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Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad against Americans 1817

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Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad

against Americans

Expel the Polytheists from the Arabian peninsula.

A Letter from Sheikh Osama bin Muhammad bin

Laden to his Muslim Brothers across the world, and

particularly those in the Arabian peninsula.

Praise be to God. We beseech Him for help and

forgiveness. We seek refuge in God from the evil of

our souls and our bad deeds. He whom God guides

will not go astray, and he whom He leads astray can

have no guide. I testify that there is no god but God

alone, who has no partners. And I testify that

Muhammad is His Servant and Prophet.

“You who believe, be mindful of God, as is His

due, and make sure you devote yourselves to Him, to

your dying moment.”

“People, be mindful of your Lord, who created

you from a single soul, and from it created its mate,

and from the pair of them spread countless men and

women far and wide; be mindful of God, in whose

name you make requests of one another. Beware of

the severing of ties of kinship: God is always watch-

ing over you.”

“Believers, be mindful of God, speak in a direct

fashion and to good purpose, and He will put your

deeds right for you and forgive you your sins. Who-

ever obeys God and His Messenger will truly achieve

a great triumph.”

Shu’ayb said: “I cannot succeed without God’s

help: I trust in Him, and always turn to Him.”

Thanks be to God, who said: “[Believers], you are

the best community singled out for people: you order

what is right, forbid what is wrong, and you believe

in God.”

And blessings and peace upon His Servant and

Prophet, who said: “The people are close to an all-

encompassing punishment from God if they see the

oppressor and fail to restrain him.”

It is no secret to you, my brothers, that the peo-

ple of Islam have been afflicted with oppression, hos-

tility, and injustice by the Judeo-Christian alliance

and its supporters. This shows our enemies’ belief

that Muslims’ blood is the cheapest and that their

property and wealth is merely loot. Your blood has

been spilt in Palestine and Iraq, and the horrific

images of the massacre in Qana in Lebanon are still

fresh in people’s minds. The massacres that have

taken place in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam,

the Philippines, Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea,

Chechnya, and Bosnia-Herzegovina send shivers

down our spines and stir up our passions. All this has

happened before the eyes and ears of the world, but

the blatant imperial arrogance of America, under the

cover of the immoral United Nations, has prevented

the dispossessed from arming themselves.

So the people of Islam realised that they were the

fundamental target of the hostility of the Judeo-Cru-

sader alliance. All the false propaganda about the

supposed rights of Islam was abandoned in the face

of the attacks and massacres committed against

Muslims everywhere, the latest and most serious of

which—the greatest disaster to befall the Muslims

since the death of the Prophet Muhammad—is the

occupation of Saudi Arabia, which is the corner-

stone of the Islamic world, place of revelation,

source of the Prophetic mission, and home of the

Noble Ka’ba where Muslims direct their prayers.

Despite this, it was occupied by the armies of the

Christians, the Americans, and their allies.

I meet you today in the midst of this gloomy sce-

nario, but also in light of the tremendous, blessed

awakening that has swept across the world, and par-

ticularly the Islamic world. After the scholars of

Islam underwent an enforced absence—enforced

due to the oppressive Crusader campaign led by

America in the fear that these scholars will incite our

Islamic umma against its enemies, in the same way

as did the pious scholars of old (God bless their

souls) such as ibn Taymiyya and al-Izz ibn Abd al-

Salam—this Judeo-Crusader alliance undertook to

kill and arrest the righteous scholars and hardwork-

ing preachers. May God sanctify who He wishes.

They killed the mujahid Sheikh Abdallah Azzam, they

arrested Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Jerusalem, and they

killed the mujahid Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman in

America, as well as arresting—on the advice of

America—a large number of scholars, preachers and

youth in Saudi Arabia. The most prominent of these

were Sheikh Salman al-Auda and Sheikh Safar al-

Hawali and their brothers.

This injustice was inflicted on us, too, as we were

prevented from talking to Muslims and were hound-

ed out of Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, Sudan, and then

Afghanistan. That is what led to this long absence of

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1818 Milestone Documents in World History

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mine, but by the grace of God there became available

a safe base in Khurasan, high in the peaks of the

Hindu Kush, the very same peaks upon which were

smashed, by the grace of God, the largest infidel mil-

itary force in the world, and on which the myth of

the great powers perished before the cries of the holy

warriors: God is greatest!

And today, in the same peaks of Afghanistan, we

work to do away with the injustice that has befallen

our umma at the hands of the Judeo-Crusader

alliance, especially after its occupation of Jerusalem

and its appropriation of Saudi Arabia. We pray to

God that He might bless us with victory—He is our

protector and is well capable of doing so.

And so here we are today, working and discussing

with each other to find ways of rectifying what has

happened to the Islamic world generally and Saudi

Arabia in particular. We need to study the appropri-

ate paths to take in order to restore things to good

order, and to restore to the people their rights after

the considerable damage and harm inflicted on their

life and religion. This has afflicted every section of

society, whether civilian or military or security per-

sonnel, whether employees or merchants, young or

old, university students, graduates or the unem-

ployed, who now represent a broad section of socie-

ty numbering hundreds of thousands. The situation

in Saudi Arabia has begun to resemble a huge vol-

cano that is about to explode and destroy unbelief

and corruption, wherever it comes from. The two

explosions in Riyadh and Khobar are merely warning

signs pointing to this destructive torrent which is

produced by bitter repression, terrible injustice, and

the humiliating poverty that we see today.

People are struggling even with the basics of

everyday life, and everyone talks frankly about eco-

nomic recession, price inflation, mounting debts,

and prison overcrowding. Low-income government

employees talk to you about their debts in the tens or

hundreds of thousands of riyals, whilst complaining

that the riyal’s value is declining dramatically.

