title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. From 1968 to 1976, he attended the elite Al-Thager Model School. He studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981. Bin Laden attended an English-language course in Oxford, England, during 1971. One source described him as "hard working"; another said he left university during his third year without completing a college degree. At university, bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work. Other interests included writing poetry; reading, with the works of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black stallions; and association football, in which he enjoyed playing at centre forward and followed the English club Arsenal.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: At age 17 in 1974, bin Laden married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia, Syria; but they were later separated and she left Afghanistan on 9 September 2001. Bin Laden's other known wives were Khadijah Sharif (married 1983, divorced 1990s); Khairiah Sabar (married 1985); Siham Sabar (married 1987); and Amal al-Sadah (married 2000). Some sources also list a sixth wife, name unknown, whose marriage to bin Laden was annulled soon after the ceremony. Bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children with his wives. Many of bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks and , Iranian authorities reportedly continue to control their movements.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Nasser al-Bahri, who was bin Laden's personal bodyguard from 1997 to 2001, details bin Laden's personal life in his memoir. He describes him as a frugal man and strict father, who enjoyed taking his large family on shooting trips and picnics in the desert.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden's father Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot Jim Harrington misjudged a landing. Bin Laden's eldest half-brother, Salem bin Laden, the subsequent head of the bin Laden family, was killed in 1988 near San Antonio, Texas, in the United States, when he accidentally flew a plane into power lines.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The FBI described bin Laden as an adult as tall and thin, between and in height and weighing about , although the author Lawrence Wright, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaeda, "The Looming Tower", writes that a number of bin Laden's close friends confirmed that reports of his height were greatly exaggerated, and that bin Laden was actually "just over tall". Eventually, after his death, he was measured to be roughly . Bin Laden had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white keffiyeh. Bin Laden had stopped wearing the traditional Saudi male keffiyeh and instead wore the traditional Yemeni male keffiyeh. Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild-mannered in demeanor.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: A major component of bin Laden's ideology was the concept that civilians from enemy countries, including women and children, were legitimate targets for jihadists to kill. According to former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader was motivated by a belief that US foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East. As such, the threat to US national security arises not from al-Qaeda being offended by what the US is but rather by what the US does, or in the words of Scheuer, "They (al-Qaeda) hate us (Americans) for what we do, not who we are." Nonetheless, bin Laden criticized the US for its secular form of governance, calling upon Americans to convert to Islam and reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury, in a letter published in late 2002.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden believed that the Islamic world was in crisis and that the complete restoration of Sharia law would be the only way to set things right in the Muslim world. He opposed such alternatives as secular government, as well as pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, and democracy. He subscribed to the Athari (literalist) school of Islamic theology.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: These beliefs, in conjunction with violent jihad, have sometimes been called Qutbism after being promoted by Sayyid Qutb. Bin Laden believed that Afghanistan, under the rule of Mullah Omar's Taliban, was "the only Islamic country" in the Muslim world. Bin Laden consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believed were injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states. He also called for the elimination of Israel, and called upon the United States to withdraw all of its civilians and military personnel from the Middle East, as well as from every Islamic country of the world.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a terrorist by scholars, journalists from "The New York Times", the BBC, and Qatari news station Al Jazeera, analysts such as Peter Bergen, Michael Scheuer, Marc Sageman, and Bruce Hoffman. He was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In 1997, he condemned the United States for its hypocrisy in not labeling the bombing of Hiroshima as terrorism. In November 2001, he maintained that the revenge killing of Americans was justified because he claimed that Islamic law allows believers to attack invaders even when the enemy uses human shields. However, according to Rodenbeck, "this classical position was originally intended as a legal justification for the accidental killings of civilians under very limited circumstances — not as a basis for the intentional targeting of noncombatants." A few months later in a 2002 letter, he made no mention of this justification but claimed "that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets."


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden's overall strategy for achieving his goals against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy countries, by "bleeding" them dry. Al-Qaeda manuals express this strategy. In a 2004 tape broadcast by Al Jazeera, bin Laden spoke of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy".


title: Osama bin Laden

text: A number of errors and inconsistencies in bin Laden's arguments have been alleged by authors such as Max Rodenbeck and Noah Feldman. He invoked democracy both as an example of the deceit and fraudulence of Western political system—American law being "the law of the rich and wealthy"—and as the reason civilians are responsible for their government's actions and so can be lawfully punished by death. He denounced democracy as a "religion of ignorance" that violates Islam by issuing man-made laws, but in a later statement compares the Western democracy of Spain favorably to the Muslim world in which the ruler is accountable. Rodenbeck states, "Evidently, [bin Laden] has never heard theological justifications for democracy, based on the notion that the will of the people must necessarily reflect the will of an all-knowing God."


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden was heavily antisemitic, stating that most of the negative events that occurred in the world were the direct result of Jewish actions. In a December 1998 interview with Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden stated that Operation Desert Fox was proof that Israeli Jews controlled the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, directing them to kill as many Muslims as they could. In a letter released in late 2002, he stated that Jews controlled the civilian media outlets, politics, and economic institutions of the United States. In a May 1998 interview with ABC's John Miller, bin Laden stated that the Israeli state's ultimate goal was to annex the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East into its territory and enslave its peoples, as part of what he called a "Greater Israel". He stated that Jews and Muslims could never get along and that war was "inevitable" between them, and further accused the US of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. He claimed that the US State Department and US Department of Defense were controlled by Jews, for the sole purpose of serving the Israeli state's goals. He often delivered warnings against alleged Jewish conspiracies: "These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery. They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next." Shia Muslims have been listed along with heretics, the United States, and Israel as the four principal enemies of Islam at ideology classes of bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden was opposed to music on religious grounds, and his attitude towards technology was mixed. He was interested in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants on the one hand, but rejected chilled water on the other. Bin Laden also believed climate change to be a serious threat and penned a letter urging Americans to work with President Barack Obama to make a rational decision to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny".


