pines, and the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Belarus.
prise in Cyprus; a "services" branch in Zagreb; an office of the Benevolence
International Foundation in Sarajevo, which supported the Bosnian Muslims
in their conflict with Serbia and Croatia; and an NGO in Baku, Azerbaijan,
that was employed as well by Egyptian Islamic Jihad both as a source and con-
duit for finances and as a support center for the Muslim rebels in Chechnya.
He also made use of the already-established Third World Relief Agency
(TWRA) headquartered in Vienna, whose branch office locations included
Zagreb and Budapest. (Bin Ladin later set up an NGO in Nairobi as a cover
for operatives there.)
as the coordinating body for the consortium of terrorist groups with which he
was forging alliances. It was composed of his own al Qaeda Shura together with
leaders or representatives of terrorist organizations that were still independent.
In building this Islamic army, he enlisted groups from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jor-
dan, Lebanon, Iraq, Oman, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Somalia, and
Eritrea.Al Qaeda also established cooperative but less formal relationships with
other extremist groups from these same countries; from the African states of
Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Uganda; and from the Southeast Asian states
of Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Bin Ladin maintained connec-
tions in the Bosnian conflict as well.
pine group that called itself the Abu Sayyaf Brigade, after one of the major
Afghan jihadist commanders.
Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. It also aided a Pakistani
group engaged in insurrectionist attacks in Kashmir. In mid-1991, Bin Ladin
dispatched a band of supporters to the northern Afghanistan border to assist
the Tajikistan Islamists in the ethnic conflicts that had been boiling there even
before the Central Asian departments of the Soviet Union became indepen-
dent states.
offices, the largest of which was in the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In the mid-
1980s, it had been set up as one of the first outposts of Azzam and Bin Ladin's
MAK.