Datasets:

mfidabel

/

wikipedia_fhe

like 1

1260

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced%20Encryption%20Standard

Advanced Encryption Standard

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant of the Rijndael block cipher developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits. AES has been adopted by the U.S. government. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data. In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001. This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable (see Advanced Encryption Standard process for more details). AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3 standard. AES became effective as a U.S. federal government standard on May 26, 2002, after approval by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module (see Security of AES, below). Definitive standards The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is defined in each of: FIPS PUB 197: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) ISO/IEC 18033-3: Block ciphers Description of the ciphers AES is based on a design principle known as a substitution–permutation network, and is efficient in both software and hardware. Unlike its predecessor DES, AES does not use a Feistel network. AES is a variant of Rijndael, with a fixed block size of 128 bits, and a key size of 128, 192, or 256 bits. By contrast, Rijndael per se is specified with block and key sizes that may be any multiple of 32 bits, with a minimum of 128 and a maximum of 256 bits. AES operates on a 4 × 4 column-major order array of bytes, termed the state. Most AES calculations are done in a particular finite field. For instance, 16 bytes, are represented as this two-dimensional array: The key size used for an AES cipher specifies the number of transformation rounds that convert the input, called the plaintext, into the final output, called the ciphertext. The number of rounds are as follows: 10 rounds for 128-bit keys. 12 rounds for 192-bit keys. 14 rounds for 256-bit keys. Each round consists of several processing steps, including one that depends on the encryption key itself. A set of reverse rounds are applied to transform ciphertext back into the original plaintext using the same encryption key. High-level description of the algorithm round keys are derived from the cipher key using the AES key schedule. AES requires a separate 128-bit round key block for each round plus one more. Initial round key addition: each byte of the state is combined with a byte of the round key using bitwise xor. 9, 11 or 13 rounds: a non-linear substitution step where each byte is replaced with another according to a lookup table. a transposition step where the last three rows of the state are shifted cyclically a certain number of steps. a linear mixing operation which operates on the columns of the state, combining the four bytes in each column. Final round (making 10, 12 or 14 rounds in total): The step In the step, each byte in the state array is replaced with a using an 8-bit substitution box. Note that before round 0, the state array is simply the plaintext/input. This operation provides the non-linearity in the cipher. The S-box used is derived from the multiplicative inverse over , known to have good non-linearity properties. To avoid attacks based on simple algebraic properties, the S-box is constructed by combining the inverse function with an invertible affine transformation. The S-box is also chosen to avoid any fixed points (and so is a derangement), i.e., , and also any opposite fixed points, i.e., . While performing the decryption, the step (the inverse of ) is used, which requires first taking the inverse of the affine transformation and then finding the multiplicative inverse. The step The step operates on the rows of the state; it cyclically shifts the bytes in each row by a certain offset. For AES, the first row is left unchanged. Each byte of the second row is shifted one to the left. Similarly, the third and fourth rows are shifted by offsets of two and three respectively. In this way, each column of the output state of the step is composed of bytes from each column of the input state. The importance of this step is to avoid the columns being encrypted independently, in which case AES would degenerate into four independent block ciphers. The step In the step, the four bytes of each column of the state are combined using an invertible linear transformation. The function takes four bytes as input and outputs four bytes, where each input byte affects all four output bytes. Together with , provides diffusion in the cipher. During this operation, each column is transformed using a fixed matrix (matrix left-multiplied by column gives new value of column in the state): Matrix multiplication is composed of multiplication and addition of the entries. Entries are bytes treated as coefficients of polynomial of order . Addition is simply XOR. Multiplication is modulo irreducible polynomial . If processed bit by bit, then, after shifting, a conditional XOR with 1B16 should be performed if the shifted value is larger than FF16 (overflow must be corrected by subtraction of generating polynomial). These are special cases of the usual multiplication in . In more general sense, each column is treated as a polynomial over and is then multiplied modulo with a fixed polynomial . The coefficients are displayed in their hexadecimal equivalent of the binary representation of bit polynomials from . The step can also be viewed as a multiplication by the shown particular MDS matrix in the finite field . This process is described further in the article Rijndael MixColumns. The step In the step, the subkey is combined with the state. For each round, a subkey is derived from the main key using Rijndael's key schedule; each subkey is the same size as the state. The subkey is added by combining each byte of the state with the corresponding byte of the subkey using bitwise XOR. Optimization of the cipher On systems with 32-bit or larger words, it is possible to speed up execution of this cipher by combining the and steps with the step by transforming them into a sequence of table lookups. This requires four 256-entry 32-bit tables (together occupying 4096 bytes). A round can then be performed with 16 table lookup operations and 12 32-bit exclusive-or operations, followed by four 32-bit exclusive-or operations in the step. Alternatively, the table lookup operation can be performed with a single 256-entry 32-bit table (occupying 1024 bytes) followed by circular rotation operations. Using a byte-oriented approach, it is possible to combine the , , and steps into a single round operation. Security The National Security Agency (NSA) reviewed all the AES finalists, including Rijndael, and stated that all of them were secure enough for U.S. Government non-classified data. In June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES could be used to protect classified information: The design and strength of all key lengths of the AES algorithm (i.e., 128, 192 and 256) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the SECRET level. TOP SECRET information will require use of either the 192 or 256 key lengths. The implementation of AES in products intended to protect national security systems and/or information must be reviewed and certified by NSA prior to their acquisition and use. AES has 10 rounds for 128-bit keys, 12 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 14 rounds for 256-bit keys. By 2006, the best known attacks were on 7 rounds for 128-bit keys, 8 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 9 rounds for 256-bit keys. Known attacks For cryptographers, a cryptographic "break" is anything faster than a brute-force attack – i.e., performing one trial decryption for each possible key in sequence (see Cryptanalysis). A break can thus include results that are infeasible with current technology. Despite being impractical, theoretical breaks can sometimes provide insight into vulnerability patterns. The largest successful publicly known brute-force attack against a widely implemented block-cipher encryption algorithm was against a 64-bit RC5 key by distributed.net in 2006. The key space increases by a factor of 2 for each additional bit of key length, and if every possible value of the key is equiprobable, this translates into a doubling of the average brute-force key search time. This implies that the effort of a brute-force search increases exponentially with key length. Key length in itself does not imply security against attacks, since there are ciphers with very long keys that have been found to be vulnerable. AES has a fairly simple algebraic framework. In 2002, a theoretical attack, named the "XSL attack", was announced by Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk, purporting to show a weakness in the AES algorithm, partially due to the low complexity of its nonlinear components. Since then, other papers have shown that the attack, as originally presented, is unworkable; see XSL attack on block ciphers. During the AES selection process, developers of competing algorithms wrote of Rijndael's algorithm "we are concerned about [its] use ... in security-critical applications." In October 2000, however, at the end of the AES selection process, Bruce Schneier, a developer of the competing algorithm Twofish, wrote that while he thought successful academic attacks on Rijndael would be developed someday, he "did not believe that anyone will ever discover an attack that will allow someone to read Rijndael traffic." Until May 2009, the only successful published attacks against the full AES were side-channel attacks on some specific implementations. In 2009, a new related-key attack was discovered that exploits the simplicity of AES's key schedule and has a complexity of 2119. In December 2009 it was improved to 299.5. This is a follow-up to an attack discovered earlier in 2009 by Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Ivica Nikolić, with a complexity of 296 for one out of every 235 keys. However, related-key attacks are not of concern in any properly designed cryptographic protocol, as a properly designed protocol (i.e., implementational software) will take care not to allow related keys, essentially by constraining an attacker's means of selecting keys for relatedness. Another attack was blogged by Bruce Schneier on July 30, 2009, and released as a preprint on August 3, 2009. This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is against AES-256 that uses only two related keys and 239 time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version, or 245 time for a 10-round version with a stronger type of related subkey attack, or 270 time for an 11-round version. 256-bit AES uses 14 rounds, so these attacks are not effective against full AES. The practicality of these attacks with stronger related keys has been criticized, for instance, by the paper on chosen-key-relations-in-the-middle attacks on AES-128 authored by Vincent Rijmen in 2010. In November 2009, the first known-key distinguishing attack against a reduced 8-round version of AES-128 was released as a preprint. This known-key distinguishing attack is an improvement of the rebound, or the start-from-the-middle attack, against AES-like permutations, which view two consecutive rounds of permutation as the application of a so-called Super-S-box. It works on the 8-round version of AES-128, with a time complexity of 248, and a memory complexity of 232. 128-bit AES uses 10 rounds, so this attack is not effective against full AES-128. The first key-recovery attacks on full AES were by Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger, and were published in 2011. The attack is a biclique attack and is faster than brute force by a factor of about four. It requires 2126.2 operations to recover an AES-128 key. For AES-192 and AES-256, 2190.2 and 2254.6 operations are needed, respectively. This result has been further improved to 2126.0 for AES-128, 2189.9 for AES-192 and 2254.3 for AES-256, which are the current best results in key recovery attack against AES. This is a very small gain, as a 126-bit key (instead of 128-bits) would still take billions of years to brute force on current and foreseeable hardware. Also, the authors calculate the best attack using their technique on AES with a 128-bit key requires storing 288 bits of data. That works out to about 38 trillion terabytes of data, which is more than all the data stored on all the computers on the planet in 2016. As such, there are no practical implications on AES security. The space complexity has later been improved to 256 bits, which is 9007 terabytes. According to the Snowden documents, the NSA is doing research on whether a cryptographic attack based on tau statistic may help to break AES. At present, there is no known practical attack that would allow someone without knowledge of the key to read data encrypted by AES when correctly implemented. Side-channel attacks Side-channel attacks do not attack the cipher as a black box, and thus are not related to cipher security as defined in the classical context, but are important in practice. They attack implementations of the cipher on hardware or software systems that inadvertently leak data. There are several such known attacks on various implementations of AES. In April 2005, D. J. Bernstein announced a cache-timing attack that he used to break a custom server that used OpenSSL's AES encryption. The attack required over 200 million chosen plaintexts. The custom server was designed to give out as much timing information as possible (the server reports back the number of machine cycles taken by the encryption operation). However, as Bernstein pointed out, "reducing the precision of the server's timestamps, or eliminating them from the server's responses, does not stop the attack: the client simply uses round-trip timings based on its local clock, and compensates for the increased noise by averaging over a larger number of samples". In October 2005, Dag Arne Osvik, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer presented a paper demonstrating several cache-timing attacks against the implementations in AES found in OpenSSL and Linux's dm-crypt partition encryption function. One attack was able to obtain an entire AES key after only 800 operations triggering encryptions, in a total of 65 milliseconds. This attack requires the attacker to be able to run programs on the same system or platform that is performing AES. In December 2009 an attack on some hardware implementations was published that used differential fault analysis and allows recovery of a key with a complexity of 232. In November 2010 Endre Bangerter, David Gullasch and Stephan Krenn published a paper which described a practical approach to a "near real time" recovery of secret keys from AES-128 without the need for either cipher text or plaintext. The approach also works on AES-128 implementations that use compression tables, such as OpenSSL. Like some earlier attacks, this one requires the ability to run unprivileged code on the system performing the AES encryption, which may be achieved by malware infection far more easily than commandeering the root account. In March 2016, Ashokkumar C., Ravi Prakash Giri and Bernard Menezes presented a side-channel attack on AES implementations that can recover the complete 128-bit AES key in just 6–7 blocks of plaintext/ciphertext, which is a substantial improvement over previous works that require between 100 and a million encryptions. The proposed attack requires standard user privilege and key-retrieval algorithms run under a minute. Many modern CPUs have built-in hardware instructions for AES, which protect against timing-related side-channel attacks. NIST/CSEC validation The Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) is operated jointly by the United States Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Computer Security Division and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of the Government of Canada. The use of cryptographic modules validated to NIST FIPS 140-2 is required by the United States Government for encryption of all data that has a classification of Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) or above. From NSTISSP #11, National Policy Governing the Acquisition of Information Assurance: “Encryption products for protecting classified information will be certified by NSA, and encryption products intended for protecting sensitive information will be certified in accordance with NIST FIPS 140-2.” The Government of Canada also recommends the use of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules in unclassified applications of its departments. Although NIST publication 197 (“FIPS 197”) is the unique document that covers the AES algorithm, vendors typically approach the CMVP under FIPS 140 and ask to have several algorithms (such as Triple DES or SHA1) validated at the same time. Therefore, it is rare to find cryptographic modules that are uniquely FIPS 197 validated and NIST itself does not generally take the time to list FIPS 197 validated modules separately on its public web site. Instead, FIPS 197 validation is typically just listed as an "FIPS approved: AES" notation (with a specific FIPS 197 certificate number) in the current list of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules. The Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) allows for independent validation of the correct implementation of the AES algorithm. Successful validation results in being listed on the NIST validations page. This testing is a pre-requisite for the FIPS 140-2 module validation described below. However, successful CAVP validation in no way implies that the cryptographic module implementing the algorithm is secure. A cryptographic module lacking FIPS 140-2 validation or specific approval by the NSA is not deemed secure by the US Government and cannot be used to protect government data. FIPS 140-2 validation is challenging to achieve both technically and fiscally. There is a standardized battery of tests as well as an element of source code review that must be passed over a period of a few weeks. The cost to perform these tests through an approved laboratory can be significant (e.g., well over $30,000 US) and does not include the time it takes to write, test, document and prepare a module for validation. After validation, modules must be re-submitted and re-evaluated if they are changed in any way. This can vary from simple paperwork updates if the security functionality did not change to a more substantial set of re-testing if the security functionality was impacted by the change. Test vectors Test vectors are a set of known ciphers for a given input and key. NIST distributes the reference of AES test vectors as AES Known Answer Test (KAT) Vectors. Performance High speed and low RAM requirements were criteria of the AES selection process. As the chosen algorithm, AES performed well on a wide variety of hardware, from 8-bit smart cards to high-performance computers. On a Pentium Pro, AES encryption requires 18 clock cycles per byte, equivalent to a throughput of about 11 MB/s for a 200 MHz processor. On Intel Core and AMD Ryzen CPUs supporting AES-NI instruction set extensions, throughput can be multiple GB/s (even over 10 GB/s). Implementations See also AES modes of operation Disk encryption Network encryption Whirlpool – hash function created by Vincent Rijmen and Paulo S. L. M. Barreto List of free and open-source software packages Notes References alternate link (companion web site contains online lectures on AES) External links AES algorithm archive information – (old, unmaintained) Animation of Rijndael – AES deeply explained and animated using Flash (by Enrique Zabala / University ORT / Montevideo / Uruguay). This animation (in English, Spanish, and German) is also part of CrypTool 1 (menu Indiv. Procedures → Visualization of Algorithms → AES). HTML5 Animation of Rijndael – Same Animation as above made in HTML5. Advanced Encryption Standard Cryptography

1368

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly%20language

Assembly language

In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language), sometimes abbreviated asm, is any low-level programming language in which there is a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program". The conversion process is referred to as assembly, as in assembling the source code. The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called assembly time. Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code. Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture. Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universally with any operating system, as the language provides access to all the real capabilities of the processor, upon which all system call mechanisms ultimately rest. In contrast to assembly languages, most high-level programming languages are generally portable across multiple architectures but require interpreting or compiling, a much more complicated task than assembling. Assembly language syntax Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent, e.g., each low-level machine instruction or opcode, each directive, typically also each architectural register, flag, etc. Some of the mnemonics may be built in and some user defined. Many operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction. Most assemblers permit named constants, registers, and labels for program and memory locations, and can calculate expressions for operands. Thus, programmers are freed from tedious repetitive calculations and assembler programs are much more readable than machine code. Depending on the architecture, these elements may also be combined for specific instructions or addressing modes using offsets or other data as well as fixed addresses. Many assemblers offer additional mechanisms to facilitate program development, to control the assembly process, and to aid debugging. Some are column oriented, with specific fields in specific columns; this was very common for machines using punched cards in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some assemblers have free-form syntax, with fields separated by delimiters, e.g., punctuation, white space. Some assemblers are hybrid, with, e.g., labels, in a specific column and other fields separated by delimiters; this became more common than column oriented syntax in the 1960s. IBM System/360 All of the IBM assemblers for System/360, by default, have a label in column 1, fields separated by delimiters in columns 2-71, a continuation indicator in column 72 and a sequence number in columns 73-80. The delimiter for label, opcode, operands and comments is spaces, while individual operands are separated by commas and parentheses. Terminology A macro assembler is an assembler that includes a macroinstruction facility so that (parameterized) assembly language text can be represented by a name, and that name can be used to insert the expanded text into other code. Open code refers to any assembler input outside of a macro definition. A cross assembler (see also cross compiler) is an assembler that is run on a computer or operating system (the host system) of a different type from the system on which the resulting code is to run (the target system). Cross-assembling facilitates the development of programs for systems that do not have the resources to support software development, such as an embedded system or a microcontroller. In such a case, the resulting object code must be transferred to the target system, via read-only memory (ROM, EPROM, etc.), a programmer (when the read-only memory is integrated in the device, as in microcontrollers), or a data link using either an exact bit-by-bit copy of the object code or a text-based representation of that code (such as Intel hex or Motorola S-record). A high-level assembler is a program that provides language abstractions more often associated with high-level languages, such as advanced control structures (IF/THEN/ELSE, DO CASE, etc.) and high-level abstract data types, including structures/records, unions, classes, and sets. A microassembler is a program that helps prepare a microprogram, called firmware, to control the low level operation of a computer. A meta-assembler is "a program that accepts the syntactic and semantic description of an assembly language, and generates an assembler for that language", or that accepts an assembler source file along with such a description and assembles the source file in accordance with that description. "Meta-Symbol" assemblers for the SDS 9 Series and SDS Sigma series of computers are meta-assemblers. Sperry Univac also provided a Meta-Assembler for the UNIVAC 1100/2200 series. inline assembler (or embedded assembler) is assembler code contained within a high-level language program. This is most often used in systems programs which need direct access to the hardware. Key concepts Assembler An assembler program creates object code by translating combinations of mnemonics and syntax for operations and addressing modes into their numerical equivalents. This representation typically includes an operation code ("opcode") as well as other control bits and data. The assembler also calculates constant expressions and resolves symbolic names for memory locations and other entities. The use of symbolic references is a key feature of assemblers, saving tedious calculations and manual address updates after program modifications. Most assemblers also include macro facilities for performing textual substitution – e.g., to generate common short sequences of instructions as inline, instead of called subroutines. Some assemblers may also be able to perform some simple types of instruction set-specific optimizations. One concrete example of this may be the ubiquitous x86 assemblers from various vendors. Called jump-sizing, most of them are able to perform jump-instruction replacements (long jumps replaced by short or relative jumps) in any number of passes, on request. Others may even do simple rearrangement or insertion of instructions, such as some assemblers for RISC architectures that can help optimize a sensible instruction scheduling to exploit the CPU pipeline as efficiently as possible. Assemblers have been available since the 1950s, as the first step above machine language and before high-level programming languages such as Fortran, Algol, COBOL and Lisp. There have also been several classes of translators and semi-automatic code generators with properties similar to both assembly and high-level languages, with Speedcode as perhaps one of the better-known examples. There may be several assemblers with different syntax for a particular CPU or instruction set architecture. For instance, an instruction to add memory data to a register in a x86-family processor might be add eax,[ebx], in original Intel syntax, whereas this would be written addl (%ebx),%eax in the AT&T syntax used by the GNU Assembler. Despite different appearances, different syntactic forms generally generate the same numeric machine code. A single assembler may also have different modes in order to support variations in syntactic forms as well as their exact semantic interpretations (such as FASM-syntax, TASM-syntax, ideal mode, etc., in the special case of x86 assembly programming). Number of passes There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed (how many times the assembler reads the source) to produce the object file. One-pass assemblers go through the source code once. Any symbol used before it is defined will require "errata" at the end of the object code (or, at least, no earlier than the point where the symbol is defined) telling the linker or the loader to "go back" and overwrite a placeholder which had been left where the as yet undefined symbol was used. Multi-pass assemblers create a table with all symbols and their values in the first passes, then use the table in later passes to generate code. In both cases, the assembler must be able to determine the size of each instruction on the initial passes in order to calculate the addresses of subsequent symbols. This means that if the size of an operation referring to an operand defined later depends on the type or distance of the operand, the assembler will make a pessimistic estimate when first encountering the operation, and if necessary, pad it with one or more "no-operation" instructions in a later pass or the errata. In an assembler with peephole optimization, addresses may be recalculated between passes to allow replacing pessimistic code with code tailored to the exact distance from the target. The original reason for the use of one-pass assemblers was memory size and speed of assembly – often a second pass would require storing the symbol table in memory (to handle forward references), rewinding and rereading the program source on tape, or rereading a deck of cards or punched paper tape. Later computers with much larger memories (especially disc storage), had the space to perform all necessary processing without such re-reading. The advantage of the multi-pass assembler is that the absence of errata makes the linking process (or the program load if the assembler directly produces executable code) faster. Example: in the following code snippet, a one-pass assembler would be able to determine the address of the backward reference BKWD when assembling statement S2, but would not be able to determine the address of the forward reference FWD when assembling the branch statement S1; indeed, FWD may be undefined. A two-pass assembler would determine both addresses in pass 1, so they would be known when generating code in pass 2. B ... EQU * ... EQU * ... B High-level assemblers More sophisticated high-level assemblers provide language abstractions such as: High-level procedure/function declarations and invocations Advanced control structures (IF/THEN/ELSE, SWITCH) High-level abstract data types, including structures/records, unions, classes, and sets Sophisticated macro processing (although available on ordinary assemblers since the late 1950s for, e.g., the IBM 700 series and IBM 7000 series, and since the 1960s for IBM System/360 (S/360), amongst other machines) Object-oriented programming features such as classes, objects, abstraction, polymorphism, and inheritance See Language design below for more details. Assembly language A program written in assembly language consists of a series of mnemonic processor instructions and meta-statements (known variously as declarative operations, directives, pseudo-instructions, pseudo-operations and pseudo-ops), comments and data. Assembly language instructions usually consist of an opcode mnemonic followed by an operand, which might be a list of data, arguments or parameters. Some instructions may be "implied," which means the data upon which the instruction operates is implicitly defined by the instruction itself—such an instruction does not take an operand. The resulting statement is translated by an assembler into machine language instructions that can be loaded into memory and executed. For example, the instruction below tells an x86/IA-32 processor to move an immediate 8-bit value into a register. The binary code for this instruction is 10110 followed by a 3-bit identifier for which register to use. The identifier for the AL register is 000, so the following machine code loads the AL register with the data 01100001. 