title: Osama bin Laden

text: After leaving college in 1979, bin Laden went to Pakistan, joined Abdullah Azzam and used money and machinery from his own construction company to help the Mujahideen resistance in the Soviet–Afghan War. He later told a journalist: "I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan." From 1979 to 1992, the United States (as part of CIA activities in Afghanistan, specifically Operation Cyclone), Saudi Arabia, and China provided between $6–12 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to tens of thousands of mujahideen through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). British journalist Jason Burke wrote: "He did not receive any direct funding or training from the US during the 1980s. Nor did his followers. The Afghan mujahideen, via Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, received large amounts of both. Some bled to the Arabs fighting the Soviets but nothing significant." Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-star general in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI. According to some CIA officers, beginning in early 1980, bin Laden acted as a liaison between the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) and Afghan warlords; no evidence of contact between the CIA and Bin Laden exists in the CIA archives. Steve Coll states that although bin Laden may not have been a formal, salaried GIP agent, "it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence." Bin Laden's first trainer was U.S. Special Forces commando Ali Mohamed.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam established Maktab al-Khidamat, which funneled money, arms, and fighters from around the Arab world into Afghanistan. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, paid for paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihadi fighters. Bin Laden established camps inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan and trained volunteers from across the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet-backed regime, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Between 1986 and 1987, bin Laden set up a base in eastern Afghanistan for several dozen of his own Arab soldiers. From this base, bin Laden participated in some combat activity against the Soviets, such as the Battle of Jaji in 1987. Despite its little strategic significance, the battle was lionized in the mainstream Arab press. It was during this time that he became idolised by many Arabs.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In May 1988, responding to rumours of a massacre of Sunnis by Shias, large numbers of Shias from in and around Gilgit, Pakistan were killed in a massacre. Shia civilians were also subjected to rape.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The massacre is alleged by B. Raman, a founder of India's Research and Analysis Wing, to have been in response to a revolt by the Shias of Gilgit during the rule of military dictator Zia-ul Haq. He alleged that the Pakistan Army induced Osama bin Laden to lead an armed group of Sunni tribals, from Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province, into Gilgit and its surrounding areas to suppress the revolt.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: By 1988, bin Laden had split from Maktab al-Khidamat. While Azzam acted as support for Afghan fighters, bin Laden wanted a more military role. One of the main points leading to the split and the creation of al-Qaeda was Azzam's insistence that Arab fighters be integrated among the Afghan fighting groups instead of forming a separate fighting force. Notes of a meeting of bin Laden and others on 20 August 1988, indicate that al-Qaeda was a formal group by that time: "Basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to lift the word of God, to make his religion victorious." A list of requirements for membership itemized the following: listening ability, good manners, obedience, and making a pledge ("bayat") to follow one's superiors.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: According to Wright, the group's real name was not used in public pronouncements because its existence was still a closely held secret. His research suggests that al-Qaeda was formed at an 11 August 1988, meeting between several senior leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abdullah Azzam, and bin Laden, where it was agreed to join bin Laden's money with the expertise of the Islamic Jihad organization and take up the jihadist cause elsewhere after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero of jihad. Along with his Arab legion, he was thought to have brought down the mighty superpower of the Soviet Union. After his return to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden engaged in opposition movements to the Saudi monarchy while working for his family business. He offered to send al-Qaeda to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Yemeni Socialist Party government in South Yemen but was rebuffed by Prince Turki bin Faisal. He then tried to disrupt the Yemeni unification process by assassinating YSP leaders but was halted by Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz after President Ali Abdullah Saleh complained to King Fahd. He was also angered by the internecine tribal fighting among the Afghans. However, he continued working with the Saudi GID and the Pakistani ISI. He funded the 1990 Afghan coup d'état attempt and also lobbied the Parliament of Pakistan to carry out an unsuccessful motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein on 2 August 1990, put the Saudi kingdom and the royal family at risk. With Iraqi forces on the Saudi border, Saddam's appeal to pan-Arabism was potentially inciting internal dissent. One week after King Fahd agreed to U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's offer of American military assistance, Bin Laden met with King Fahd and Saudi Defense Minister Sultan, telling them not to depend on non-Muslim assistance from the United States and others and offering to help defend Saudi Arabia with his Arab legion. When Sultan asked how bin Laden would defend the fighters if Saddam used Iraqi chemical and biological weapons against them he replied "We will fight him with faith." Bin Laden's offer was rebuffed, and the Saudi monarchy invited the deployment of U.S. forces in Saudi territory.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden publicly denounced Saudi dependence on the U.S. forces, arguing that the Quran prohibited non-Muslims from setting foot in the Arabian Peninsula and that two holiest shrines of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the prophet Muhammad received and recited Allah's message, should only be defended by Muslims. Bin Laden tried to convince the Saudi "ulama" to issue a fatwa condemning the American military deployment but senior clerics refused out of fear of repression. Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led them to try to silence him. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division landed in the north-eastern Saudi city of Dhahran and was deployed in the desert barely 400 miles from Medina.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Meanwhile, on 8 November 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed. They discovered copious evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. This marked the earliest discovery of al-Qaeda terrorist plans outside of Muslim countries. Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later admitted guilt for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City on 5 November 1990.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In 1991, bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia by its government after repeatedly criticizing the Saudi alliance with the United States. He and his followers moved first to Afghanistan and then relocated to Sudan by 1992, in a deal brokered by Ali Mohamed. Bin Laden's personal security detail consisted of bodyguards personally selected by him. Their arsenal included SA-7, Stinger missiles, AK-47s, RPGs, and PK machine guns. Meanwhile, in March–April 1992, bin Laden tried to play a pacifying role in the escalating civil war in Afghanistan, by urging warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to join the other mujahideen leaders negotiating a coalition government instead of trying to conquer Kabul for himself.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: US intelligence monitored bin Laden in Sudan using operatives to run by daily and to photograph activities at his compound, and using an intelligence safe house and signals intelligence to surveil him and to record his moves.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In Sudan, bin Laden established a new base for Mujahideen operations in Khartoum. He bought a house on Al-Mashtal Street in the affluent Al-Riyadh quarter and a retreat at Soba on the Blue Nile. During his time in Sudan, he heavily invested in the infrastructure, in agriculture and businesses. He was the Sudan agent for the British firm Hunting Surveys, and built roads using the same bulldozers he had employed to construct mountain tracks in Afghanistan. Many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the war against the Soviet Union. He was generous to the poor and popular with the people. He continued to criticize King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In response, in 1994 Fahd stripped bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship and persuaded his family to cut off his $7 million a year stipend.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: By that time, bin Laden was being linked with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which made up the core of al-Qaeda. In 1995 the EIJ attempted to assassinate the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The attempt failed, and Sudan expelled the EIJ.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The US State Department accused Sudan of being a sponsor of international terrorism and bin Laden of operating terrorist training camps in the Sudanese desert. However, according to Sudan officials, this stance became obsolete as the Islamist political leader Hassan al-Turabi lost influence in their country. The Sudanese wanted to engage with the US but American officials refused to meet with them even after they had expelled bin Laden. It was not until 2000 that the State Department authorized US intelligence officials to visit Sudan.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In late 1995, when Bin Laden was still in Sudan, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) learned that Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling Bin Laden. CIA paramilitary officer Billy Waugh tracked down Bin Ladin in Sudan and prepared an operation to apprehend him, but was denied authorization. US Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want Bin Laden, giving as their reason their revocation of his citizenship. Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Laden over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel Bin Laden. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese since, at the time, there was no indictment outstanding against bin Laden in any country.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In February 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching officials from the United States and other governments, asking what actions of theirs might ease foreign pressure. In secret meetings with Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel Bin Laden to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. US officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March. Saudi officials apparently wanted Bin Laden expelled from Sudan. They had already revoked his citizenship, however, and would not tolerate his presence in their country. Also Bin Laden may have no longer felt safe in Sudan, where he had already escaped at least one assassination attempt that he believed to have been the work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, and paid for by the CIA.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Due to the increasing pressure on Sudan from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States, bin Laden was permitted to leave for a country of his choice. He chose to return to Jalalabad, Afghanistan aboard a chartered flight on 18 May 1996; there he forged a close relationship with Mullah Mohammed Omar. According to the 9/11 Commission, the expulsion from Sudan significantly weakened bin Laden and his organization. Some African intelligence sources have argued that the expulsion left bin Laden without an option other than becoming a full-time radical, and that most of the 300 Afghan Arabs who left with him subsequently became terrorists. Various sources report that bin Laden lost between $20 million and $300 million in Sudan; the government seized his construction equipment, and bin Laden was forced to liquidate his businesses, land, and even his horses.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In August 1996, bin Laden declared war against the United States. Despite the assurance of President George H. W. Bush to King Fahd in 1990, that all US forces based in Saudi Arabia would be withdrawn once the Iraqi threat had been dealt with, by 1996 the Americans were still there. Bush cited the necessity of dealing with the remnants of Saddam's regime (which Bush had chosen not to destroy). Bin Laden's view was that "the 'evils' of the Middle East arose from America's attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into an American colony".


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In 1998 he issued a fatwā against the United States, which was first published in "Al-Quds Al-Arabi", a London-based newspaper. It was entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places". Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "The Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. The reference to occupation in the fatwā referred to US forces based in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of controlling air space in Iraq, known as Operation Southern Watch.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda raised money from donors from the days of the Soviet jihad, and from the Pakistani ISI to establish more training camps for Mujahideen fighters. Bin Laden effectively took over Ariana Afghan Airlines, which ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash, and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, as well as provided false identifications to members of bin Laden's terrorist network. The arms smuggler Viktor Bout helped to run the airline, maintaining planes and loading cargo. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, concluded that Ariana was being used as a terrorist taxi service.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: It is believed that the first bombing attack involving bin Laden was the 29 December 1992, bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden in which two people were killed.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: After this bombing, al-Qaeda was reported to have developed its justification for the killing of innocent people. According to a fatwa issued by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the killing of someone standing near the enemy is justified because any innocent bystander will find a proper reward in death, going to "Jannah" (paradise) if they were good Muslims and to "Jahannam" (hell) if they were bad or non-believers. The fatwa was issued to al-Qaeda members but not the general public.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In the 1990s, bin Laden's al-Qaeda assisted jihadis financially and sometimes militarily in Algeria, Egypt, and Afghanistan. In 1992 or 1993, bin Laden sent an emissary, Qari el-Said, with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists and urge war rather than negotiation with the government. Their advice was heeded. The war that followed caused the deaths of 150,000–200,000 Algerians and ended with the Islamist surrender to the government. In January 1996, the CIA launched a new unit of its Counterterrorism Center (CTC) called Bin Laden Issue Station, code-named "Alec Station", to track and to carry out operations against Bin Laden's activities. Bin Laden Issue Station was headed by Michael Scheuer, a veteran of the Islamic Extremism Branch of the CTC.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: It has been claimed that bin Laden funded the Luxor massacre of 17 November 1997, which killed 62 civilians, and outraged the Egyptian public. In mid-1997, the Northern Alliance threatened to overrun Jalalabad, causing bin Laden to abandon his Najim Jihad compound and move his operations to Tarnak Farms in the south.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Another successful attack was carried out in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Bin Laden helped cement his alliance with the Taliban by sending several hundred Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban kill between five and six thousand Hazaras overrunning the city.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a "fatwa" in the name of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, which declared the killing of North Americans and their allies an "individual duty for every Muslim" to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip. At the public announcement, fatwa bin Laden announced that North Americans are "very easy targets". He told the attending journalists, "You will see the results of this in a very short time."


