Al-Qaeda’s name originated as bin Laden’s 1988 database of camp volunteers

Evidence

One such brother was the Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, whose family had benefited from Saudi state contracts and US funding. Bin Laden became interested in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. He had contacts with Afghan mujahideen leaders and moved to the country in 1982. Working with his former teacher Abdullah Azzam, he brought in and trained thousands of volunteers. By the mid-1980s he had established several camps of his own and in 1988 he created a database of the volunteers who passed through his camp; the file was named al-Qaeda. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 408

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• CANDY: The etymology of ‘al-Qaeda’ as a database filename is a genuinely surprising, tweetable tidbit.
• DEFINE: Defines the literal origin of the al-Qaeda name.

Related

• Al-Qaeda began as a 1988 database of Afghan volunteer records (similarity 0.93)
• US and Pakistani intelligence funded and trained bin Laden’s mujahideen network (similarity 0.82)