Combatting Cyber Terrorism - A guide to understanding the cyber threat landscape and incident response planning

APPENDIX B: TERRORISM GROUPS

• Al-Qaeda (AQ): Founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, around 1988, AQ is a Sunni pan-Islamist terrorism organisation who self-identify as a religious military elite whose mission it is to accelerate Muslim world unification and the creation of a global caliphate (Klausen: 2021). After a merger with some Egyptian Islamic Jihad leaders, AQ maintained a strong central command structure (AQ Central) at least until it carried out the 9/11 atrocities. AQ then enabled and/or supported the development of powerful regional commands such as AQAP (Arab Peninsula), AQI (Iraq) and AQIM (Islamic Maghreb). Superseded by ISIS during the 2010s as the Western world’s most lethal terror threat, AQ conducted fewer direct attacks in Europe ...