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri organized an al-Qaeda congress on 24 June 1998. The 1998 US embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on 7 August 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the United States public for the first time. Al-Qaeda later claimed responsibility for the bombings.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In retaliation for the embassy bombings, President Bill Clinton ordered a series of cruise missile strikes on bin Laden-related targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on 20 August 1998. In December 1998, the Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorist Center reported to President Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the United States of America, including the training of personnel to hijack aircraft. On 7 June 1999, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation placed bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: At the end of 2000, Richard Clarke revealed that Islamic militants headed by bin Laden had planned a triple attack on 3 January 2000, which would have included bombings in Jordan of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, tourists at Mount Nebo, and a site on the Jordan River, as well as the sinking of the destroyer in Yemen, and an attack on a target within the United States. The plan was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian terrorist cell, the sinking of the explosive-filled skiff intended to target the destroyer, and the arrest of Ahmed Ressam.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: A former US State Department official in October 2001 described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a safe haven for terrorists, and asserted that militant elements of the former Sarajevo government were protecting extremists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden. In 1997, "Rzeczpospolita", one of the largest Polish daily newspapers, had reported that intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspected that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries was located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, hundreds of volunteers joined an all-mujahedeen unit called El Moujahed in an abandoned hillside factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: According to Middle East intelligence reports, bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan. Among them was Karim Said Atmani, who was identified by authorities as the document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings in the United States. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canada–United States border in mid-December 1999 with a car full of nitroglycerin and bomb-making materials. He was convicted of colluding with Osama bin Laden by a French court.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: A Bosnian government search of passport and residency records, conducted at the urging of the United States, revealed other former Mujahideen who were linked to the same Algerian group or to other groups of suspected terrorists, and had lived in the area north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years. Khalil al-Deek was arrested in Jordan in late December 1999 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist sites. A second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated with Osama bin Laden. In its 26 June 1997 report on the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, "The New York Times" noted that those arrested confessed to serving with Bosnian Muslim forces. Further, the captured men also admitted to ties with Osama bin Laden.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In 1999, the press reported that bin Laden and his Tunisian assistant Mehrez Aodouni were granted citizenship and Bosnian passports in 1993 by the government in Sarajevo. The Bosnian government denied this information following the September 11 attacks, but it was later found that Aodouni was arrested in Turkey and that at that time he possessed the Bosnian passport. Following this revelation, a new explanation was given that bin Laden did not personally collect his Bosnian passport and that officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna, which issued the passport, could not have known who bin Laden was at the time.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The Bosnian daily "Oslobođenje" published in 2001 that three men, believed to be linked to bin Laden, were arrested in Sarajevo in July 2001. The three, one of whom was identified as Imad El Misri, were Egyptian nationals. The paper said that two of the suspects were holding Bosnian passports.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The head of Albania's State Intelligence Service (SHISH), Fatos Klosi, said that Osama was running a terror network in Albania to take part in the Kosovo War under the guise of a humanitarian organisation and it was reported to have been started in 1994. Claude Kader, who was a member, testified its existence during his trial. By 1998, four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) were arrested in Albania and extradited to Egypt. The mujahideen fighters were organised by Islamic leaders in Western Europe allied to him and Zawihiri.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: During his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević quoted from a purported FBI report that bin Laden's al-Qaeda had a presence in the Balkans and aided the Kosovo Liberation Army. He claimed bin Laden had used Albania as a launchpad for violence in the region and Europe. He claimed that they had informed Richard Holbrooke that KLA was being aided by al-Qaeda but the US decided to cooperate with the KLA and thus indirectly with Osama despite the 1998 United States embassy bombings earlier. Milošević had argued that the United States aided the terrorists, which culminated in its backing of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: After his initial denial, in the wake of the attacks, bin Laden announced, "what the United States is tasting today is nothing compared to what we have tasted for decades. Our "umma" has known this humiliation and contempt for over eighty years. Its sons are killed, its blood is spilled, its holy sites are attacked, and it is not governed according to Allah's command. Despite this, no one cares". In response to the attacks, the United States launched the War on Terror to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and capture al-Qaeda operatives, and several countries strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation to preclude future attacks. The CIA's Special Activities Division was given the lead in tracking down and killing or capturing bin Laden.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that classified evidence linking al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the September 11 attacks is clear and irrefutable. The UK Government reached a similar conclusion regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11 attacks, although the government report noted that the evidence presented is not necessarily sufficient to prosecute the case.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden initially denied involvement in the attacks. On 16 September 2001, bin Laden read a statement later broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel denying responsibility for the attack. In a videotape recovered by U.S. forces in November 2001 in Jalalabad, bin Laden was seen discussing the attack with Khaled al-Harbi in a way that indicates foreknowledge. The tape was broadcast on various news networks on 13 December 2001. The merits of this translation have been disputed. Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini stated: "This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic."


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In the 2004 video, bin Laden abandoned his denials without retracting past statements. In it he said he had personally directed the nineteen hijackers. In the 18-minute tape, played on Al-Jazeera, four days before the American presidential election, bin Laden accused U.S. President George W. Bush of negligence in the hijacking of the planes on 11 September. According to the tapes, bin Laden claimed he was inspired to destroy the World Trade Center after watching the destruction of towers in Lebanon by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Through two other tapes aired by Al Jazeera in 2006, Osama bin Laden announced, "I am the one in charge of the nineteen brothers. ... I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers ... with the raids" (23 May 2006). In the tapes he was seen with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as well as two of the 9/11 hijackers, Hamza al-Ghamdi, and Wail al-Shehri, as they made preparations for the attacks (videotape broadcast 7 September 2006). Identified motivations of the September 11 attacks include the support of Israel by the United States, presence of the US military in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the US enforcement of sanctions against Iraq.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: On 16 March 1998, Libya issued the first official Interpol arrest warrant against bin Laden and three other people. They were charged for killing Silvan Becker, agent of Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in the Terrorism Department, and his wife Vera in Libya on 10 March 1994. Bin Laden was still wanted by the Libyan government at the time of his death. Osama bin Laden was first indicted by a grand jury of the United States on 8 June 1998, on a charges of conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States and prosecutors further charged that bin Laden was the head of the terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, and that he was a major financial backer of Islamic fighters worldwide. On 4 November 1998, Osama bin Laden was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on charges of "Murder of US Nationals Outside the United States, Conspiracy to Murder US Nationals Outside the United States, and Attacks on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death" for his alleged role in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The evidence against bin Laden included courtroom testimony by former al-Qaeda members and satellite phone records, from a phone purchased for him by al-Qaeda procurement agent Ziyad Khaleel in the United States. However the Taliban ruled not to extradite Bin Laden on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence published in the indictments and that non-Muslim courts lacked standing to try Muslims.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden became the 456th person listed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, when he was added on 7 June 1999, following his indictment along with others for capital crimes in the 1998 embassy attacks. Attempts at assassination and requests for the extradition of bin Laden from the Taliban of Afghanistan were met with failure before the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001. In 1999, US President Bill Clinton convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite him.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: On 10 October 2001, bin Laden appeared as well on the initial list of the top 22 FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, which was released to the public by the President of the United States George W. Bush, in direct response to the September 11 attacks, but which was again based on the indictment for the 1998 embassy attack. Bin Laden was among a group of thirteen fugitive terrorists wanted on that latter list for questioning about the 1998 embassy bombings. Bin Laden remains the only fugitive ever to be listed on both FBI fugitive lists.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Despite the multiple indictments listed above and multiple requests, the Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden. However, they did offer to try him before an Islamic court if evidence of Osama bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks was provided. It was not until eight days after the bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001 that the Taliban finally did offer to turn over Osama bin Laden to a third-party country for trial in return for the United States ending the bombing. This offer was rejected by President Bush stating that this was no longer negotiable, with Bush responding "there's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty."


