more
I heard whooshing sounds… One of the most vivid pictures I have of the day is this waterfall of fire falling down. It was raining fire inside the elevator bank… I yelled ‘Stairs! Follow me!’ I turned right and just started running. —Neil Lucente, then-employee of Network Plus, ...read more
As Latin music blared inside Pulse, one of Orlando’s biggest nightclubs on June 12, 2016, a gunman forced his way inside and opened fire on the predominantly gay crowd. In the end, 49 people were dead and dozens more injured, in what was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting ...read more
During one horrific 8-minute period on June 3, 2017, eight people were killed as a band of terrorists drove a van through a pedestrian walkway on the London Bridge. The men then exited, armed with pink steak knives, and proceeded to slash and stab people in a nearby market. The ...read more
As Friday prayers came to a close on May 28, 2010 in Lahore, Pakistan, seven terrorists wielding guns, grenades and suicide vests stormed into two crowded Ahmadi Muslim mosques and opened fire, killing 94 victims and injuring more than 120. The coordinated attacks took place just ...read more
In October 2002, after Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater and trapped more than 800 people for 57 hours, it seemed like it couldn’t get much worse. Then Russian troops released a mysterious gas into the theater. The gas was intended to incapacitate the rebels—which it ...read more
During his adolescence in upstate New York, Timothy McVeigh developed an enthusiasm for guns and a suspicion of governmental authority. He drew inspiration from the 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, written by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce, which depicts a right-wing ...read more
Just moments after Ariana Grande finished the final song of her May 22, 2017 concert at Manchester Arena, a suicide bomber detonated an explosion on the premises, killing 22 concertgoers and injuring 116 more. ISIS claimed responsibility for what was the deadliest act of ...read more
The Unabomber is the nickname given to American domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who conducted a 17-year series of attacks, using mail bombs to target academics, business executives and others. The Unabomber bombing campaign – which killed three people and injured 23 – started ...read more
The Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was first founded in 1964 during a summit in Cairo, Egypt. The organization’s initial goals were to unite various Arab groups and create a liberated Palestine in Israel. Over time, the PLO has embraced a broader role, claiming to ...read more
When two disgruntled Americans detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, it was, at the time, the biggest terror attack in U.S. history. The event set off the nation’s most massive F.B.I. ...read more
On November 29, 1987, two North Korean spies boarded a South Korean plane in Baghdad. The pair had used fake names and forged passports to pose as Japanese tourists. They’d also convinced security to let them keep the batteries in their carry-on “radio,” which they’d turned on to ...read more
Palmyra is an ancient archaeological site located in modern-day Syria. Originally founded near a fertile natural oasis, it was established sometime during the third millennium B.C. as the settlement of Tadmor, and it became a leading city of the Near East and a major trading ...read more
Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions. Islam ...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
The Patriot Act is legislation passed in 2001 to improve the abilities of U.S. law enforcement to detect and deter terrorism. The act’s official title is, “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” or ...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
