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Factbox: 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden

(Agencies)
Updated: 2011-05-02 16:32

Afghan anti-Taliban fighters are silhouetted below the contrails left by US jets on a bombing sortie in the Tora Bora mountains, in this file picture taken Dec 14, 2001. [Photo/Agencies]

Asymmetric warfare

The United States and its allies rewrote their security doctrines, struggling to adjust from Cold War-style confrontation between states to a new brand of transnational "asymmetric warfare" against small cells of Islamist militants.

Al-Qaida's weapons were not tanks, submarines and aircraft carriers but the everyday tools of globalisation and 21st century technology - among them the Internet, which it eagerly exploited for propaganda, training and recruitment.

But, by his own account, not even bin Laden anticipated the full impact of using 19 suicide hijackers to turn passenger aircraft into guided missiles and slam them into buildings that symbolised US financial and military power.

Nearly 3,000 people died when two planes struck New York's World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers rushed the hijackers.

"Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs," bin Laden said in a statement a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging Muslims to rise up and join a global battle between "the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels".

In video and audio messages over the next seven years, the al-Qaida leader goaded Washington and its allies. His diatribes lurched across a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to US politics, the subprime mortgage crisis and even climate change.

A gap of nearly three years in his output of video messages revived speculation he might be gravely ill with a kidney problem or even have died, but bin Laden was back on screen in September 2007, telling Americans their country was vulnerable despite its economic and military power.