title: Osama bin Laden

text: On 15 June 2011, federal prosecutors of the United States of America officially dropped all criminal charges against Osama bin Laden following his death in May.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Capturing Osama bin Laden had been an objective of the United States government since the presidency of Bill Clinton. Shortly after the September 11 attacks it was revealed that President Clinton had signed a directive authorizing the CIA (and specifically their elite Special Activities Division) to apprehend bin Laden and bring him to the United States to stand trial after the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa; if taking bin Laden alive was deemed impossible, then deadly force was authorized. On 20 August 1998, 66 cruise missiles launched by United States Navy ships in the Arabian Sea struck bin Laden's training camps near Khost in Afghanistan, missing him by a few hours. In 1999 the CIA, together with Pakistani military intelligence, had prepared a team of approximately 60 Pakistani commandos to infiltrate Afghanistan to capture or kill bin Laden, but the plan was aborted by the 1999 Pakistani coup d'état; in 2000, foreign operatives working on behalf of the CIA had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy of vehicles in which bin Laden was traveling through the mountains of Afghanistan, hitting one of the vehicles but not the one in which bin Laden was riding.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In 2000, before the September 11 attacks, Paul Bremer characterized the Clinton administration as correctly focused on bin Laden, while Robert Oakley criticized their obsession with Osama.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Immediately after the September 11 attacks, US government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization as the prime suspects and offered a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture or death. On 13 July 2007, the Senate voted to double the reward to $50 million, although the amount was never changed. The Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association offered an additional $2 million reward.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden was believed to be hiding in the White Mountains (Spin Ghar) in Afghanistan's east, near the Pakistani border. According to "The Washington Post", the US government concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the Battle of Tora Bora, Afghanistan in late 2001, and according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge, failure by the United States to commit enough US ground troops to hunt him led to his escape and was the gravest failure by the United States in the war against al-Qaeda. Intelligence officials assembled what they believed to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the Battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: "The Washington Post" also reported that the CIA unit composed of special operations paramilitary forces dedicated to capturing bin Laden was shut down in late 2005.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: US and Afghanistan forces raided the mountain caves in Tora Bora between 14–16 August 2007. The military was drawn to the area after receiving intelligence of a pre-Ramadan meeting held by al-Qaeda members. After killing dozens of al-Qaeda and Taliban members, they did not find either Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: On 7 October 2008, in the second presidential debate, on foreign policy, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." Upon being elected, then President-elect Obama expressed his plans to renew US commitment to finding al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to his national security advisers in an effort to ratchet up the hunt for the terrorist. President Obama rejected the Bush administration's policy on bin Laden that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah, replacing it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaeda and its spawn.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in December 2009 that officials had had no reliable information on bin Laden's whereabouts for years. One week later, General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan said in December 2009 that al-Qaeda would not be defeated unless its leader, Osama bin Laden, were captured or killed. Testifying to the US Congress, he said that bin Laden had become an iconic figure, whose survival emboldens al-Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world, and that Obama's deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan meant that success would be possible. "I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaeda until he's captured or killed", McChrystal said of bin Laden. According to him, killing or capturing bin Laden would not spell the end of al-Qaeda, but the movement could not be eradicated while he remained at large.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In April 2011, President Obama ordered a covert operation to kill or capture bin Laden. On 2 May 2011, the White House announced that SEAL Team Six had successfully carried out the operation, killing him in his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: While referring to Osama bin Laden in a CNN film clip on 17 September 2001, then-President George W. Bush stated, "I want justice. There is an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or alive'". Subsequently, bin Laden retreated further from public contact to avoid capture. Numerous speculative press reports were issued about his whereabouts or even death; some placed bin Laden in different locations during overlapping time periods. None were ever definitively proven. After military offensives in Afghanistan failed to uncover his whereabouts, Pakistan was regularly identified as his suspected hiding place. Some of the conflicting reports regarding bin Laden's whereabouts and mistaken claims about his death follow:


title: Osama bin Laden

text: On 29 March 2012, Pakistani newspaper "Dawn" acquired a report produced by Pakistani security officials, based on interrogation of his three surviving wives, that detailed his movements while living underground in Pakistan.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In a 2010 letter, bin Laden chastised followers who had reinterpreted "al-tatarrus"—an Islamic doctrine meant to excuse the unintended killing of non-combatants in unusual circumstances—to justify routine massacres of Muslim civilians, which had turned Muslims against the extremist movement. Of the groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, Bin Laden condemned Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan for an attack on members of a hostile tribe, declaring that the operation is not justified, as there were casualties of noncombatants. Bin Laden wrote that the "tatarrus" doctrine needs to be revisited based on the modern-day context and clear boundaries established. He asked a subordinate to draw up a jihadist code of conduct that would constrain military operations in order to avoid civilian casualties. In Yemen, Bin Laden urged his allies to seek a truce that would bring the country stability, or would at least show the people that they were careful in keeping Muslims safe on the basis of peace. In Somalia, he called attention to the extreme poverty caused by constant warfare, and he advised al-Shabab to pursue economic development. He instructed his followers around the world to focus on education and persuasion rather than entering into confrontations with Islamic political parties.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: In April 2011, various US intelligence outlets traced Bin Laden to Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was previously believed that bin Laden was hiding near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but he was found away in a windowless three-story mansion in Abbottabad at , southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy. Imagery from Google Earth indicates that the compound was built between 2001 and 2005.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 2 May 2011, shortly after 1:00 AM local time (4:00 PM Eastern Time) by a United States military special operations unit.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was ordered by United States President Barack Obama and carried out in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation by a team of United States Navy SEALs from the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (also known as DEVGRU or informally by its former name, SEAL Team Six) of the Joint Special Operations Command, with support from CIA operatives on the ground. The raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad was launched from Afghanistan. After the raid, reports at the time stated that U.S. forces had taken bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for positive identification, then buried it at sea, in accordance with Islamic law, within 24 hours of his death. Subsequent reporting has called this account into question—citing, for example, the absence of evidence that there was an imam on board the , where the burial was said to have taken place.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February 2012 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine. In February 2013, Pakistan announced plans to build a PKR 265 million (US$30 million) amusement park in the area, including the property of the former hideout. In an interview in 2019, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan claimed that Pakistani intelligence led the CIA to Osama bin Laden.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: It was widely reported by the press that bin Laden was fatally wounded by Robert J. O'Neill, however, it has also been widely discredited by witnesses, who claim that bin Laden was possibly already dead by the time O'Neill arrived, having been injured by an anonymous SEAL Team Six member referred to under the pseudonym "Red". According to Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, bin Laden was struck by two suppressed shots to the side of the head from around ten feet away after leaning out of his bedroom doorway to survey Bissonnette and a point man. Once the Navy SEALs entered the bedroom, his body began convulsing before Bissonnette and another SEAL responded by firing multiple shots into his chest.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Bin Laden was killed within the fortified complex of buildings that were probably built for him, and had reportedly been his home for at least five years. The compound was located less than from Pakistan Military Academy and less than from Pakistan's capital. While the United States and Pakistan governments both claimed, and later maintained, that no Pakistani officials, including senior military leaders, knew bin Laden's whereabouts or had prior knowledge of the US strike, Carlotta Gall, writing in "The New York Times Magazine" in 2014, reported that ISI Director General Ahmad Shuja Pasha knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad. In a 2015 "London Review of Books" article, investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh asserted—citing US sources—that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Pasha knew of the US mission in advance, and authorized the helicopters delivering the SEALs to enter Pakistani airspace; and that the CIA learned of bin Laden's whereabouts from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who was paid an estimated $25 million for the information. Both stories were denied by US and Pakistani officials.


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Mosharraf Zia, a leading Pakistani columnist, stated, "It seems deeply improbable that bin Laden could have been where he was killed without the knowledge of some parts of the Pakistani state." Pakistan's United States envoy, Ambassador Husain Haqqani, promised a "full inquiry" into how Pakistani intelligence services could have failed to find bin Laden in a fortified compound so close to Islamabad. "Obviously bin Laden did have a support system", he said. "The issue is, was that support system within the government and the state of Pakistan, or within the society of Pakistan?"


title: Osama bin Laden

text: Others argued that bin Laden lived in the compound with a local family, and never used the internet or a mobile phone, which would have made him much easier to locate. Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari denied that his country's security forces sheltered bin Laden, and called any supposed support for bin Laden by the Pakistani government baseless speculation. Government officials said that the country's limited resources had been committed to its war against the Pakistan Taliban, and other insurgents who posed an active threat to it, rather than to finding or sheltering bin Laden. Coll states that as of 2019 there is no direct evidence showing Pakistani knowledge of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad. Documents captured from the Abbottabad compound generally show that bin Laden was wary of contact with Pakistani intelligence and police, especially in light of Pakistan's role in the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.