Domestic debts owed by the government to its citi-

zens have reached 340 billion riyals, and are rising

daily due to usurious interest, let alone all the for-

eign debt. People are wondering: are we really the

biggest source of oil in the world? They feel that God

is bringing this torture upon them because they have

not spoken out against the regime’s injustice and ille-

gitimate behaviour, the most prominent aspects of

which are its failure to rule in accordance with God’s

law, its depriving of legal rights to its servants, its

permitting the American occupiers into Saudi Ara-

bia, and its arresting of righteous scholars—inheri-

tors of the Prophet’s legacy—and unjustly throwing

them in prison. The regime has desecrated its legiti-

macy through many of its own actions, the most

important being:

1. Its suspension of the rulings of the Islamic law

and replacement thereof with man-made laws, and

its entering into a bloody confrontation with the

righteous scholars and pious youth. May God sancti-

fy whom He pleases.

2. Its inability to protect the land and its allowing

the enemies of God to occupy it for years in the form

of the American Crusaders, who have become the

principal reason for all aspects of our land’s disas-

trous predicament.

The voices of the shadows have spoken up, their

eyes uncovering the veil of injustice and their noses

smelling the stench of corruption. The voices of

reform have spoken up, calling for the situation to be

put right: they have sent petitions, testimonies, and

requests for reform. In the year 1411

AH, at the time

of the Gulf War, a petition was sent to the king with

around 400 signatures calling for reform in the

country, but he made a mockery of them by com-

pletely ignoring their advice, and the situation went

from bad to worse.

Brother Muslims in Saudi Arabia, does it make

any sense at all that our country is the biggest pur-

chaser of weapons from America in the world and

America’s biggest trading partner in the region, while

at the very same time the Americans are occupying

Saudi Arabia and supporting—with money, arms, and

manpower—their Jewish brothers in the occupation

of Palestine and their murder and expulsion of Mus-

lims there? Depriving these occupiers of the huge

returns they receive from their trade with us is a very

important way of supporting the jihad against them,

and we expect you to boycott all American goods.

Men of the radiant future of our umma of Muham-

mad, raise the banner of jihad up high against the

Judeo-American alliance that has occupied the holy

places of Islam. God told his Prophet: “He will not let

the deeds of those who are killed for His cause come

to nothing; He will guide them and put them in a

good state; He will admit them into the Garden He

has already made known to them.” And the Prophet

said: “There are one hundred levels in Heaven that

God has prepared for the holy warriors who have died

for Him, between two levels as between the earth and

the sky.” And the al-Jami al-Sahih notes that the

Prophet said: “The best martyrs are those who stay in

the battle line and do not turn their faces away until

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Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad against Americans 1819

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they are killed. They will achieve the highest level of

Heaven, and their Lord will look kindly upon them.

When your Lord looks kindly upon a slave in the

world, He will not hold him to account.” And he said:

“The martyr has a guarantee from God: He forgives

him at the first drop of his blood and shows him his

seat in Heaven. He decorates him with the jewels of

faith, protects him from the torment of the grave,

keeps him safe on the day of judgment, places a

crown of dignity on his head with the finest rubies in

the world, marries him to seventy-two of the pure vir-

gins of paradise and intercedes on behalf of seventy of

his relatives,” as related by Ahmad al-Tirmidhi in an

authoritative hadith.

I say to the youth of Islam who have waged jihad in

Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with their

financial, spiritual, linguistic, and scholarly resources,

that the battle is not yet over. I remind them of what

Gabriel said to the Prophet, after the battle of Ahzab:

“When the Messenger of God, prayers and peace be

upon him, departed to Medina and laid down his

sword, Gabriel came to him and said: ‘You have laid

down your sword? By God, the angels have not yet laid

down their swords. Get up and go with whoever is

with you to the Bani Qorayza, and I will go ahead of

you to shake their fortresses and strike fear into them.’

So Gabriel went off, accompanied by his pageant of

angels, the Prophet, and his holy warriors and

helpers.” This is as it was told by al-Bukhari.

I say to our Muslim brothers across the world:

your brothers in Saudi Arabia and Palestine are call-

ing for your help and asking you to share with them

in the jihad against the enemies of God, your ene-

mies the Israelis and Americans. They are asking you

to defy them in whatever way you possibly can, so as

to expel them in defeat and humiliation from the

holy places of Islam. God Almighty has said: “If they

seek help from you against persecution, it is your

duty to assist them.”

Cavalry of Islam, be mounted! This is a difficult

time, so you yourselves must be tough. You should

know that your coming-together and cooperation in

order to liberate the holy places of Islam is the right

step towards unification of the word of our umma

under the banner of God’s unity. At this point we can

only raise our palms humbly to ask God Almighty to

provide good fortune and success in this matter.

Lord, bless your slave and messenger Muham-

mad, and his family and companions. Our final

prayer is praise to God, Lord of the worlds.

Your brother in Islam,

Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden

al-Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari (810–870); compiler of one of the six canonical hadiths of Sunni Islam,

the branch to which Bin Laden adheres

al-Jami al-Sahih the work of Sahih al-Bukhari

Gulf War in this context, the conflict often called the Persian Gulf War (August 2, 1990–February

28, 1991)

place of the the cave, located in present-day Saudi Arabia, where the Qur’an is said to have been

revelation revealed to Muhammad

Shu’ayb a Muslim prophet of the

BH (before hegira) period

umma in this context, the community of Islamic believers; the Muslim world

Glossary

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