10110000 01100001 This binary computer code can be made more human-readable by expressing it in hexadecimal as follows. B0 61 Here, B0 means 'Move a copy of the following value into AL, and 61 is a hexadecimal representation of the value 01100001, which is 97 in decimal. Assembly language for the 8086 family provides the mnemonic MOV (an abbreviation of move) for instructions such as this, so the machine code above can be written as follows in assembly language, complete with an explanatory comment if required, after the semicolon. This is much easier to read and to remember. MOV AL, 61h ; Load AL with 97 decimal (61 hex) In some assembly languages (including this one) the same mnemonic, such as MOV, may be used for a family of related instructions for loading, copying and moving data, whether these are immediate values, values in registers, or memory locations pointed to by values in registers or by immediate (a.k.a direct) addresses. Other assemblers may use separate opcode mnemonics such as L for "move memory to register", ST for "move register to memory", LR for "move register to register", MVI for "move immediate operand to memory", etc. If the same mnemonic is used for different instructions, that means that the mnemonic corresponds to several different binary instruction codes, excluding data (e.g. the 61h in this example), depending on the operands that follow the mnemonic. For example, for the x86/IA-32 CPUs, the Intel assembly language syntax MOV AL, AH represents an instruction that moves the contents of register AH into register AL. The hexadecimal form of this instruction is: 88 E0 The first byte, 88h, identifies a move between a byte-sized register and either another register or memory, and the second byte, E0h, is encoded (with three bit-fields) to specify that both operands are registers, the source is AH, and the destination is AL. In a case like this where the same mnemonic can represent more than one binary instruction, the assembler determines which instruction to generate by examining the operands. In the first example, the operand 61h is a valid hexadecimal numeric constant and is not a valid register name, so only the B0 instruction can be applicable. In the second example, the operand AH is a valid register name and not a valid numeric constant (hexadecimal, decimal, octal, or binary), so only the 88 instruction can be applicable. Assembly languages are always designed so that this sort of unambiguousness is universally enforced by their syntax. For example, in the Intel x86 assembly language, a hexadecimal constant must start with a numeral digit, so that the hexadecimal number 'A' (equal to decimal ten) would be written as 0Ah or 0AH, not AH, specifically so that it cannot appear to be the name of register AH. (The same rule also prevents ambiguity with the names of registers BH, CH, and DH, as well as with any user-defined symbol that ends with the letter H and otherwise contains only characters that are hexadecimal digits, such as the word "BEACH".) Returning to the original example, while the x86 opcode 10110000 (B0) copies an 8-bit value into the AL register, 10110001 (B1) moves it into CL and 10110010 (B2) does so into DL. Assembly language examples for these follow. MOV AL, 1h ; Load AL with immediate value 1 MOV CL, 2h ; Load CL with immediate value 2 MOV DL, 3h ; Load DL with immediate value 3 The syntax of MOV can also be more complex as the following examples show. MOV EAX, [EBX] ; Move the 4 bytes in memory at the address contained in EBX into EAX MOV [ESI+EAX], CL ; Move the contents of CL into the byte at address ESI+EAX MOV DS, DX ; Move the contents of DX into segment register DS In each case, the MOV mnemonic is translated directly into one of the opcodes 88-8C, 8E, A0-A3, B0-BF, C6 or C7 by an assembler, and the programmer normally does not have to know or remember which. Transforming assembly language into machine code is the job of an assembler, and the reverse can at least partially be achieved by a disassembler. Unlike high-level languages, there is a one-to-one correspondence between many simple assembly statements and machine language instructions. However, in some cases, an assembler may provide pseudoinstructions (essentially macros) which expand into several machine language instructions to provide commonly needed functionality. For example, for a machine that lacks a "branch if greater or equal" instruction, an assembler may provide a pseudoinstruction that expands to the machine's "set if less than" and "branch if zero (on the result of the set instruction)". Most full-featured assemblers also provide a rich macro language (discussed below) which is used by vendors and programmers to generate more complex code and data sequences. Since the information about pseudoinstructions and macros defined in the assembler environment is not present in the object program, a disassembler cannot reconstruct the macro and pseudoinstruction invocations but can only disassemble the actual machine instructions that the assembler generated from those abstract assembly-language entities. Likewise, since comments in the assembly language source file are ignored by the assembler and have no effect on the object code it generates, a disassembler is always completely unable to recover source comments. Each computer architecture has its own machine language. Computers differ in the number and type of operations they support, in the different sizes and numbers of registers, and in the representations of data in storage. While most general-purpose computers are able to carry out essentially the same functionality, the ways they do so differ; the corresponding assembly languages reflect these differences. Multiple sets of mnemonics or assembly-language syntax may exist for a single instruction set, typically instantiated in different assembler programs. In these cases, the most popular one is usually that supplied by the CPU manufacturer and used in its documentation. Two examples of CPUs that have two different sets of mnemonics are the Intel 8080 family and the Intel 8086/8088. Because Intel claimed copyright on its assembly language mnemonics (on each page of their documentation published in the 1970s and early 1980s, at least), some companies that independently produced CPUs compatible with Intel instruction sets invented their own mnemonics. The Zilog Z80 CPU, an enhancement of the Intel 8080A, supports all the 8080A instructions plus many more; Zilog invented an entirely new assembly language, not only for the new instructions but also for all of the 8080A instructions. For example, where Intel uses the mnemonics MOV, MVI, LDA, STA, LXI, LDAX, STAX, LHLD, and SHLD for various data transfer instructions, the Z80 assembly language uses the mnemonic LD for all of them. A similar case is the NEC V20 and V30 CPUs, enhanced copies of the Intel 8086 and 8088, respectively. Like Zilog with the Z80, NEC invented new mnemonics for all of the 8086 and 8088 instructions, to avoid accusations of infringement of Intel's copyright. (It is questionable whether such copyrights can be valid, and later CPU companies such as AMD and Cyrix republished Intel's x86/IA-32 instruction mnemonics exactly with neither permission nor legal penalty.) It is doubtful whether in practice many people who programmed the V20 and V30 actually wrote in NEC's assembly language rather than Intel's; since any two assembly languages for the same instruction set architecture are isomorphic (somewhat like English and Pig Latin), there is no requirement to use a manufacturer's own published assembly language with that manufacturer's products. Language design Basic elements There is a large degree of diversity in the way the authors of assemblers categorize statements and in the nomenclature that they use. In particular, some describe anything other than a machine mnemonic or extended mnemonic as a pseudo-operation (pseudo-op). A typical assembly language consists of 3 types of instruction statements that are used to define program operations: Opcode mnemonics Data definitions Assembly directives Opcode mnemonics and extended mnemonics Instructions (statements) in assembly language are generally very simple, unlike those in high-level languages. Generally, a mnemonic is a symbolic name for a single executable machine language instruction (an opcode), and there is at least one opcode mnemonic defined for each machine language instruction. Each instruction typically consists of an operation or opcode plus zero or more operands. Most instructions refer to a single value or a pair of values. Operands can be immediate (value coded in the instruction itself), registers specified in the instruction or implied, or the addresses of data located elsewhere in storage. This is determined by the underlying processor architecture: the assembler merely reflects how this architecture works. Extended mnemonics are often used to specify a combination of an opcode with a specific operand, e.g., the System/360 assemblers use as an extended mnemonic for with a mask of 15 and ("NO OPeration" – do nothing for one step) for with a mask of 0. Extended mnemonics are often used to support specialized uses of instructions, often for purposes not obvious from the instruction name. For example, many CPU's do not have an explicit NOP instruction, but do have instructions that can be used for the purpose. In 8086 CPUs the instruction is used for , with being a pseudo-opcode to encode the instruction . Some disassemblers recognize this and will decode the instruction as . Similarly, IBM assemblers for System/360 and System/370 use the extended mnemonics and for and with zero masks. For the SPARC architecture, these are known as synthetic instructions. Some assemblers also support simple built-in macro-instructions that generate two or more machine instructions. For instance, with some Z80 assemblers the instruction is recognized to generate followed by . These are sometimes known as pseudo-opcodes. Mnemonics are arbitrary symbols; in 1985 the IEEE published Standard 694 for a uniform set of mnemonics to be used by all assemblers. The standard has since been withdrawn. Data directives There are instructions used to define data elements to hold data and variables. They define the type of data, the length and the alignment of data. These instructions can also define whether the data is available to outside programs (programs assembled separately) or only to the program in which the data section is defined. Some assemblers classify these as pseudo-ops. Assembly directives Assembly directives, also called pseudo-opcodes, pseudo-operations or pseudo-ops, are commands given to an assembler "directing it to perform operations other than assembling instructions". Directives affect how the assembler operates and "may affect the object code, the symbol table, the listing file, and the values of internal assembler parameters". Sometimes the term pseudo-opcode is reserved for directives that generate object code, such as those that generate data. The names of pseudo-ops often start with a dot to distinguish them from machine instructions. Pseudo-ops can make the assembly of the program dependent on parameters input by a programmer, so that one program can be assembled in different ways, perhaps for different applications. Or, a pseudo-op can be used to manipulate presentation of a program to make it easier to read and maintain. Another common use of pseudo-ops is to reserve storage areas for run-time data and optionally initialize their contents to known values. Symbolic assemblers let programmers associate arbitrary names (labels or symbols) with memory locations and various constants. Usually, every constant and variable is given a name so instructions can reference those locations by name, thus promoting self-documenting code. In executable code, the name of each subroutine is associated with its entry point, so any calls to a subroutine can use its name. Inside subroutines, GOTO destinations are given labels. Some assemblers support local symbols which are often lexically distinct from normal symbols (e.g., the use of "10$" as a GOTO destination). Some assemblers, such as NASM, provide flexible symbol management, letting programmers manage different namespaces, automatically calculate offsets within data structures, and assign labels that refer to literal values or the result of simple computations performed by the assembler. Labels can also be used to initialize constants and variables with relocatable addresses. Assembly languages, like most other computer languages, allow comments to be added to program source code that will be ignored during assembly. Judicious commenting is essential in assembly language programs, as the meaning and purpose of a sequence of binary machine instructions can be difficult to determine. The "raw" (uncommented) assembly language generated by compilers or disassemblers is quite difficult to read when changes must be made. Macros Many assemblers support predefined macros, and others support programmer-defined (and repeatedly re-definable) macros involving sequences of text lines in which variables and constants are embedded. The macro definition is most commonly a mixture of assembler statements, e.g., directives, symbolic machine instructions, and templates for assembler statements. This sequence of text lines may include opcodes or directives. Once a macro has been defined its name may be used in place of a mnemonic. When the assembler processes such a statement, it replaces the statement with the text lines associated with that macro, then processes them as if they existed in the source code file (including, in some assemblers, expansion of any macros existing in the replacement text). Macros in this sense date to IBM autocoders of the 1950s. Macro assemblers typically have directives to, e.g., define macros, define variables, set variables to the result of an arithmetic, logical or string expression, iterate, conditionally generate code. Some of those directives may be restricted to use within a macro definition, e.g., MEXIT in HLASM, while others may be permitted within open code (outside macro definitions), e.g., AIF and COPY in HLASM. In assembly language, the term "macro" represents a more comprehensive concept than it does in some other contexts, such as the pre-processor in the C programming language, where its #define directive typically is used to create short single line macros. Assembler macro instructions, like macros in PL/I and some other languages, can be lengthy "programs" by themselves, executed by interpretation by the assembler during assembly. Since macros can have 'short' names but expand to several or indeed many lines of code, they can be used to make assembly language programs appear to be far shorter, requiring fewer lines of source code, as with higher level languages. They can also be used to add higher levels of structure to assembly programs, optionally introduce embedded debugging code via parameters and other similar features. Macro assemblers often allow macros to take parameters. Some assemblers include quite sophisticated macro languages, incorporating such high-level language elements as optional parameters, symbolic variables, conditionals, string manipulation, and arithmetic operations, all usable during the execution of a given macro, and allowing macros to save context or exchange information. Thus a macro might generate numerous assembly language instructions or data definitions, based on the macro arguments. This could be used to generate record-style data structures or "unrolled" loops, for example, or could generate entire algorithms based on complex parameters. For instance, a "sort" macro could accept the specification of a complex sort key and generate code crafted for that specific key, not needing the run-time tests that would be required for a general procedure interpreting the specification. An organization using assembly language that has been heavily extended using such a macro suite can be considered to be working in a higher-level language since such programmers are not working with a computer's lowest-level conceptual elements. Underlining this point, macros were used to implement an early virtual machine in SNOBOL4 (1967), which was written in the SNOBOL Implementation Language (SIL), an assembly language for a virtual machine. The target machine would translate this to its native code using a macro assembler. This allowed a high degree of portability for the time. Macros were used to customize large scale software systems for specific customers in the mainframe era and were also used by customer personnel to satisfy their employers' needs by making specific versions of manufacturer operating systems. This was done, for example, by systems programmers working with IBM's Conversational Monitor System / Virtual Machine (VM/CMS) and with IBM's "real time transaction processing" add-ons, Customer Information Control System CICS, and ACP/TPF, the airline/financial system that began in the 1970s and still runs many large computer reservation systems (CRS) and credit card systems today. It is also possible to use solely the macro processing abilities of an assembler to generate code written in completely different languages, for example, to generate a version of a program in COBOL using a pure macro assembler program containing lines of COBOL code inside assembly time operators instructing the assembler to generate arbitrary code. IBM OS/360 uses macros to perform system generation. The user specifies options by coding a series of assembler