The 2022 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 8, 2022, as part of the 2022 United States elections during incumbent president Joe Biden's term. The elections were held to elect representatives from all 435 U.S. congressional districts across each of the 50 states, as well as five non-voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the District of Columbia and four of the five inhabited insular areas. Numerous other federal, state, and local elections, including the 2022 U.S. Senate elections, were also held on the same date. At the time of the election, the Democratic Party had held a majority in the House since January 3, 2019, as a result of the 2018 elections, when they won 235 seats; their majority was reduced to 222 seats in 2020.


title: 2022 United States House of Representatives elections

text: Although most observers and pundits predicted large Republican gains, Democrats lost fewer seats than expected and fewer than the average for the president's party in midterms. Democrats won several upsets in districts considered Republican-leaning or won by Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, such as . Republicans also won some upsets in New York, including . Observers attributed Democrats' surprise overperformance to, among others, the issue of abortion in the United States after "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization", as well as the underperformance of multiple statewide and congressional Republican candidates who held extreme views, including refusal to accept the party's 2020 electoral loss. The elections marked the first time since the 19th century that Democrats won all districts along the Pacific Ocean.


text: Due to gerrymandering during the 2020 U.S. redistricting cycle, Republicans made gains in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia, while Democrats made gains in Illinois and New Mexico. Defensive gerrymanders helped both parties hold competitive seats in various states, while Republican gains in New York and Democratic gains in North Carolina and Ohio were made possible because their state supreme courts overturned gerrymanders passed by their state legislatures. By November 16, major news organizations had called control of the House for Republicans.


text: As the usage of mail-in voting has increased in U.S. elections, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, the results in some congressional races were not known immediately following the election, which was more competitive and closer than expected, as a widely predicted red wave election did not materialize. Instead, Democrats lost fewer seats than expected at less than 10 and fewer than the average (25) for the president's party since the end of World War II. Several tossup or lean Republican races were won by Democrats, including upsets in , , and congressional districts; the Washington 3rd's seat was particularly notable because the "Cook Political Report" had labeled the district as lean Republican and "FiveThirtyEight" had Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's chance of winning at 2-in-100. Democrats also narrowly missed a further upset for the seat held by Republican Lauren Boebert; it was so close that it needed a recount.


text: Democrats performed better than expected in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, benefitting from a coattail effect, and performed well in Colorado and New England but suffered losses in New York. In Florida and New York, Republicans achieved state red waves, and red states became redder. Gerrymandering during the 2020 U.S. redistricting cycle gave each party advantages in various states; due to advantageous maps, Republicans performed well or made gains in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee, and Democrats made gains in Illinois and New Mexico. As of November 10, 14 seats were flipped, with Republicans gaining 11 of them for a net gain of 8 seats; Republicans needed to maintain a net gain of at least 5 seats to regain the House. Republicans won the popular vote by a 3 percent margin and would have won it even if Democrats contested more seats than they did, which may have costed them about 1–2 percent in the final popular vote margin.


text: The unprecedented degree of Republican underperformance during the election defied election analysts' predictions of heavy gains, given that while a majority of voters trusted Democrats on abortion, they were disappointed with the performance of Joe Biden and Democrats on issues facing the country, such as the economy and inflation, crime, and immigration. This has been variously attributed by political commentators to the issue of abortion after "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" overturned "Roe v. Wade" in June 2022, candidate quality among Republicans who held extremist or unpopular views, such as denial of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results, and youth turnout, among others. Biden described the results as a "strong night" for Democrats, and he urged for cooperation in Congress. Senator Lindsey Graham commented: "It's certainly not a red wave, that's for darn sure. But it is clear that we will take back the House." On November 9, when the results for the House were still uncertain, the Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy launched his bid to succeed long-time House Democrats leader Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In a letter asking for support among Republicans, he wrote: "I trust you know that earning the majority is only the beginning. Now, we will be measured by what we do with our majority. Now the real work begins."


text: Control of the House would not be known until November 16, when it became clear that the Republican Party had won a majority of the House after Mike Garcia was projected to win reelection in , giving Republicans a total of at least 218 seats; their majority were to be narrow. The size of the majority remained in doubt with several races still to be called more than one week after Election Day. On November 17, after Republicans were projected to win back the House, Pelosi announced that she would not seek reelection as Speaker of the House, and Hakeem Jeffries was later selected as the Democratic nominee by acclamation. On November 15, McCarthy won an internal Republican caucus poll as their nominee for Speaker of the House, although several members of the Republican caucus have expressed opposition to his speakership, casting doubt on how the 2023 U.S. speaker election, to be held on January 3, will unfold.


text: The 2022 election results are compared below to the 2020 election. The table does not include blank and over or under votes, both of which were included in the official results.


text: In total, 49 representatives and one non-voting delegate (30 Democrats and 20 Republicans) retired, 17 of whom (nine Democrats and eight Republicans) sought other offices.


text: Three seats were left vacant on the day of the general election due to resignations or death in 2022, two of which were not filled until the next Congress.


text: Fourteen incumbents lost renomination in the primary elections and nine incumbents lost reelection in the general elections.


text: The 2020 United States census determined how many of the 435 congressional districts each state receives for the 2020 redistricting cycle. Due to population shifts, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia lost one seat. Conversely, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon each gained one seat; and Texas gained two seats.


text: The following districts had multiple incumbent representatives running, a product of multiple districts merging in redistricting.


text: This is a list of house seats where the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the incumbent in the district were from different parties. The results for the 2020 elections accounted for redistricting, and was representative of the new district boundaries.


text: In February 2022, "The Guardian" reported that "America is poised to have a staggeringly low number of competitive seats in the US House, an alarming trend that makes it harder to govern and exacerbates political polarization." The 2020 redistricting cycle resulted in 94% of the U.S. House running in relatively safe seats, often due to gerrymandering.


text: There were nine special elections in 2022 to the 117th United States Congress, listed here by date and district.


text: Incumbent resigned March 31, 2022, to join Akin Gump.New member elected June 14, 2022.Republican gain.


title: Wales

text: Wales ( ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in 2021 of 3,107,500 and has a total area of . Wales has over of coastline and is largely mountainous with its higher peaks in the north and central areas, including Snowdon (), its highest summit. The country lies within the north temperate zone and has a changeable, maritime climate. The capital and largest city is Cardiff.


title: Wales

text: Welsh national identity emerged among the Celtic Britons after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, and Wales was formed as a kingdom under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn in 1055. Wales is regarded as one of the Celtic nations. The conquest of Wales by Edward I of England was completed by 1283, though Owain Glyndŵr led the Welsh Revolt against English rule in the early 15th century, and briefly re-established an independent Welsh state with its own national parliament (). The whole of Wales was annexed by England and incorporated within the English legal system under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. Distinctive Welsh politics developed in the 19th century. Welsh Liberalism, exemplified in the early 20th century by David Lloyd George, was displaced by the growth of socialism and the Labour Party. Welsh national feeling grew over the century; a nationalist party, was formed in 1925, and the Welsh Language Society in 1962. A governing system of Welsh devolution is employed in Wales, of which the most major step was the formation of the (Welsh Parliament, formerly the National Assembly for Wales) in 1998, responsible for a range of .


title: Wales

text: At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, development of the mining and metallurgical industries transformed the country from an agricultural society into an industrial nation; the South Wales Coalfield's exploitation caused a rapid expansion of Wales' population. Two-thirds of the population live in South Wales, including Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and the nearby valleys. The eastern region of North Wales has about a sixth of the overall population, with Wrexham being the largest northern city. The remaining parts of Wales are sparsely populated. Now that the country's traditional extractive and heavy industries have gone or are in decline, the economy is based on the public sector, light and service industries, and tourism. Agriculture in Wales is largely livestock based, making Wales a net exporter of animal produce, contributing towards national agricultural self-sufficiency.


title: Wales

text: The country has a distinct national and cultural identity and from the late 19th century onwards Wales acquired its popular image as the "land of song", in part due to the "eisteddfod" tradition. Both Welsh and English are official languages. A majority of the population in most areas speaks English whilst a majority of the population in parts of the north and west speak Welsh, with a total of 538,300 Welsh speakers across the whole country.


title: Wales

text: The English words "Wales" and "Welsh" derive from the same Old English root (singular , plural ), a descendant of Proto-Germanic , which was itself derived from the name of the Gauls known to the Romans as Volcae. This term was later used to refer indiscriminately to inhabitants of the Western Roman Empire. Anglo-Saxons came to use the term to refer to the Britons in particular; the plural form evolved into the name for their territory, Wales. Historically in Britain, the words were not restricted to modern Wales or to the Welsh but were used to refer to anything that Anglo-Saxons associated with Britons, including other non-Germanic territories in Britain (e.g. Cornwall) and places in Anglo-Saxon territory associated with Britons (e.g. Walworth in County Durham and Walton in West Yorkshire).


title: Wales

text: The modern Welsh name for themselves is , and is the Welsh name for Wales. These words (both of which are pronounced ) are descended from the Brythonic word "combrogi", meaning "fellow-countrymen", and probably came into use before the 7th century. In literature, they could be spelt or , regardless of whether it referred to the people or their homeland. The Latinised forms of these names, "Cambrian", "Cambric" and "Cambria", survive as names such as the Cambrian Mountains and the Cambrian geological period.


title: Wales

text: Wales has been inhabited by modern humans for at least 29,000 years Continuous human habitation dates from the end of the last ice age, between 12,000 and 10,000 years before present (BP), when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Central Europe began to migrate to Great Britain. At that time, sea levels were much lower than today. Wales was free of glaciers by about 10,250 BP, the warmer climate allowing the area to become heavily wooded. The post-glacial rise in sea level separated Wales and Ireland, forming the Irish Sea. By 8,000 BP the British Peninsula had become an island. By the beginning of the Neolithic () sea levels in the Bristol Channel were still about lower than today. The historian John Davies theorised that the story of Cantre'r Gwaelod's drowning and tales in the "Mabinogion", of the waters between Wales and Ireland being narrower and shallower, may be distant folk memories of this time.


