Osama bin Laden killed during Soviet invasion

hey, all. this idea just occurred to me, so i don't have many thoughts on it right now, nor will i be trying to come up with any for a while--i'm supposed to be studying for my final in the morning :p

anyway, suppose that, sometime after he joins the mujahadeen in 1979 during the Soviet invasion, Osama bin Laden is killed as many as nine years before al-Qaeda was founded IOTL, just a basic casualty of the fighting. nothing dark or sinister or preordained by some CIA operative who can see into the future, he happens to get hit by a stray bullet during a skirmish he may have happened to be involved in during the invasion

what does everyone think the repercussions of this would be? obviously, al-Qaeda isn't founded, but would some other terrorist organization rise up and (more or less) take its place?
 

Pangur

Donor
I have wondered the same thing and on a few occasions consider posting that very question here. My 5c on the matter is that there would have been someone else and there would been another terrorist group. Would they have pulled of 9/11? impossible to be sure however it is likely. The reason I think this to be the case is that the CIA etc used the Muslim fundementalists as force aganist the Soviets, Bin Laden was not a factor in that move. Equally BL tapped into an existing sentiment, he did not create it.
 
He wasn't a Jim Jones figure who created Al Qaeda out of nothing. An organisation like it would take its OTL place, and attacks on the West would still happen. Predicting in much more detail is impossible.
 
Al-Qaeda as a name might never come into existance, but the idea of Arab secular nationalism was already dying out because of the failure of such leaders not to hord the wealth of their countries for themselves as well as their military failures against Israel and later Saddam against the West.

Zarqawi who also went to Afghanistan to wage Jihad and after tried to take down the government in Jordan and then returned to Afghanistan to train terrorists to plot suicide attacks on Western countries like Germany would still likely have done so had Bin Laden died. OTL in the late 1990s Zarqawi's organization was seperate from Bin Laden's and they were in competition for jihadists coming to Afghanistan.

I imagine without Bin Laden Zarqawi would have ended up the public face of international terrorism as he pretty much became from 2003 until his death in 2006 as Bin Laden was in hiding in Pakistan doing very little at that time and most of those who ended up going with Bin Laden OTL in this timeline would have ended up joining Zarqawi's organization in the 90s instead.

In fact the terrorist attack that brings the U.S. into the war against Zarqawi's terrorist operation may be far more deadly to Americans then 911 given Zarqawi's love of chemical weapons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wK7WIDy_WmU

In fact this gives me an idea for a TL.
 
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you often read about how OBL came from a wealthy family, but was he able to use any of that wealth in his schemes? If yes, then he had an advantage over the other wannabes, and his loss would have an impact on his followers. If not, then not so much. Still, did any of the others have OBL's single-minded hatred of the USA? I have to wonder if the others would be so anti-USA...
 
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