macros. Assembling these macros generates a job stream to build the system, including job control language and utility control statements. This is because, as was realized in the 1960s, the concept of "macro processing" is independent of the concept of "assembly", the former being in modern terms more word processing, text processing, than generating object code. The concept of macro processing appeared, and appears, in the C programming language, which supports "preprocessor instructions" to set variables, and make conditional tests on their values. Unlike certain previous macro processors inside assemblers, the C preprocessor is not Turing-complete because it lacks the ability to either loop or "go to", the latter allowing programs to loop. Despite the power of macro processing, it fell into disuse in many high level languages (major exceptions being C, C++ and PL/I) while remaining a perennial for assemblers. Macro parameter substitution is strictly by name: at macro processing time, the value of a parameter is textually substituted for its name. The most famous class of bugs resulting was the use of a parameter that itself was an expression and not a simple name when the macro writer expected a name. In the macro: foo: macro a load a*b the intention was that the caller would provide the name of a variable, and the "global" variable or constant b would be used to multiply "a". If foo is called with the parameter a-c, the macro expansion of load a-c*b occurs. To avoid any possible ambiguity, users of macro processors can parenthesize formal parameters inside macro definitions, or callers can parenthesize the input parameters. Support for structured programming Packages of macros have been written providing structured programming elements to encode execution flow. The earliest example of this approach was in the Concept-14 macro set, originally proposed by Harlan Mills (March 1970), and implemented by Marvin Kessler at IBM's Federal Systems Division, which provided IF/ELSE/ENDIF and similar control flow blocks for OS/360 assembler programs. This was a way to reduce or eliminate the use of GOTO operations in assembly code, one of the main factors causing spaghetti code in assembly language. This approach was widely accepted in the early 1980s (the latter days of large-scale assembly language use). IBM's High Level Assembler Toolkit includes such a macro package. A curious design was A-natural, a "stream-oriented" assembler for 8080/Z80, processors from Whitesmiths Ltd. (developers of the Unix-like Idris operating system, and what was reported to be the first commercial C compiler). The language was classified as an assembler because it worked with raw machine elements such as opcodes, registers, and memory references; but it incorporated an expression syntax to indicate execution order. Parentheses and other special symbols, along with block-oriented structured programming constructs, controlled the sequence of the generated instructions. A-natural was built as the object language of a C compiler, rather than for hand-coding, but its logical syntax won some fans. There has been little apparent demand for more sophisticated assemblers since the decline of large-scale assembly language development. In spite of that, they are still being developed and applied in cases where resource constraints or peculiarities in the target system's architecture prevent the effective use of higher-level languages. Assemblers with a strong macro engine allow structured programming via macros, such as the switch macro provided with the Masm32 package (this code is a complete program): include \masm32\include\masm32rt.inc ; use the Masm32 library .code demomain: REPEAT 20 switch rv(nrandom, 9) ; generate a number between 0 and 8 mov ecx, 7 case 0 print "case 0" case ecx ; in contrast to most other programming languages, print "case 7" ; the Masm32 switch allows "variable cases" case 1 .. 3 .if eax==1 print "case 1" .elseif eax==2 print "case 2" .else print "cases 1 to 3: other" .endif case 4, 6, 8 print "cases 4, 6 or 8" default mov ebx, 19 ; print 20 stars .Repeat print "*" dec ebx .Until Sign? ; loop until the sign flag is set endsw print chr$(13, 10) ENDM exit end demomain Use of assembly language Historical perspective Assembly languages were not available at the time when the stored-program computer was introduced. Kathleen Booth "is credited with inventing assembly language" based on theoretical work she began in 1947, while working on the ARC2 at Birkbeck, University of London following consultation by Andrew Booth (later her husband) with mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study. In late 1948, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) had an assembler (named "initial orders") integrated into its bootstrap program. It used one-letter mnemonics developed by David Wheeler, who is credited by the IEEE Computer Society as the creator of the first "assembler". Reports on the EDSAC introduced the term "assembly" for the process of combining fields into an instruction word. SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program) was an assembly language for the IBM 650 computer written by Stan Poley in 1955. Assembly languages eliminate much of the error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming first-generation programming needed with the earliest computers, freeing programmers from tedium such as remembering numeric codes and calculating addresses. Assembly languages were once widely used for all sorts of programming. However, by the 1980s (1990s on microcomputers), their use had largely been supplanted by higher-level languages, in the search for improved programming productivity. Today, assembly language is still used for direct hardware manipulation, access to specialized processor instructions, or to address critical performance issues. Typical uses are device drivers, low-level embedded systems, and real-time systems. Historically, numerous programs have been written entirely in assembly language. The Burroughs MCP (1961) was the first computer for which an operating system was not developed entirely in assembly language; it was written in Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL), an Algol dialect. Many commercial applications were written in assembly language as well, including a large amount of the IBM mainframe software written by large corporations. COBOL, FORTRAN and some PL/I eventually displaced much of this work, although a number of large organizations retained assembly-language application infrastructures well into the 1990s. Most early microcomputers relied on hand-coded assembly language, including most operating systems and large applications. This was because these systems had severe resource constraints, imposed idiosyncratic memory and display architectures, and provided limited, buggy system services. Perhaps more important was the lack of first-class high-level language compilers suitable for microcomputer use. A psychological factor may have also played a role: the first generation of microcomputer programmers retained a hobbyist, "wires and pliers" attitude. In a more commercial context, the biggest reasons for using assembly language were minimal bloat (size), minimal overhead, greater speed, and reliability. Typical examples of large assembly language programs from this time are IBM PC DOS operating systems, the Turbo Pascal compiler and early applications such as the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. Assembly language was used to get the best performance out of the Sega Saturn, a console that was notoriously challenging to develop and program games for. The 1993 arcade game NBA Jam is another example. Assembly language has long been the primary development language for many popular home computers of the 1980s and 1990s (such as the MSX, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST). This was in large part because interpreted BASIC dialects on these systems offered insufficient execution speed, as well as insufficient facilities to take full advantage of the available hardware on these systems. Some systems even have an integrated development environment (IDE) with highly advanced debugging and macro facilities. Some compilers available for the Radio Shack TRS-80 and its successors had the capability to combine inline assembly source with high-level program statements. Upon compilation, a built-in assembler produced inline machine code. Current usage There have always been debates over the usefulness and performance of assembly language relative to high-level languages. Although assembly language has specific niche uses where it is important (see below), there are other tools for optimization. , the TIOBE index of programming language popularity ranks assembly language at 11, ahead of Visual Basic, for example. Assembler can be used to optimize for speed or optimize for size. In the case of speed optimization, modern optimizing compilers are claimed to render high-level languages into code that can run as fast as hand-written assembly, despite the counter-examples that can be found. The complexity of modern processors and memory sub-systems makes effective optimization increasingly difficult for compilers, as well as for assembly programmers. Moreover, increasing processor performance has meant that most CPUs sit idle most of the time, with delays caused by predictable bottlenecks such as cache misses, I/O operations and paging. This has made raw code execution speed a non-issue for many programmers. There are some situations in which developers might choose to use assembly language: Writing code for systems with that have limited high-level language options such as the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and graphing calculators. Programs for these computers of 1970s and 1980s are often written in the context of demoscene or retrogaming subcultures. Code that must interact directly with the hardware, for example in device drivers and interrupt handlers. In an embedded processor or DSP, high-repetition interrupts require the shortest number of cycles per interrupt, such as an interrupt that occurs 1000 or 10000 times a second. Programs that need to use processor-specific instructions not implemented in a compiler. A common example is the bitwise rotation instruction at the core of many encryption algorithms, as well as querying the parity of a byte or the 4-bit carry of an addition. A stand-alone executable of compact size is required that must execute without recourse to the run-time components or libraries associated with a high-level language. Examples have included firmware for telephones, automobile fuel and ignition systems, air-conditioning control systems, security systems, and sensors. Programs with performance-sensitive inner loops, where assembly language provides optimization opportunities that are difficult to achieve in a high-level language. For example, linear algebra with BLAS or discrete cosine transformation (e.g. SIMD assembly version from x264). Programs that create vectorized functions for programs in higher-level languages such as C. In the higher-level language this is sometimes aided by compiler intrinsic functions which map directly to SIMD mnemonics, but nevertheless result in a one-to-one assembly conversion specific for the given vector processor. Real-time programs such as simulations, flight navigation systems, and medical equipment. For example, in a fly-by-wire system, telemetry must be interpreted and acted upon within strict time constraints. Such systems must eliminate sources of unpredictable delays, which may be created by (some) interpreted languages, automatic garbage collection, paging operations, or preemptive multitasking. However, some higher-level languages incorporate run-time components and operating system interfaces that can introduce such delays. Choosing assembly or lower level languages for such systems gives programmers greater visibility and control over processing details. Cryptographic algorithms that must always take strictly the same time to execute, preventing timing attacks. Modify and extend legacy code written for IBM mainframe computers. Situations where complete control over the environment is required, in extremely high-security situations where nothing can be taken for granted. Computer viruses, bootloaders, certain device drivers, or other items very close to the hardware or low-level operating system. Instruction set simulators for monitoring, tracing and debugging where additional overhead is kept to a minimum. Situations where no high-level language exists, on a new or specialized processor for which no cross compiler is available. Reverse-engineering and modifying program files such as: existing binaries that may or may not have originally been written in a high-level language, for example when trying to recreate programs for which source code is not available or has been lost, or cracking copy protection of proprietary software. Video games (also termed ROM hacking), which is possible via several methods. The most widely employed method is altering program code at the assembly language level. Assembly language is still taught in most computer science and electronic engineering programs. Although few programmers today regularly work with assembly language as a tool, the underlying concepts remain important. Such fundamental topics as binary arithmetic, memory allocation, stack processing, character set encoding, interrupt processing, and compiler design would be hard to study in detail without a grasp of how a computer operates at the hardware level. Since a computer's behavior is fundamentally defined by its instruction set, the logical way to learn such concepts is to study an assembly language. Most modern computers have similar instruction sets. Therefore, studying a single assembly language is sufficient to learn: I) the basic concepts; II) to recognize situations where the use of assembly language might be appropriate; and III) to see how efficient executable code can be created from high-level languages. Typical applications Assembly language is typically used in a system's boot code, the low-level code that initializes and tests the system hardware prior to booting the operating system and is often stored in ROM. (BIOS on IBM-compatible PC systems and CP/M is an example.) Assembly language is often used for low-level code, for instance for operating system kernels, which cannot rely on the availability of pre-existing system calls and must indeed implement them for the particular processor architecture on which the system will be running. Some compilers translate high-level languages into assembly first before fully compiling, allowing the assembly code to be viewed for debugging and optimization purposes. Some compilers for relatively low-level languages, such as Pascal or C, allow the programmer to embed assembly language directly in the source code (so called inline assembly). Programs using such facilities can then construct abstractions using different assembly language on each hardware platform. The system's portable code can then use these processor-specific components through a uniform interface. Assembly language is useful in reverse engineering. Many programs are distributed only in machine code form which is straightforward to translate into assembly language by a disassembler, but more difficult to translate into a higher-level language through a decompiler. Tools such as the Interactive Disassembler make extensive use of disassembly for such a purpose. This technique is used by hackers to crack commercial software, and competitors to produce software with similar results from competing companies. Assembly language is used to enhance speed of execution, especially in early personal computers with limited processing power and RAM. Assemblers can be used to generate blocks of data, with no high-level language overhead, from formatted and commented source code, to be used by other code. See also Compiler Comparison of assemblers Disassembler Hexadecimal Instruction set architecture Little man computer – an educational computer model with a base-10 assembly language Nibble Typed assembly language Notes References Further reading (2+xiv+270+6 pages) Kann, Charles W. (2021). "Introduction to Assembly Language Programming: From Soup to Nuts: ARM Edition" ("An online book full of helpful ASM info, tutorials and code examples" by the ASM Community, archived at the internet archive.) External links Unix Assembly Language Programming Linux Assembly PPR: Learning Assembly Language NASM – The Netwide Assembler (a popular assembly language) Assembly Language Programming Examples Authoring Windows Applications In Assembly Language Assembly Optimization Tips by Mark Larson The table for assembly language to machine code Assembly language Computer-related introductions in 1949 Embedded systems Low-level programming languages Programming language implementation Programming languages created in 1949