title: Wales

text: Neolithic colonists integrated with the indigenous people, gradually changing their lifestyles from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering, to become settled farmers about 6,000 BP – the Neolithic Revolution. They cleared the forests to establish pasture and to cultivate the land, developed new technologies such as ceramics and textile production, and built cromlechs such as Pentre Ifan, Bryn Celli Ddu, and Parc Cwm long cairn between about 5,800 BP and 5,500 BP. Over the following centuries they assimilated immigrants and adopted ideas from Bronze Age and Iron Age Celtic cultures. Some historians, such as John T. Koch, consider Wales in the Late Bronze Age as part of a maritime trading-networked culture that included other Celtic nations. This "Atlantic-Celtic" view is opposed by others who hold that the Celtic languages derive their origins from the more easterly Hallstatt culture. By the time of the Roman invasion of Britain the area of modern Wales had been divided among the tribes of the Deceangli (north-east), Ordovices (north-west), Demetae (south-west), Silures (south-east) and Cornovii (east), centuries.


title: Wales

text: Leader of the Ordovices, Caractacus or "Caradog", was successful in resisting Roman invasions of north Wales for a period. He was eventually defeated and taken to Rome where, following a famous speech to the Roman senate, his life was spared and he was allowed to live peacefully in Rome.


title: Wales

text: The Roman conquest of Wales began in AD 48 and took 30 years to complete; the occupation lasted over 300 years. The campaigns of conquest were opposed by two native tribes: the Silures and the Ordovices. Roman rule in Wales was a military occupation, save for the southern coastal region of south Wales, where there is a legacy of Romanisation. The only town in Wales founded by the Romans, Caerwent, is in south east Wales. Both Caerwent and Carmarthen, also in southern Wales, became Roman "civitates". Wales had a rich mineral wealth. The Romans used their engineering technology to extract large amounts of gold, copper and lead, as well as lesser amounts of zinc and silver. No significant industries were located in Wales in this time; this was largely a matter of circumstance as Wales had none of the necessary materials in suitable combination, and the forested, mountainous countryside was not amenable to industrialisation. Latin became the official language of Wales, though the people continued to speak in Brythonic. While Romanisation was far from complete, the upper classes came to consider themselves Roman, particularly after the ruling of 212 that granted Roman citizenship to all free men throughout the Empire. Further Roman influence came through the spread of Christianity, which gained many followers when Christians were allowed to worship freely; state persecution ceased in the 4th century, as a result of Constantine I issuing an edict of toleration in 313.


title: Wales

text: Early historians, including the 6th-century cleric Gildas, have noted 383 as a significant point in Welsh history. In that year, the Roman general Magnus Maximus, or Macsen Wledig, stripped Britain of troops to launch a successful bid for imperial power, continuing to rule Britain from Gaul as emperor, and transferring power to local leaders. The earliest Welsh genealogies cite Maximus as the founder of several royal dynasties, and as the father of the Welsh Nation. He is given as the ancestor of a Welsh king on the Pillar of Eliseg, erected nearly 500 years after he left Britain, and he figures in lists of the Fifteen Tribes of Wales.


title: Wales

text: The 400-year period following the collapse of Roman rule is the most difficult to interpret in the history of Wales. After the Roman departure in AD 410, much of the lowlands of Britain to the east and south-east was overrun by various Germanic peoples, commonly known as Anglo-Saxons. Some have theorized that the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Saxons was due to apartheid-like social conditions in which the Britons were at a disadvantage.


title: Wales

text: By AD 500 the land that would become Wales had divided into a number of kingdoms free from Anglo-Saxon rule. The kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys, Dyfed, Caredigion, Morgannwg, the Ystrad Tywi, and Gwent emerged as independent Welsh successor states. Archaeological evidence, in the Low Countries and what was to become England, shows early Anglo-Saxon migration to Great Britain reversed between 500 and 550, which concurs with Frankish chronicles. John Davies notes this as consistent with a victory for the Celtic Britons at Badon Hill against the Saxons, which was attributed to Arthur by Nennius.


title: Wales

text: Having lost much of what is now the West Midlands to Mercia in the 6th and early 7th centuries, a resurgent late-7th-century Powys checked Mercian advances. Aethelbald of Mercia, looking to defend recently acquired lands, had built Wat's Dyke. According to Davies, this had been with the agreement of king Elisedd ap Gwylog of Powys, as this boundary, extending north from the valley of the River Severn to the Dee estuary, gave him Oswestry. Another theory, after carbon dating placed the dyke's existence 300 years earlier, is that it was built by the post-Roman rulers of Wroxeter. King Offa of Mercia seems to have continued this initiative when he created a larger earthwork, now known as Offa's Dyke (). Davies wrote of Cyril Fox's study of Offa's Dyke: "In the planning of it, there was a degree of consultation with the kings of Powys and Gwent. On the Long Mountain near Trelystan, the dyke veers to the east, leaving the fertile slopes in the hands of the Welsh; near Rhiwabon, it was designed to ensure that Cadell ap Brochwel retained possession of the Fortress of Penygadden." And, for Gwent, Offa had the dyke built "on the eastern crest of the gorge, clearly with the intention of recognizing that the River Wye and its traffic belonged to the kingdom of Gwent." However, Fox's interpretations of both the length and purpose of the Dyke have been questioned by more recent research.


title: Wales

text: In 853, the Vikings raided Anglesey, but in 856, Rhodri Mawr defeated and killed their leader, Gorm. The Celtic Britons of Wales made peace with the Vikings and Anarawd ap Rhodri allied with the Norsemen occupying Northumbria to conquer the north. This alliance later broke down and Anarawd came to an agreement with Alfred, king of Wessex, with whom he fought against the west Welsh. According to , in 894, "Anarawd came with the Angles and laid waste Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi."


title: Wales

text: The southern and eastern parts of Great Britain lost to English settlement became known in Welsh as (Modern Welsh ), which may have referred to the kingdom of Mercia originally and which came to refer to England as a whole. The Germanic tribes who now dominated these lands were invariably called , meaning "Saxons". The Anglo-Saxons called the Romano-British , meaning 'Romanised foreigner' or 'stranger'. The Welsh continued to call themselves (Brythons or Britons) well into the Middle Ages, though the first written evidence of the use of and is found in a praise poem to (, by ) . In , believed to be written around 930–942, the words and are used as often as 15 times. However, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement onwards, the people gradually begin to adopt the name over .


title: Wales

text: From 800 onwards, a series of dynastic marriages led to 's ( 844–77) inheritance of and . His sons founded the three dynasties of ( for , for and for ). 's grandson (r. 900–50) founded out of his maternal and paternal inheritances of and in 930, ousted the dynasty from and and then codified Welsh law in the 940s. (r. 986–99) of , ('s grandson), temporarily ousted the line from control of and . 's great-grandson (through his daughter Princess ) (r. 1039–63) conquered his cousins' realms from his base in , and extended his authority into England.


title: Wales

text: Gruffydd ap Llywelyn was the only ruler to unite all of Wales under his rule, becoming king of Wales. In 1055 Gruffydd ap Llywelyn killed his rival Gruffydd ap Rhydderch in battle and recaptured . Originally king of Gwynedd, by 1057 he was ruler of Wales and had annexed parts of England around the border. He ruled Wales with no internal battles. His territories were again divided into the traditional kingdoms. John Davies states that was "the only Welsh king ever to rule over the entire territory of Wales... Thus, from about 1057 until his death in 1063, the whole of Wales recognised the kingship of . For about seven brief years, Wales was one, under one ruler, a feat with neither precedent nor successor." Owain Gwynedd (1100–70) of the Aberffraw line was the first Welsh ruler to use the title (prince of the Welsh), a title of substance given his victory on the Berwyn Mountains, according to Davies. During this time, between 1053 and 1063, Wales lacked any internal strife and was at peace.


title: Wales

text: Within four years of the Battle of Hastings (1066), England had been completely subjugated by the Normans. William I of England established a series of lordships, allocated to his most powerful warriors, along the Welsh border, their boundaries fixed only to the east (where they met other feudal properties inside England). Starting in the 1070s, these lords began conquering land in southern and eastern Wales, west of the River Wye. The frontier region, and any English-held lordships in Wales, became known as , the Welsh Marches, in which the Marcher lords were subject to neither English nor Welsh law. The extent of the March varied as the fortunes of the Marcher lords and the Welsh princes ebbed and flowed.


