Posted on 09/11/2001 12:40:31 PM PDT by BansheeBill
The world's main radical Islamist movements
NICOSIA, Sept 11 (AFP) -
There are four main radical Islamic movements -- two Palestinian, one pro-Iranian Lebanese group and a fourth created by the sought-after Saudi-born alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden.
The Palestinian groups -- the Hamas resistance movement and the Islamic Jihad -- emerged in the 1980s.
The Jihad was set up in 1980 with Iranian backing and was the first Palestinian fundamentalist organisation to commit itself to armed struggle against Israel. Hamas was founded at the start of the first uprising or intifada from 1987 to 1993 by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are both fiercely opposed to Israeli-Palestinian accords and both want to continue their fight right up to the creation of an Islamic state covering all of Palestine.
The two movements both have representatives in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which served as bases during the civil war of 1975 to 1990 for various organisations which claimed responsibility for anti-US and anti-Israeli attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.
Among those was Black September, which has since disappeared having claimed responsibility for the 1973 Munich attack against Israeli athletes during the Olympic games there, along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which hijacked and destroyed three western airliners in Jordan in 1970 and is Damascus-based.
In 1983, another group, Lebanon's Islamic Jihad (distinct from the Palestinian movement of the same name), claimed responsibility for attacks against the US embassy and its headquarters in Beirut, along with the French HQ based in the Lebanese capital, after the Israeli invasion of the country in 1982. Those attacks left more than 400 dead.
That secretive group also claimed several hostage seizures in Lebanon in the 1980's.
For its part, the Lebanese fundamentalist Hezbollah movement, which was set up in 1984 in Lebanon by Iran, has never claimed responsibility for attacks outside Lebanon, but spearheaded the struggle against the Israeli army which occupied southern Lebanon up to its withdrawal in May 2000.
Hezbollah is furthermore opposed to the Taliban which has given refuge in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden -- who is already on the FBI's 10 most wanted list on charges of masterminding the 1998 bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam that claimed 224 lives -- has on several occasions struck at the United States through his supporters.
The billionaire Islamist, who has been stripped of his Saudi nationality, is sought by the US authorities for the 1988 bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam that claimed 224 lives, and left thousand injured.
The US has offered a reward of five million dollars for any information leading to his arrest.
Bin Laden is also suspected of organising a bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen, which left 17 US sailors dead in October 2000.
Added to this list of organisations is the separatist group of Abu Sayyaf rebels in the Philippines, which has been behind several kidnaps of western and Asian hostages
Posted for informational and discussion purposes only. Not for commercial use.
These swine hide behind a religion that forbids such actions; they are pigs that worship pigs.
Go to Balkanpeace.org and search under BIN LADEN.
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