1921

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda (; , , translation: "the Base", "the Foundation", alternatively spelled al-Qaida and al-Qa'ida), officially known as Qaedat al-Jihad, is a multinational militant Sunni Islamic extremist network composed of Salafist jihadists. It was founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and several other Arab volunteers during the Soviet–Afghan War. Al-Qaeda has been designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council (the permament members of which are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, India and various other countries (see below). Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on non-military and military targets in various countries, including the 1998 United States embassy bombings, the September 11 attacks, and the 2002 Bali bombings. The United States government responded to the September 11 attacks by launching the "war on terror", which sought to undermine al-Qaeda and its allies. The deaths of key leaders, including that of Osama bin Laden, have led al-Qaeda's operations to shift from top-down organization and planning of attacks, to the planning of attacks which are carried out by a loose network of associated groups and lone-wolf operators. Al-Qaeda characteristically organises attacks which include suicide attacks and the simultaneous bombing of several targets. Al-Qaeda ideologues envision the violent removal of all foreign and secular influences in Muslim countries, which it perceives as corrupt deviations. Al-Qaeda members believe a Christian–Jewish alliance (led by the United States) is conspiring to be at war against Islam and destroy Islam. As Salafist jihadists, members of al-Qaeda believe that killing non-combatants is religiously sanctioned. Al-Qaeda also opposes what it regards as man-made laws, and wants to replace them exclusively with a strict form of sharīʿa (Islamic religious law which is perceived as divine law). Al-Qaeda has carried out many attacks on people whom it considers kāfir. It is also responsible for instigating sectarian violence among Muslims. Al-Qaeda regards liberal Muslims, Shias, Sufis, and other Islamic sects as heretical and its members and sympathizers have attacked their mosques, shrines, and gatherings. Examples of sectarian attacks include the 2004 Ashoura massacre, the 2006 Sadr City bombings, the April 2007 Baghdad bombings and the 2007 Yazidi community bombings. Following the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the group has been led by Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, and as of 2021 has reportedly suffered from a deterioration of central command over its regional operations. Organization Al-Qaeda only indirectly controls its day-to-day operations. Its philosophy calls for the centralization of decision making, while allowing for the decentralization of execution. Al-Qaeda's top leaders have defined the organization's ideology and guiding strategy, and they have also articulated simple and easy-to-receive messages. At the same time, mid-level organizations were given autonomy, but they had to consult with top management before large-scale attacks and assassinations. Top management included the shura council as well as committees on military operations, finance, and information sharing. Through al-Qaeda's information committees, he placed special emphasis on communicating with his groups. However, after the War on Terror, al-Qaeda's leadership has become isolated. As a result, the leadership has become decentralized, and the organization has become regionalized into several al-Qaeda groups. Many terrorism experts do not believe that the global jihadist movement is driven at every level by al-Qaeda's leadership. However, bin Laden held considerable ideological sway over some Muslim extremists before his death. Experts argue that al-Qaeda has fragmented into a number of disparate regional movements, and that these groups bear little connection with one another. This view mirrors the account given by Osama bin Laden in his October 2001 interview with Tayseer Allouni: Bruce Hoffman, however, sees al-Qaeda as a cohesive network that is strongly led from the Pakistani tribal areas. Affiliates Al-Qaeda has the following direct affiliates: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) al-Shabaab Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) Al-Qaeda in Bosnia and Herzegovina Al-Qaeda in Caucasus and Russia Al-Qaeda in Gaza Al-Qaeda in Kurdistan Al-Qaeda in Lebanon Al Qaeda in Spain Al-Qaeda in the Malay Archipelago Al-Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula Guardians of Religion Organization Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Niles (AQTN). The following are presently believed to be indirect affiliates of al-Qaeda: Caucasus Emirate (factions) Fatah al-Islam Islamic Jihad Union Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan Jaish-e-Mohammed Jemaah Islamiyah Lashkar-e-Taiba Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group Al-Qaeda's former affiliates include the following: Abu Sayyaf (pledged allegiance to ISIL in 2014) Al-Mourabitoun (joined JNIM in 2017) Al-Qaeda in Iraq (became the Islamic State of Iraq, which later seceded from al-Qaeda and became ISIL) Al-Qaeda in the Lands Beyond the Sahel (inactive since 2015) Ansar al-Islam (majority merged with ISIL in 2014) Ansar Dine (joined JNIM in 2017) Islamic Jihad of Yemen (became AQAP) Jund al-Aqsa (defunct) Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (merged with Al-Mulathameen to form Al-Mourabitoun in 2013) Rajah Sulaiman movement (defunct) Al-Nusra Front (became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and split ties in 2017, disputed) Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (pledged alliance to ISIL and adopted the name Sinai Province) Leadership Osama bin Laden (1988 – May 2011) Osama bin Laden served as the emir of al-Qaeda from the organization's founding in 1988 until his assassination by US forces on May 1, 2011. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman was alleged to be second in command prior to his death on August 22, 2011. Bin Laden was advised by a Shura Council, which consists of senior al-Qaeda members. The group was estimated to consist of 20–30 people. After May 2011 Ayman al-Zawahiri had been al-Qaeda's deputy emir and assumed the role of emir following bin Laden's death. Al-Zawahiri replaced Saif al-Adel, who had served as interim commander. On June 5, 2012, Pakistani intelligence officials announced that al-Rahman's alleged successor as second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi, had been killed in Pakistan. Nasir al-Wuhayshi was alleged to have become al-Qaeda's overall second in command and general manager in 2013. He was concurrently the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) until he was killed by a US airstrike in Yemen in June 2015. Abu Khayr al-Masri, Wuhayshi's alleged successor as the deputy to Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed by a US airstrike in Syria in February 2017. Al-Qaeda's network was built from scratch as a conspiratorial network which drew upon the leadership of a number of regional nodes. The organization divided itself into several committees, which include: The Military Committee, which is responsible for training operatives, acquiring weapons, and planning attacks. The Money/Business Committee, which funds the recruitment and training of operatives through the hawala banking system. US-led efforts to eradicate the sources of "terrorist financing" were most successful in the year immediately following the September 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda continues to operate through unregulated banks, such as the 1,000 or so hawaladars in Pakistan, some of which can handle deals of up to million. The committee also procures false passports, pays al-Qaeda members, and oversees profit-driven businesses. In the 9/11 Commission Report, it was estimated that al-Qaeda required $30million per year to conduct its operations. The Law Committee reviews Sharia law, and decides upon courses of action conform to it. The Islamic Study/Fatwah Committee issues religious edicts, such as an edict in 1998 telling Muslims to kill Americans. The Media Committee ran the now-defunct newspaper Nashrat al Akhbar () and handled public relations. In 2005, al-Qaeda formed As-Sahab, a media production house, to supply its video and audio materials. Command structure Most of Al Qaeda's top leaders and operational directors were veterans who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were the leaders who were considered the operational commanders of the organization. Nevertheless, Al-Qaeda is not operationally managed by Ayman al-Zawahiri. Several operational groups exist, which consult with the leadership in situations where attacks are in preparation. When asked in 2005 about the possibility of al-Qaeda's connection to the July 7, 2005 London bombings, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said: "Al-Qaeda is not an organization. Al-Qaeda is a way of working... but this has the hallmark of that approach... al-Qaeda clearly has the ability to provide training... to provide expertise... and I think that is what has occurred here." On August 13, 2005, The Independent newspaper, reported that the July7 bombers had acted independently of an al-Qaeda mastermind. Nasser al-Bahri, who was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard for four years in the run-up to 9/11 wrote in his memoir a highly detailed description of how the group functioned at that time. Al-Bahri described al-Qaeda's formal administrative structure and vast arsenal. However, the author Adam Curtis argued that the idea of al-Qaeda as a formal organization is primarily an American invention. Curtis contended the name "al-Qaeda" was first brought to the attention of the public in the 2001 trial of bin Laden and the four men accused of the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. Curtis wrote: During the 2001 trial, the US Department of Justice needed to show that bin Laden was the leader of a criminal organization in order to charge him in absentia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The name of the organization and details of its structure were provided in the testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, who said he was a founding member of the group and a former employee of bin Laden. Questions about the reliability of al-Fadl's testimony have been raised by a number of sources because of his history of dishonesty, and because he was delivering it as part of a plea bargain agreement after being convicted of conspiring to attack US military establishments. Sam Schmidt, a defense attorney who defended al-Fadl said: Field operatives The number of individuals in the group who have undergone proper military training, and are capable of commanding insurgent forces, is largely unknown. Documents captured in the raid on bin Laden's compound in 2011 show that the core al-Qaeda membership in 2002 was 170. In 2006, it was estimated that al-Qaeda had several thousand commanders embedded in 40 different countries. , it was believed that no more than 200–300 members were still active commanders. According to the 2004 BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, al-Qaeda was so weakly linked together that it was hard to say it existed apart from bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. The lack of any significant numbers of convicted al-Qaeda members, despite a large number of arrests on terrorism charges, was cited by the documentary as a reason to doubt whether a widespread entity that met the description of al-Qaeda existed. Al-Qaeda's commanders, as well as its sleeping agents, are hiding in different parts of the world to this day. They are mainly hunted by the American and Israeli secret services. Al Qaeda's number two leader, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, was killed by Israeli agents. His pseudonym was Abu Muhammad al-Masri, who was killed in November 2020 in Iran. He was involved in the 1988 assassination attempt on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Insurgent forces According to author Robert Cassidy, al-Qaeda maintains two separate forces which are deployed alongside insurgents in Iraq and Pakistan. The first, numbering in the tens of thousands, was "organized, trained, and equipped as insurgent combat forces" in the Soviet–Afghan war. The force was composed primarily of foreign mujahideen from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Many of these fighters went on to fight in Bosnia and Somalia for global jihad. Another group, which numbered 10,000 in 2006, live in the West and have received rudimentary combat training. Other analysts have described al-Qaeda's rank and file as being "predominantly Arab" in its first years of operation, but that the organization also includes "other peoples" . It has been estimated that 62 percent of al-Qaeda members have a university education. In 2011 and the following year, the Americans successfully settled accounts with Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, the organization's chief propagandist, and Abu Yahya al-Libi's deputy commander. The optimistic voices were already saying it was over for al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, it was around this time that the Arab Spring greeted the region, the turmoil of which came great to al-Qaeda's regional forces. Seven years later, Ayman al-Zawahiri became arguably the number one leader in the organization, implementing his strategy with systematic consistency. Tens of thousands loyal to al-Qaeda and related organizations were able to challenge local and regional stability and ruthlessly attack their enemies in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and Russia alike. In fact, from Northwest Africa to South Asia, al-Qaeda had more than two dozen “franchise-based” allies. The number of al-Qaeda militants was set at 20,000 in Syria alone, and they had 4,000 members in Yemen and about 7,000 in Somalia. The war was not over. Financing Al-Qaeda usually does not disburse funds for attacks, and very rarely makes wire transfers. In the 1990s, financing came partly from the personal wealth of Osama bin Laden. Other sources of income included the heroin trade and donations from supporters in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic Gulf states. A WikiLeaks-released 2009 internal US government cable stated that "terrorist funding emanating from Saudi Arabia remains a serious concern." Among the first pieces of evidence regarding Saudi Arabia's support for al-Qaeda was the so-called "Golden Chain", a list of early al-Qaeda funders seized during a 2002 raid in Sarajevo by Bosnian police. The hand-written list was validated by al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl, and included the names of both donors and beneficiaries. Osama bin-Laden's name appeared seven times among the beneficiaries, while 20 Saudi and Gulf-based businessmen and politicians were listed among the donors. Notable donors included Adel Batterjee, and Wael Hamza Julaidan. Batterjee was designated as a terror financier by the US Department of the Treasury in 2004, and Julaidan is recognized as one of al-Qaeda's founders. Documents seized during the 2002 Bosnia raid showed that al-Qaeda widely exploited charities to channel financial and material support to its operatives across the globe. Notably, this activity exploited the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the Muslim World League (MWL). The IIRO had ties with al-Qaeda associates worldwide, including