title: Wales

text: 's grandson (the Great, 1173–1240), received the fealty of other Welsh lords in 1216 at the council at , becoming in effect the first prince of Wales. His grandson secured the recognition of the title "Prince of Wales" from Henry III with the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. Subsequent disputes, including the imprisonment of 's wife Eleanor, culminated in the first invasion by King Edward I of England. As a result of military defeat, the Treaty of Aberconwy exacted 's fealty to England in 1277. Peace was short-lived, and, with the 1282 Edwardian conquest, the rule of the Welsh princes permanently ended. With 's death and his brother prince 's execution, the few remaining Welsh lords did homage to Edward I. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 provided the constitutional basis for a post-conquest government of the Principality of North Wales from 1284 until 1535/36. It defined Wales as "annexed and united" to the English Crown, separate from England but under the same monarch. The king ruled directly in two areas: the Statute divided the north and delegated administrative duties to the Justice of Chester and Justiciar of North Wales, and further south in western Wales the King's authority was delegated to the Justiciar of South Wales. The existing royal lordships of Montgomery and remained unchanged. To maintain his dominance, Edward constructed a series of castles: Beaumaris, , Harlech and . His son, the future Edward II, was born at in 1284. He became the first English prince of Wales in 1301, which at the time provided an income from northwest Wales known as the Principality of Wales. After the failed revolt in 1294–95 of – who styled himself Prince of Wales in the Penmachno Document – and the rising of (1316), the last uprising was led by , against Henry IV of England. In 1404, was crowned prince of Wales in the presence of emissaries from France, Spain (Castille) and Scotland. went on to hold parliamentary assemblies at several Welsh towns, including a Welsh parliament () at . The rebellion was eventually defeated by 1412. Having failed went into hiding and nothing was known of him after 1413.


title: Wales

text: Henry Tudor (born in Wales in 1457) seized the throne of England from Richard III in 1485, uniting England and Wales under one royal house. The last remnants of Celtic-tradition Welsh law were abolished and replaced by English law by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 during the reign of Henry VII's son, Henry VIII. In the legal jurisdiction of England and Wales, Wales became unified with the kingdom of England; the "Principality of Wales" began to refer to the whole country, though it remained a "principality" only in a ceremonial sense. The Marcher lordships were abolished, and Wales began electing members of the Westminster parliament.


title: Wales

text: In 1536 Wales had around 278,000 inhabitants, which increased to around 360,000 by 1620. This was primarily due to rural settlement, where animal farming was central to the Welsh economy. Increase in trade and increased economic stability occurred due to the increased diversity of the Welsh economy. Population growth however outpaced economic growth and the standard of living dropped.


title: Wales

text: Prior to the Industrial Revolution in Wales, there were small-scale industries scattered throughout Wales. These ranged from those connected to agriculture, such as milling and the manufacture of woollen textiles, through to mining and quarrying. Agriculture remained the dominant source of wealth. The emerging industrial period saw the development of copper smelting in the Swansea area. With access to local coal deposits and a harbour that connected it with Cornwall's copper mines in the south and the large copper deposits at Parys Mountain on Anglesey, Swansea developed into the world's major centre for non-ferrous metal smelting in the 19th century. The second metal industry to expand in Wales was iron smelting, and iron manufacturing became prevalent in both the north and the south of the country. In the north, John Wilkinson's Ironworks at Bersham was a major centre, while in the south, at Merthyr Tydfil, the ironworks of Dowlais, Cyfarthfa, Plymouth and Penydarren became the most significant hub of iron manufacture in Wales. By the 1820s, south Wales produced 40 per cent of all Britain's pig iron.


title: Wales

text: By the 18th century, lawyers, doctors, estate agents and government officials formed a bourgeoisie with sizeable houses. In the late 18th century, slate quarrying began to expand rapidly, most notably in North Wales. The Penrhyn Quarry, opened in 1770 by Richard Pennant, was employing 15,000 men by the late 19th century, and along with Dinorwic Quarry, it dominated the Welsh slate trade. Although slate quarrying has been described as "the most Welsh of Welsh industries", it is coal mining which became the industry synonymous with Wales and its people. Initially, coal seams were exploited to provide energy for local metal industries but, with the opening of canal systems and later the railways, Welsh coal mining saw an explosion in demand. As the South Wales coalfield was exploited, Cardiff, Swansea, Penarth and Barry grew as world exporters of coal. By its height in 1913, Wales was producing almost 61 million tons of coal.


title: Wales

text: Historian Kenneth Morgan described Wales on the eve of the First World War as a "relatively placid, self-confident and successful nation". The output from the coalfields continued to increase, with the Rhondda Valley recording a peak of 9.6 million tons of coal extracted in 1913. The First World War (1914–1918) saw a total of 272,924 Welshmen under arms, representing 21.5 per cent of the male population. Of these, roughly 35,000 were killed, with particularly heavy losses of Welsh forces at Mametz Wood on the Somme and the Battle of Passchendaele. The first quarter of the 20th century also saw a shift in the political landscape of Wales. Since 1865, the Liberal Party had held a parliamentary majority in Wales and, following the general election of 1906, only one non-Liberal Member of Parliament, Keir Hardie of Merthyr Tydfil, represented a Welsh constituency at Westminster. Yet by 1906, industrial dissension and political militancy had begun to undermine Liberal consensus in the southern coalfields. In 1916, David Lloyd George became the first Welshman to become Prime Minister of Britain. In December 1918, Lloyd George was re-elected at the head of a Conservative-dominated coalition government, and his poor handling of the 1919 coal miners' strike was a key factor in destroying support for the Liberal party in south Wales. The industrial workers of Wales began shifting towards the Labour Party. When in 1908 the Miners' Federation of Great Britain became affiliated to the Labour Party, the four Labour candidates sponsored by miners were all elected as MPs. By 1922, half the Welsh seats at Westminster were held by Labour politicians—the start of a Labour dominance of Welsh politics that continued into the 21st century.


title: Wales

text: After economic growth in the first two decades of the 20th century, Wales' staple industries endured a prolonged slump from the early 1920s to the late 1930s, leading to widespread unemployment and poverty. For the first time in centuries, the population of Wales went into decline; unemployment reduced only with the production demands of the Second World War. The war saw Welsh servicemen and women fight in all major theatres, with some 15,000 of them killed. Bombing raids brought high loss of life as the German Air Force targeted the docks at Swansea, Cardiff and Pembroke. After 1943, 10 per cent of Welsh conscripts aged 18 were sent to work in the coal mines, where there were labour shortages; they became known as Bevin Boys. Pacifist numbers during both World Wars were fairly low, especially in the Second World War, which was seen as a fight against fascism.


title: Wales

text: Plaid Cymru was formed in 1925, seeking greater autonomy or independence from the rest of the UK. The term "England and Wales" became common for describing the area to which English law applied, and in 1955 Cardiff was proclaimed as Wales' capital. "Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg" (The Welsh Language Society) was formed in 1962, in response to fears that the language might soon die out. Nationalist sentiment grew following the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in 1965 to create a reservoir to supply water to the English city of Liverpool. Although 35 of the 36 Welsh MPs voted against the bill (one abstained), Parliament passed the bill and the village of Capel Celyn was submerged, highlighting Wales' powerlessness in her own affairs in the face of the numerical superiority of English MPs in Parliament. Separatist groupings, such as the Free Wales Army and "Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru" were formed, conducting campaigns from 1963. Prior to the investiture of Charles in 1969, these groups were responsible for a number of bomb attacks on infrastructure. At a by-election in 1966, Gwynfor Evans won the parliamentary seat of Carmarthen, Plaid Cymru's first Parliamentary seat.


title: Wales

text: By the end of the 1960s, the policy of bringing businesses into disadvantaged areas of Wales through financial incentives had proven very successful in diversifying the industrial economy. This policy, begun in 1934, was enhanced by the construction of industrial estates and improvements in transport communications, most notably the M4 motorway linking south Wales directly to London. It was believed that the foundations for stable economic growth had been firmly established in Wales during this period, but this was shown to be optimistic after the recession of the early 1980s saw the collapse of much of the manufacturing base that had been built over the preceding forty years.


title: Wales

text: The Welsh Language Act 1967 repealed a section of the Wales and Berwick Act and thus "Wales" was no longer part of the legal definition of England. This essentially defined Wales as a separate entity legally (but within the UK), for the first time since before the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 which defined Wales as a part of the Kingdom of England. The Welsh Language Act 1967 also expanded areas where use of Welsh was permitted, including in some legal situations.


title: Wales

text: In a referendum in 1979, Wales voted against the creation of a Welsh assembly with an 80 per cent majority. In 1997, a second referendum on the same issue secured a very narrow majority (50.3 per cent). The National Assembly for Wales ("Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru") was set up in 1999 (under the Government of Wales Act 1998) with the power to determine how Wales' central government budget is spent and administered, although the UK Parliament reserved the right to set limits on its powers. The governments of the United Kingdom and of Wales almost invariably define Wales as a country. The Welsh Government says: "Wales is not a Principality. Although we are joined with England by land, and we are part of Great Britain, Wales is a country in its own right."


title: Wales

text: The Government of Wales Act 2006 (c 32) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that reformed the National Assembly for Wales and allows further powers to be granted to it more easily. The Act creates a system of government with a separate executive drawn from and accountable to the legislature. Following a successful referendum in 2011 on extending the law making powers of the National Assembly it is now able to make laws, known as Acts of the Assembly, on all matters in devolved subject areas, without needing the UK Parliament's agreement.


title: Wales

text: In the 2016 referendum, Wales voted in support of leaving the European Union, although demographic differences became evident. According to Danny Dorling, professor of geography at the Oxford University, “If you look at the more genuinely Welsh areas, especially the Welsh-speaking ones, they did not want to leave the EU,”


title: Wales

text: After the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020, the National Assembly was renamed "Senedd Cymru" (in Welsh) and the "Welsh Parliament" (in English) (also collectively referred to as the "Senedd"), which was seen as a better reflection of the body's expanded legislative powers.


title: Wales

text: In 2016, YesCymru was launched. A non party-political campaign for an independent Wales which held its first rally in Cardiff in 2019. An opinion poll in March 2021 showed a record 39 per cent support for Welsh independence when excluding don't knows.


title: Wales

text: The Welsh language () is an Indo-European language of the Celtic family; the most closely related languages are Cornish and Breton. Most linguists believe that the Celtic languages arrived in Britain around 600 BCE. The Brythonic languages ceased to be spoken in England and were replaced by the English language, which arrived in Wales around the end of the eighth century due to the defeat of the Kingdom of Powys.


title: Wales

text: The Bible translations into Welsh and the Protestant Reformation, which encouraged use of the vernacular in religious services, helped the language survive after Welsh elites abandoned it in favour of English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.


title: Wales

text: Successive Welsh Language Acts, in 1942, 1967 and 1993, improved the legal status of Welsh. The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 modernised the 1993 Welsh Language Act and gave Welsh an official status in Wales for the first time, a major landmark for the language. The Measure also created the post of Welsh Language Commissioner, replacing the Welsh Language Board. Following the referendum in 2011, the Official Languages Act became the first Welsh law to be created in 600 years, according to the First Minister at the time, Carwyn Jones. This law was passed by Welsh Assembly members (AMs) only and made Welsh an official language of the National Assembly.


title: Wales

text: Starting in the 1960s, many road signs have been replaced by bilingual versions. Various public and private sector bodies have adopted bilingualism to a varying degree and (since 2011) Welsh is the only official ("de jure") language in any part of the United Kingdom.


title: Wales

text: Wales is a country that is part of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom. Constitutionally, the UK is a "de jure" unitary state, with a parliament and government in Westminster. Wales has a devolved, unicameral legislature known as the Senedd (Senedd Cymru - Welsh Parliament) which holds devolved powers from the UK Parliament via a reserved powers model. For the purposes of local government, Wales has been divided into 22 council areas since 1996. These "principal areas" are responsible for the provision of all local government services.


title: Wales

text: In the House of Commons – the 650-member lower house of the UK Parliament – there are 40 members of Parliament (MPs) who represent Welsh constituencies. At the 2019 general election, 22 Labour and Labour Co-op MPs were elected, along with 14 Conservative MPs and 4 Plaid Cymru MPs from Wales. The Wales Office is a department of the UK government responsible for Wales, whose minister the Secretary of State for Wales sits in the UK cabinet.


title: Wales

text: Following devolution in 1997, the Government of Wales Act 1998 created a Welsh devolved assembly now known as the Senedd (formally "" or "the Welsh Parliament", and formerly the "National Assembly for Wales" until 2020). Powers of the Secretary of State for Wales were transferred to the devolved government on 1 July 1999, granting the assembly the power to decide how the Westminster government's budget for devolved areas is spent and administered. The 1998 Act was amended by the Government of Wales Act 2006, which enhanced the institution's powers, giving it legislative powers akin to those of the Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly. The 60 members of the Senedd (MSs) are elected to five-year terms (four-year terms before 2011) under an additional member system. There are 40 single-member constituencies, with MSs directly elected using the first-past-the-post system. The remaining 20 MSs represent five electoral regions, each including between seven and nine constituencies, using proportional representation. The Senedd must elect a first minister (), who in turn selects ministers to form the Welsh Government.


title: Wales

text: The twenty areas of responsibility devolved to the Welsh Government, known as "subjects", include agriculture, economic development, education, health, housing, local government, social services, tourism, transport and the Welsh language. On its creation in 1999, the National Assembly for Wales had no primary legislative powers. In 2007, following passage of the Government of Wales Act 2006 (GoWA 2006), the assembly developed powers to pass primary legislation known at the time as Assembly Measures on some specific matters within the areas of devolved responsibility. Further matters have been added subsequently, either directly by the UK Parliament or by the UK Parliament approving a Legislative Competence Order (LCO, a request from the assembly for additional powers). The GoWA 2006 allows for the Senedd to gain primary lawmaking powers on a more extensive range of matters within the same devolved areas if approved in a referendum. A referendum on extending the law-making powers of the then National Assembly was held on 3 March 2011 and secured a majority for extension. Consequently, the assembly became empowered to make laws, now known as Acts of Senedd Cymru, on all matters in the subject areas, without needing the UK Parliament's agreement.


title: Wales

text: The Senedd also promotes Welsh interests abroad. It has its own envoy to America, primarily to promote Wales-specific business interests. The primary Welsh Government Office is based in the Washington British Embassy, with satellites in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta. The United States has also established a caucus to build direct relations with Wales. In the United States Congress, legislators with Welsh heritage and interests in Wales have established the Friends of Wales Caucus.


title: Wales

text: By tradition, Welsh Law was compiled during an assembly held at Whitland around 930 by Hywel Dda, king of most of Wales between 942 and his death in 950. The 'law of Hywel Dda' (), as it became known, codified the previously existing folk laws and legal customs that had evolved in Wales over centuries. Welsh Law emphasised the payment of compensation for a crime to the victim, or the victim's kin, rather than punishment by the ruler. Other than in the Marches, where March law was imposed by the Marcher Lords, Welsh Law remained in force in Wales until the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284. Edward I of England annexed the Principality of Wales following the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and Welsh Law was replaced for criminal cases under the Statute. Marcher Law and Welsh Law (for civil cases) remained in force until Henry VIII of England annexed the whole of Wales under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 (often referred to as the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543), after which English law applied to the whole of Wales. The Wales and Berwick Act 1746 provided that all laws that applied to England would automatically apply to Wales (and the Anglo-Scottish border town of Berwick) unless the law explicitly stated otherwise; this Act was repealed with regard to Wales in 1967. English law has been the legal system of England and Wales since 1536.


title: Wales

text: English law is regarded as a common law system, with no major codification of the law and legal precedents are binding as opposed to persuasive. The court system is headed by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom which is the highest court of appeal in the land for criminal and civil cases. The Senior Courts of England and Wales is the highest court of first instance as well as an appellate court. The three divisions are the Court of Appeal; the High Court of Justice and the Crown Court. Minor cases are heard by magistrates' courts or the County Court. In 2007 the Wales and Cheshire Region (known as the Wales and Cheshire Circuit before 2005) came to an end when Cheshire was attached to the North-Western England Region. From that point, Wales became a legal unit in its own right, although it remains part of the single jurisdiction of England and Wales.


title: Wales

text: The Senedd has the authority to draft and approve laws outside of the UK Parliamentary system to meet the specific needs of Wales. Under powers approved by a referendum held in March 2011, it is empowered to pass primary legislation, at the time referred to as an Act of the National Assembly for Wales but now known as an Act of Senedd Cymru in relation to twenty subjects listed in the Government of Wales Act 2006 such as health and education. Through this primary legislation, the Welsh Government can then also enact more specific subordinate legislation.


title: Wales

text: Wales is served by four regional police forces, Dyfed-Powys Police, Gwent Police, North Wales Police and South Wales Police. There are five prisons in Wales; four in the southern half of the country and one in Wrexham. Wales has no women's prisons; female inmates are imprisoned in England.


title: Wales

text: Wales is a generally mountainous country on the western side of central southern Great Britain. It is about north to south. The oft-quoted 'size of Wales' is about . Wales is bordered by England to the east and by sea in all other directions: the Irish Sea to the north and west, St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea to the southwest and the Bristol Channel to the south. Wales has about of coastline (along the mean high water mark), including the mainland, Anglesey and Holyhead. Over 50 islands lie off the Welsh mainland; the largest being Anglesey, in the north-west.