al-Qaeda's deputy Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother worked for the IIRO in Albania and had actively recruited on behalf of al-Qaeda. The MWL was openly identified by al-Qaeda's leader as one of the three charities al-Qaeda primarily relied upon for funding sources. Allegations of Qatari support Several Qatari citizens have been accused of funding al-Qaeda. This includes Abd Al-Rahman al-Nuaimi, a Qatari citizen and a human-rights activist who founded the Swiss-based non-governmental organization (NGO) Alkarama. On December 18, 2013, the US Treasury designated Nuaimi as a terrorist for his activities supporting al-Qaeda. The US Treasury has said Nuaimi "has facilitated significant financial support to al-Qaeda in Iraq, and served as an interlocutor between al-Qaeda in Iraq and Qatar-based donors". Nuaimi was accused of overseeing a $2million monthly transfer to al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of his role as mediator between Iraq-based al-Qaeda senior officers and Qatari citizens. Nuaimi allegedly entertained relationships with Abu-Khalid al-Suri, al-Qaeda's top envoy in Syria, who processed a $600,000 transfer to al-Qaeda in 2013. Nuaimi is also known to be associated with Abd al-Wahhab Muhammad 'Abd al-Rahman al-Humayqani, a Yemeni politician and founding member of Alkarama, who was listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) by the US Treasury in 2013. The US authorities claimed that Humayqani exploited his role in Alkarama to fundraise on behalf of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A prominent figure in AQAP, Nuaimi was also reported to have facilitated the flow of funding to AQAP affiliates based in Yemen. Nuaimi was also accused of investing funds in the charity directed by Humayqani to ultimately fund AQAP. About ten months after being sanctioned by the US Treasury, Nuaimi was also restrained from doing business in the UK. Another Qatari citizen, Kalifa Mohammed Turki Subayi, was sanctioned by the US Treasury on June 5, 2008, for his activities as a "Gulf-based al-Qaeda financier". Subayi's name was added to the UN Security Council's Sanctions List in 2008 on charges of providing financial and material support to al-Qaeda senior leadership. Subayi allegedly moved al-Qaeda recruits to South Asia-based training camps. He also financially supported Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani national and senior al-Qaeda officer who is believed to be the mastermind behind the September 11 attack according to the September 11 Commission report. Qataris provided support to al-Qaeda through the country's largest NGO, the Qatar Charity. Al-Qaeda defector al-Fadl, who was a former member of Qatar Charity, testified in court that Abdullah Mohammed Yusef, who served as Qatar Charity's director, was affiliated to al-Qaeda and simultaneously to the National Islamic Front, a political group that gave al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden harbor in Sudan in the early 1990s. It was alleged that in 1993 Bin Laden was using Middle East based Sunni charities to channel financial support to al-Qaeda operatives overseas. The same documents also report Bin Laden's complaint that the failed assassination attempt of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had compromised the ability of al-Qaeda to exploit charities to support its operatives to the extent it was capable of before 1995. Qatar financed al-Qaeda's enterprises through al-Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. The funding was primarily channeled through kidnapping for ransom. The Consortium Against Terrorist Finance (CATF) reported that the Gulf country has funded al-Nusra since 2013. In 2017, Asharq Al-Awsat estimated that Qatar had disbursed $25million in support of al-Nusra through kidnapping for ransom. In addition, Qatar has launched fundraising campaigns on behalf of al-Nusra. Al-Nusra acknowledged a Qatar-sponsored campaign "as one of the preferred conduits for donations intended for the group". Strategy In the disagreement over whether Al-Qaeda's objectives are religious or political, Mark Sedgwick describes Al-Qaeda's strategy as political in the immediate term but with ultimate aims that are religious. On March 11, 2005, Al-Quds Al-Arabi published extracts from Saif al-Adel's document "Al Qaeda's Strategy to the Year 2020". Abdel Bari Atwan summarizes this strategy as comprising five stages to rid the Ummah from all forms of oppression: Provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack or string of attacks on US soil that results in massive civilian casualties. Incite local resistance to occupying forces. Expand the conflict to neighboring countries and engage the US and its allies in a long war of attrition. Convert al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against the US and countries allied with the US until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the July 7, 2005 London bombings. The US economy will finally collapse by the year 2020, under the strain of multiple engagements in numerous places. This will lead to a collapse in the worldwide economic system, and lead to global political instability. This will lead to a global jihad led by al-Qaeda, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will then be installed across the world. Atwan noted that, while the plan is unrealistic, "it is sobering to consider that this virtually describes the downfall of the Soviet Union." According to Fouad Hussein, a Jordanian journalist and author who has spent time in prison with Al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's strategy consists of seven phases and is similar to the plan described in Al Qaeda's Strategy to the year 2020. These phases include: "The Awakening." This phase was supposed to last from 2001 to 2003. The goal of the phase is to provoke the United States to attack a Muslim country by executing an attack that kills many civilians on US soil. "Opening Eyes." This phase was supposed to last from 2003 to 2006. The goal of this phase was to recruit young men to the cause and to transform the al-Qaeda group into a movement. Iraq was supposed to become the center of all operations with financial and military support for bases in other states. "Arising and Standing up", was supposed to last from 2007 to 2010. In this phase, al-Qaeda wanted to execute additional attacks and focus their attention on Syria. Hussein believed other countries in the Arabian Peninsula were also in danger. Al-Qaeda expected a steady growth among their ranks and territories due to the declining power of the regimes in the Arabian Peninsula. The main focus of attack in this phase was supposed to be on oil suppliers and cyberterrorism, targeting the US economy and military infrastructure. The declaration of an Islamic Caliphate, which was projected between 2013 and 2016. In this phase, al-Qaeda expected the resistance from Israel to be heavily reduced. The declaration of an "Islamic Army" and a "fight between believers and non-believers", also called "total confrontation". "Definitive Victory", projected to be completed by 2020. According to the seven-phase strategy, the war is projected to last less than two years. According to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute and Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute, the new model of al-Qaeda is to "socialize communities" and build a broad territorial base of operations with the support of local communities, also gaining income independent of the funding of sheiks. Name The English name of the organization is a simplified transliteration of the Arabic noun (), which means "the foundation" or "the base". The initial al- is the Arabic definite article "the", hence "the base". In Arabic, al-Qaeda has four syllables (). However, since two of the Arabic consonants in the name are not phones found in the English language, the common naturalized English pronunciations include , and . Al-Qaeda's name can also be transliterated as al-Qaida, al-Qa'ida, or el-Qaida. Bin Laden explained the origin of the term in a videotaped interview with Al Jazeera journalist Tayseer Alouni in October 2001: It has been argued that two documents seized from the Sarajevo office of the Benevolence International Foundation prove the name was not simply adopted by the mujahideen movement and that a group called al-Qaeda was established in August 1988. Both of these documents contain minutes of meetings held to establish a new military group, and contain the term "al-Qaeda". Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote that the word al-Qaeda should be translated as "the database", because it originally referred to the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen militants who were recruited and trained with CIA help to defeat the Russians. In April 2002, the group assumed the name Qa'idat al-Jihad ( ), which means "the base of Jihad". According to Diaa Rashwan, this was "apparently as a result of the merger of the overseas branch of Egypt's al-Jihad, which was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the groups Bin Laden brought under his control after his return to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s." Ideology The radical Islamist movement developed during the Islamic revival and the rise of the Islamist movement after the Iranian Revolution (1978-1979). Some have argued that the writings of Islamic author and thinker Sayyid Qutb inspired the al-Qaeda organization. In the 1950s and 1960s, Qutb preached that because of the lack of sharia law, the Muslim world was no longer Muslim, and had reverted to the pre-Islamic ignorance known as jahiliyyah. To restore Islam, Qutb argued that a vanguard of righteous Muslims was needed in order to establish "true Islamic states", implement sharia, and rid the Muslim world of any non-Muslim influences. In Qutb's view, the enemies of Islam included "world Jewry", which "plotted conspiracies" and opposed Islam. In the words of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a close college friend of bin Laden: Qutb also influenced Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri's uncle and maternal family patriarch, Mafouz Azzam, was Qutb's student, protégé, personal lawyer, and an executor of his estate. Azzam was one of the last people to see Qutb alive before his execution. Zawahiri paid homage to Qutb in his work Knights under the Prophet's Banner. Qutb argued that many Muslims were not true Muslims. Some Muslims, Qutb argued, were apostates. These alleged apostates included leaders of Muslim countries, since they failed to enforce sharia law. The Afghan jihad against the pro-Soviet government further developed the Salafist Jihadist movement which inspired Al-Qaeda. Theory of Islamic State Al Qaeda aims to establish an Islamic State in the Arab World, modelled after the Rashidun Caliphate, by initiating a global Jihad against the "International Jewish-Crusader Alliance" led by the United States, which it sees as the "external enemy" and against the secular governments in Muslim countries, that are described as "the apostate domestic enemy". Once foreign influences and the secular ruling authorities are removed from Muslim countries through Jihad; Al Qaeda supports elections to choose the rulers of its proposed Islamic states. This is to be done through representatives of leadership councils (Shura) that would ensure the implementation of Shari'a (Islamic law). However, it opposes elections that institute parliaments which empower Muslim and non-Muslim legislators to collaborate in making laws of their own choosing. In the second edition of his book Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, Ayman Al Zawahiri writes:"We demand... the government of the rightly guiding caliphate, which is established on the basis of the sovereignty of sharia and not on the whims of the majority. Its ummah chooses its rulers....If they deviate, the ummah brings them to account and removes them. The ummah participates in producing that government's decisions and determining its direction. ... [The caliphal state] commands the right and forbids the wrong and engages in jihad to liberate Muslim lands and to free all humanity from all oppression and ignorance." Religious compatibility Abdel Bari Atwan wrote that: Attacks on civilians Following its 9/11 attack and in response to its condemnation by Islamic scholars, Al-Qaeda provided a justification for the killing of non-combatants/civilians, entitled, "A Statement from Qaidat al-Jihad Regarding the Mandates of the Heroes and the Legality of the Operations in New York and Washington". According to a couple of critics, Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner, it provides "ample theological justification for killing civilians in almost any imaginable situation." Among these justifications are that America is leading the west in waging a War on Islam so that attacks on America are a defense of Islam and any treaties and agreements between Muslim majority states and Western countries that would be violated by attacks are null and void. According to the tract, several conditions allow for the killing of civilians including: retaliation for the American war on Islam which al-Qaeda alleges has targeted "Muslim women, children and elderly"; when it is too difficult to distinguish between non-combatants and combatants when attacking an enemy "stronghold" (hist) and/or non-combatants remain in enemy territory, killing them is allowed; those who assist the enemy "in deed, word, mind" are eligible for killing, and this includes the general population in democratic countries because civilians can vote in elections that bring enemies of Islam to power; the necessity of killing in the war to protect Islam and Muslims; the prophet Muhammad, when asked whether the Muslim fighters could use the catapult against the village of Taif, replied affirmatively, even though the enemy fighters were mixed with a civilian population; if the women, children and other protected groups serve as human shields for the enemy; if the enemy has broken a treaty, killing of civilians is permitted. History The Guardian in 2009 described five distinct phases in the development of al-Qaeda: its beginnings in the late 1980s, a "wilderness" period in 1990–1996, its "heyday" in 1996–2001, a network period from 2001 to 2005, and a period of fragmentation from 2005 to 2009. Jihad in Afghanistan The origins of al-Qaeda can be traced to the Soviet War in Afghanistan (December 1979February 1989). The United States viewed the conflict in Afghanistan in terms of the Cold War, with Marxists on one side and the native Afghan mujahideen on the other. This view led to a CIA program called Operation Cyclone, which channeled funds through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to the Afghan Mujahideen. The US government provided substantial financial support to the Afghan Islamic militants. Aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen leader and founder of the Hezb-e Islami, amounted to more than $600million. In addition to American aid, Hekmatyar was the recipient of Saudi aid. In the early 1990s, after the US had withdrawn support, Hekmatyar "worked closely" with bin Laden. At the same time, a growing number of Arab mujahideen joined the jihad against the Afghan Marxist regime, which was facilitated by international Muslim organizations, particularly the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK). In 1984, MAK was established in Peshawar, Pakistan, by bin Laden and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. MAK organized guest houses in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, and gathered supplies for the construction of paramilitary training camps to prepare foreign recruits for the Afghan war front. MAK was funded by the Saudi government as well as by individual Muslims including Saudi businessmen. Bin Laden also became a major financier of the mujahideen, spending his own money and using his connections to influence public opinion about the war. From 1986, MAK began to set up a network of recruiting offices in the US, the hub of which was the Al Kifah Refugee Center at the Farouq Mosque on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. Among notable figures at the Brooklyn center were "double agent" Ali Mohamed, whom FBI special agent Jack Cloonan called "bin Laden's first trainer", and "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman, a leading recruiter of mujahideen for Afghanistan. Azzam and bin Laden began to establish camps in Afghanistan in 1987. MAK and foreign mujahideen volunteers, or "Afghan Arabs", did not play a major role in the war. While over 250,000 Afghan mujahideen fought the Soviets and the communist Afghan government, it is estimated that there were never more than two thousand foreign mujahideen on the field at any one time. Nonetheless, foreign mujahideen volunteers came from 43 countries, and the total number who participated in the Afghan movement between 1982 and 1992 is reported to have been 35,000. Bin Laden played a central role in organizing training camps for the foreign Muslim volunteers. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Mohammad Najibullah's Communist Afghan government lasted for three more years, before it was overrun by elements of the mujahideen. Expanding operations Toward the end of the Soviet military mission in Afghanistan, some foreign mujahideen wanted to expand their operations to include Islamist struggles in other parts of the world, such as Palestine and Kashmir. A number of overlapping and interrelated organizations were formed, to further those aspirations. One of these was the organization that would eventually be called al-Qaeda. Research suggests that al-Qaeda was formed on August 11, 1988, when a meeting in Afghanistan between leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abdullah Azzam, and bin Laden took place. An agreement was reached to link 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. Notes indicate al-Qaeda was a formal group by August 20, 1988. A list of requirements for membership itemized the following: listening ability, good manners, obedience, and making a pledge (bayat ) to follow one's superiors. In his memoir, bin Laden's former bodyguard, Nasser al-Bahri, gives the only publicly available description of the ritual of giving bayat when he swore his allegiance to the al-Qaeda chief. According to Wright, the group's real name was not used in public pronouncements because "its existence was still a closely held secret." After Azzam was assassinated in 1989 and MAK broke up, significant numbers of MAK followers joined bin Laden's new organization. In November 1989, Ali Mohamed, a former special forces sergeant stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, left military service and moved to California. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and became "deeply involved with bin Laden's plans." In 1991, Ali Mohammed is said to have helped orchestrate bin Laden's relocation to Sudan. Gulf War and the start of US enmity Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 had put the Kingdom and its ruling House of Saud at risk. The world's most valuable oil fields were within striking distance of Iraqi forces in Kuwait, and Saddam's call to Pan-Arabism could potentially rally internal dissent. In the face of a seemingly massive Iraqi military presence, Saudi Arabia's own forces were outnumbered. Bin Laden offered the services of his mujahideen to King Fahd to protect Saudi Arabia from the Iraqi army. The Saudi monarch refused bin Laden's offer, opting instead to allow US and allied forces to deploy troops into Saudi territory. The deployment angered bin Laden, as he believed the presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques" (Mecca and Medina) profaned sacred soil. After speaking publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops, he was banished and forced to live in exile in Sudan. Sudan From around 1992 to 1996, al-Qaeda and bin Laden based themselves in Sudan at the invitation of Islamist theoretician Hassan al-Turabi. The move followed an Islamist coup d'état in Sudan, led by Colonel Omar al-Bashir, who professed a commitment to reordering Muslim political values. During this time, bin Laden assisted the Sudanese government, bought or set up various business enterprises, and established training camps. A key turning point for bin Laden occurred in 1993 when Saudi Arabia gave support for the Oslo Accords, which set a path for peace between Israel and Palestinians. Due to bin Laden's continuous verbal assault on King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Fahd sent an emissary to Sudan on March 5, 1994, demanding bin Laden's passport. Bin Laden's Saudi citizenship was also revoked. His family was persuaded to cut off his stipend, $7million a year, and his Saudi assets were frozen. His family publicly disowned him. There is controversy as to what extent bin Laden continued to garner support from members afterwards. In 1993, a young schoolgirl was killed in an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Egyptian prime minister, Atef Sedki. Egyptian public opinion turned against Islamist bombings, and the police arrested 280 of al-Jihad's members and executed 6. In June 1995, an attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Mubarak led to the expulsion of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), and in May 1996, of bin Laden from Sudan. According to Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, the Sudanese government offered the Clinton Administration numerous opportunities to arrest bin Laden. Ijaz's claims appeared in numerous op-ed pieces, including one in the Los Angeles Times and one in The Washington Post co-written with former Ambassador to Sudan Timothy M. Carney. Similar allegations have been made by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose, and Richard Miniter, author of Losing bin Laden, in a November 2003 interview with World. Several sources dispute Ijaz's claim, including the 9/11 Commission, which concluded in part: Refuge in Afghanistan After the fall of the Afghan communist regime in 1992, Afghanistan was effectively ungoverned for four years and plagued by constant infighting between various mujahideen groups. This situation allowed the Taliban to organize. The Taliban also garnered support from graduates of Islamic schools, which are called madrassa. According to Ahmed Rashid, five leaders of the Taliban were graduates of Darul Uloom Haqqania, a madrassa in the small town of Akora Khattak. The town is situated near Peshawar in Pakistan, but the school is largely attended by Afghan refugees. This institution reflected Salafi beliefs in its teachings, and much of its funding came from private donations from wealthy Arabs. Four of the Taliban's leaders attended a similarly funded and influenced madrassa in Kandahar. Bin Laden's contacts were laundering donations to these schools, and Islamic banks were used to transfer money to an "array" of charities which served as front groups for al-Qaeda. Many of the mujahideen who later joined the Taliban fought alongside Afghan warlord Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi's Harkat i Inqilabi group at the time of the Russian invasion. This group also enjoyed the loyalty of most Afghan Arab fighters. The continuing lawlessness enabled the growing and well-disciplined Taliban to expand their control over territory in Afghanistan, and it came to establish an enclave which it called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. In 1994, it captured the regional center of Kandahar, and after making rapid territorial gains thereafter, the Taliban captured the capital city Kabul in September 1996. In 1996, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provided a perfect staging ground for al-Qaeda. While not officially working together, Al-Qaeda enjoyed the Taliban's protection and supported the regime in such a strong symbiotic relationship that many Western observers dubbed the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as, "the world's first terrorist-sponsored state." However, at this time, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. In response to the 1998 United States embassy bombings, an al-Qaeda base in Khost Province was attacked by the United States during Operation Infinite Reach. While in Afghanistan, the Taliban government tasked al-Qaeda with the training of Brigade 055, an elite element of the Taliban's army. The Brigade mostly consisted of foreign fighters, veterans from the Soviet Invasion, and adherents to the ideology of the mujahideen. In November 2001, as Operation Enduring Freedom had toppled the Taliban government, many Brigade 055 fighters were captured or killed, and those who survived were thought to have escaped into Pakistan along with bin Laden. By the end of 2008, some sources reported that the Taliban had severed any remaining ties with al-Qaeda, however, there is reason to doubt this. According to senior US military intelligence officials, there were fewer than 100 members of al-Qaeda remaining in Afghanistan in 2009. Al Qaeda chief, Asim Omar was killed in Afghanistan's Musa Qala district after a joint US–Afghanistan commando airstrike on September 23, Afghan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) confirmed in October 2019. In a report released May 27, 2020, the United Nations' Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team stated that the Taliban-Al Qaeda relations remain strong to this day and additionally, Al Qaeda itself has admitted that it operates inside Afghanistan. On July 26, 2020, a United Nations report stated that the Al Qaeda group is still active in twelve provinces in Afghanistan and its leader al-Zawahiri is still based in the country. and that the UN Monitoring Team estimated that the total number of Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan were "between 400 and 600". Call for global Salafi jihadism In 1994, the Salafi groups waging Salafi jihadism in Bosnia entered into decline, and groups such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad began to drift away from the Salafi cause in Europe. Al-Qaeda stepped in and assumed control of around 80% of non-state armed cells in Bosnia in late 1995. At the same time, al-Qaeda ideologues instructed the network's recruiters to look for Jihadi international Muslims who believed that extremist-jihad must be fought on a global level. Al-Qaeda also sought to open the "offensive phase" of the global Salafi jihad. Bosnian Islamists in 2006 called for "solidarity with Islamic causes around the world", supporting the insurgents in Kashmir and Iraq as well as the groups fighting for a Palestinian state. Fatwas In 1996, al-Qaeda announced its jihad to expel foreign troops and interests from what they considered Islamic lands. Bin Laden issued a fatwa, which amounted to a public declaration of war against the US and its allies, and began to refocus al-Qaeda's resources on large-scale, propagandist strikes. On February 23, 1998, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, along with three other Islamist leaders, co-signed and issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Under the banner of the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders, they declared: Neither bin Laden nor al-Zawahiri possessed the traditional Islamic scholarly qualifications to issue a fatwa. However, they rejected the authority of the contemporary ulema (which they saw as the paid servants of jahiliyya rulers), and took it upon themselves. Iraq Al-Qaeda has launched attacks against the Iraqi Shia majority in an attempt to incite sectarian violence. Al-Zarqawi purportedly declared an all-out war on Shiites while claiming responsibility for Shiite mosque bombings. The same month, a statement claiming to be from Al-Qaeda in Iraq was rejected as a "fake". In a December 2007 video, al-Zawahiri defended the Islamic State in Iraq, but distanced himself from the attacks against civilians, which he deemed to be perpetrated by "hypocrites and traitors existing among the ranks". US and Iraqi officials accused Al-Qaeda in Iraq of trying to slide Iraq into a full-scale civil war between Iraq's Shiite population and Sunni Arabs. This was done through an orchestrated campaign of civilian massacres and a number of provocative attacks against high-profile religious targets. With attacks including the 2003 Imam Ali Mosque bombing, the 2004 Day of Ashura and Karbala and Najaf bombings, the 2006 first al-Askari Mosque bombing in Samarra, the deadly single-day series of bombings in which at least 215 people were killed in Baghdad's Shiite district of Sadr City, and the second al-Askari bombing in 2007, Al-Qaeda in Iraq provoked Shiite militias to unleash a wave of retaliatory attacks, resulting in death squad-style killings and further sectarian violence which escalated in 2006. In 2008, sectarian bombings blamed on al-Qaeda in Iraq killed at least 42 people at the Imam Husayn Shrine in Karbala in March, and at least 51 people at a bus stop in Baghdad in June. In February 2014, after a prolonged dispute with al-Qaeda in Iraq's successor organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), al-Qaeda publicly announced it was cutting all ties with the group, reportedly for its brutality and "notorious intractability". Somalia and Yemen In Somalia, al-Qaeda agents had been collaborating closely with its Somali wing, which was created from the al-Shabaab group. In February 2012, al-Shabaab officially joined al-Qaeda, declaring loyalty in a video. Somalian al-Qaeda recruited children for suicide-bomber training and recruited young people to participate in militant actions against Americans. The percentage of attacks in the First World originating from the Afghanistan–Pakistan (AfPak) border declined starting in 2007, as al-Qaeda shifted to Somalia and Yemen. While al-Qaeda leaders were hiding in the tribal areas along the AfPak border, middle-tier leaders heightened activity in Somalia and Yemen. In January 2009, al-Qaeda's division in Saudi Arabia merged with its Yemeni wing to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Centered in Yemen, the group takes advantage of the country's poor economy, demography and domestic security. In August 2009, the group made an assassination attempt against a member of the Saudi royal family. President Obama asked Ali Abdullah Saleh to ensure closer cooperation with the US in the struggle against the growing activity of al-Qaeda in Yemen, and promised to send additional aid. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drew US attention from Somalia and Yemen. In December 2011, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the US operations against al-Qaeda "are now concentrating on key groups in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa." Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the 2009 bombing attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The AQAP declared the Al-Qaeda Emirate in Yemen on March 31, 2011, after capturing the most of the Abyan Governorate. As the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen escalated in July 2015, fifty civilians had been killed and twenty million needed aid. In February 2016, al-Qaeda forces and Saudi Arabian-led coalition forces were both seen fighting Houthi rebels in the same battle. In August 2018, Al Jazeera reported that "A military coalition battling Houthi rebels secured secret deals with al-Qaeda in Yemen and recruited hundreds of the group's fighters.... Key figures in the deal-making said the United States was aware of the arrangements and held off on drone attacks against the armed group, which was created by Osama bin Laden in 1988." United States operations In December 1998, the Director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing to launch attacks in the United States, and the group was training personnel to hijack aircraft. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacked the United States, hijacking four airliners within the country and deliberately crashing two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The third plane crashed into the western side of the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane was crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In total, the attackers killed 2,977 victims and injured more than 6,000 others. US officials noted that Anwar al-Awlaki had considerable reach within the US. A former FBI agent identified Awlaki as a known "senior recruiter for al-Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. Awlaki's sermons in the US were attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers, and accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. US intelligence intercepted emails from Hasan to Awlaki between December 2008 and early 2009. On his website, Awlaki has praised Hasan's actions in the Fort Hood shooting. An unnamed official claimed there was good reason to believe Awlaki "has been involved in very serious terrorist activities since leaving the US [in 2002], including plotting attacks against America and our allies." US President Barack Obama approved the targeted killing of al-Awlaki by April 2010, making al-Awlaki the first US citizen ever placed on the CIA target list. That required the consent of the US National Security Council, and officials argued that the attack was appropriate because the individual posed an imminent danger to national security. In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, who pleaded guilty to the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators he was "inspired by" al-Awlaki, and sources said Shahzad had made contact with al-Awlaki over the Internet. Representative Jane Harman called him "terrorist number one", and Investor's Business Daily called him "the world's most dangerous man". In July 2010, the US Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and the UN added him to its list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda. In August 2010, al-Awlaki's father initiated a lawsuit against the US government with the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging its order to kill al-Awlaki. In October 2010, US and UK officials linked al-Awlaki to the 2010 cargo plane bomb plot. In September 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a targeted killing drone attack in Yemen. On March 16, 2012, it was reported that Osama bin Laden plotted to kill US President Barack Obama. Killing of Osama bin Laden On May 1, 2011, US President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by "a small team of Americans" acting under direct orders, in a covert operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The action took place north of Islamabad. According to US officials, a team of 20–25 US Navy SEALs under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command stormed bin Laden's compound with two helicopters. Bin Laden and those with him were killed during a firefight in which US forces experienced no casualties. According to one US official the attack was carried out without the knowledge or consent of the Pakistani authorities. In Pakistan some people were reported to be shocked at the unauthorized incursion by US armed forces. The site is a few miles from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul. In his broadcast announcement President Obama said that US forces "took care to avoid civilian casualties". Details soon emerged that three men and a woman were killed along with bin Laden, the woman being killed when she was "used as a shield by a male combatant". DNA from bin Laden's body, compared with DNA samples on record from his dead sister, confirmed bin Laden's identity. The body was recovered by the US military and was in its custody until, according to one US official, his body was buried at sea according to Islamic traditions. One US official said that "finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist would have been difficult." US State Department issued a "Worldwide caution" for Americans following bin Laden's death and US diplomatic facilities everywhere were placed on high alert, a senior US official said. Crowds gathered outside the White House and in New York City's Times Square to celebrate bin Laden's death. Syria In 2003, President Bashar al-Assad revealed in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper that he doubted al-Qaeda even existed. He was quoted as saying, "Is there really an entity called al-Qaeda? Was it in Afghanistan? Does it exist now?" He went on further to remark about bin Laden, commenting "[he] cannot talk on the phone or use the Internet, but he can direct communications to the four corners of the world? This is illogical." Following the mass protests that took place in 2011, which demanded the resignation of al-Assad, al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and Sunni sympathizers soon began to constitute an effective fighting force against al-Assad. Before the Syrian Civil War, al-Qaeda's presence in Syria was negligible, but its growth thereafter was rapid. Groups such as the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have recruited many foreign Mujahideen to train and fight in what has gradually become a highly sectarian war. Ideologically, the Syrian Civil War has served the interests of al-Qaeda as it pits a mainly Sunni opposition against a secular government. Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Sunni militant groups have invested heavily in the civil conflict, at times actively backing and supporting the mainstream Syrian Opposition. On February 2, 2014, al-Qaeda distanced itself from ISIS and its actions in Syria; however, during 2014–15, ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front were still able to occasionally cooperate in their fight against the Syrian government. Al-Nusra (backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey as part of the Army of Conquest during 2015–2017) launched many attacks and bombings, mostly against targets affiliated with or supportive of the Syrian government. From October 2015, Russian air strikes targeted positions held by al-Nusra Front, as well as other Islamist and non-Islamist rebels, while the US also targeted al-Nusra with airstrikes. In early 2016, a leading ISIL ideologue described al-Qaeda as the "Jews of jihad". India In September 2014, al-Zawahiri announced al-Qaeda was establishing a front in India to "wage jihad against its enemies, to liberate its land, to restore its sovereignty, and to revive its Caliphate." Al-Zawahiri nominated India as a beachhead for regional jihad taking in neighboring countries such as Myanmar and Bangladesh. The motivation for the video was questioned, as it appeared the militant group was struggling to remain relevant in light of the emerging prominence of ISIS. The new wing was to be known as "Qaedat al-Jihad fi'shibhi al-qarrat al-Hindiya" or al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). Leaders of several Indian Muslim organizations rejected al-Zawahiri's pronouncement, saying they could see no good coming from it, and viewed it as a threat to Muslim youth in the country. In 2014, Zee News reported that Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council official for South Asia, had accused the Pakistani military intelligence and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of organising and assisting Al-Qaeda to organise in India, that Pakistan ought to be warned that it will be placed on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, and that "Zawahiri made the tape in his hideout in Pakistan, no doubt, and many Indians suspect the ISI is helping to protect him." In September 2021, after the success of 2021 Taliban offensive, al-Qaeda congratulated Taliban and called for liberation of Kashmir from the “clutches of the enemies of Islam". Attacks Al-Qaeda has carried out a total of six major attacks, four of them in its jihad against America. In each case the leadership planned the attack years in advance, arranging for the shipment of weapons and explosives and using its businesses to provide operatives with safehouses and false identities. 1991 To prevent the former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah from coming back from exile and possibly becoming head of a new government, bin Laden instructed a Portuguese convert to Islam, Paulo Jose de Almeida Santos, to assassinate Zahir Shah. On November 4, 1991, Santos entered the king’s villa in Rome posing as a journalist and tried to stab him with a dagger. A tin of cigarillos in the king’s breast pocket deflected the blade and saved Zahir Shah’s life. Santos was apprehended and jailed for 10 years in Italy. 1992 On December 29, 1992, al-Qaeda launched the 1992 Yemen hotel bombings. Two bombs were detonated in Aden, Yemen. The first target was the Movenpick Hotel and the second was the parking lot of the Goldmohur Hotel. The bombings were an attempt to eliminate American soldiers on their way to Somalia to take part in the international famine relief effort, Operation Restore Hope. Internally, al-Qaeda considered the bombing a victory that frightened the Americans away, but in the US, the attack was barely noticed. No American soldiers were killed because no soldiers were staying in the hotel which was bombed. However, an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker were killed in the bombing. Seven others, mostly Yemenis, were severely injured. Two fatwas are said to have been appointed by al-Qaeda's members, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, to justify the killings according to Islamic law. Salim referred to a famous fatwa appointed by Ibn Taymiyyah, a 13th-century scholar much admired by Wahhabis, which sanctioned resistance by any means during the Mongol invasions. Late 1990s In 1996, bin Laden personally engineered a plot to assassinate United States President Bill Clinton while the president was in Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. However, intelligence agents intercepted a message before the motorcade was to leave, and alerted the US Secret Service. Agents later discovered a bomb planted under a bridge. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in East Africa, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans. In retaliation, a barrage of cruise missiles launched by the US military devastated an al-Qaeda base in Khost, Afghanistan. The network's capacity was unharmed. In late 1999 and 2000, Al-Qaeda planned attacks to coincide with the millennium, masterminded by Abu Zubaydah and involving Abu Qatada, which would include the bombing of Christian holy sites in Jordan, the bombing of Los Angeles International Airport by Ahmed Ressam, and the bombing of the . On October 12, 2000, al-Qaeda militants in Yemen bombed the missile destroyer USS Cole in a suicide attack, killing 17 US servicemen and damaging the vessel while it lay offshore. Inspired by the success of such a brazen attack, al-Qaeda's command core began to prepare for an attack on the US itself. September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks on America by al-Qaeda killed 2,977 people2,507 civilians, 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers, and 55 military personnel. Two commercial airliners were deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, originally intended to target either the United States Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was also the deadliest foreign attack on American soil since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The attacks were conducted by al-Qaeda, acting in accord with the 1998 fatwa issued against the US and its allies by persons under the command of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and others. Evidence points to suicide squads led by al-Qaeda military commander Mohamed Atta as the culprits of the attacks, with bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Hambali as the key planners and part of the political and military command. Messages issued by bin Laden after September 11, 2001, praised the attacks, and explained their motivation while denying any involvement. Bin Laden legitimized the attacks by identifying grievances felt by both mainstream and Islamist Muslims, such as the general perception that the US was actively oppressing Muslims. Bin Laden asserted that America was massacring Muslims in "Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq" and Muslims should retain the "right to attack in reprisal". He also claimed the 9/11 attacks were not targeted at people, but "America's icons of military and economic power", despite the fact he planned to attack in the morning when most of the people in the intended targets were present and thus generating the maximum number of human casualties. Evidence later came to light that the original targets for the attack may have been nuclear power stations on the US East Coast. The targets were later altered by al-Qaeda, as it was feared that such an attack "might get out of hand". Designation as a terrorist group Al-Qaeda is deemed a designated terrorist group by the following countries and international organizations: designated Al-Qaeda's Turkish branch United Nations Security Council War on terror In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US government responded, and began to prepare its armed forces to overthrow the Taliban, which it believed was harboring al-Qaeda. The US offered Taliban leader Mullah Omar a chance to surrender bin Laden and his top associates. The first forces to be inserted into Afghanistan were paramilitary officers from the CIA's elite Special Activities Division (SAD). The Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US would provide evidence of bin Laden's complicity in the attacks. US President George W. Bush responded by saying: "We know he's guilty. Turn him over", and British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the Taliban regime: "Surrender bin Laden, or surrender power." Soon thereafter the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, and together with the Afghan Northern Alliance removed the Taliban government as part of the war in Afghanistan. As a result of the US special forces and air support for the Northern Alliance ground forces, a number of Taliban and al-Qaeda training camps were destroyed, and much of the operating structure of al-Qaeda is believed to have been disrupted. After being driven from their key positions in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan, many al-Qaeda fighters tried to regroup in the rugged Gardez region of the nation. By early 2002, al-Qaeda had been dealt a serious blow to its operational capacity, and the Afghan invasion appeared to be a success. Nevertheless, a significant Taliban insurgency remained in Afghanistan. Debate continued regarding the nature of al-Qaeda's role in the 9/11 attacks. The US State Department released a videotape showing bin Laden speaking with a small group of associates somewhere in Afghanistan shortly before the Taliban was removed from power. Although its authenticity has been questioned by a couple of people, the tape definitively implicates bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks. The tape was aired on many television channels, with an accompanying English translation provided by the US Defense Department. In September 2004, the 9/11 Commission officially concluded that the attacks were conceived and implemented by al-Qaeda operatives. In October 2004, bin Laden appeared to claim responsibility for the attacks in a videotape released through Al Jazeera, saying he was inspired by Israeli attacks on high-rises in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: "As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children." By the end of 2004, the US government proclaimed that two-thirds of the most senior al-Qaeda figures from 2001 had been captured and interrogated by the CIA: Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003; and Saif al Islam el Masry in 2004. Mohammed Atef and several others were killed. The West was criticized for not being able to handle Al-Qaida despite a decade of the war. Activities Africa Al-Qaeda involvement in Africa has included a number of bombing attacks in North Africa, while supporting parties in civil wars in Eritrea and Somalia. From 1991 to 1996, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were based in Sudan. Islamist rebels in the Sahara calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have stepped up their violence in recent years. French officials say the rebels have no real links to the al-Qaeda leadership, but this has been disputed. It seems likely that bin Laden approved the group's name in late 2006, and the rebels "took on the al Qaeda franchise label", almost a year before the violence began to escalate. In Mali, the Ansar Dine faction was also reported as an ally of al-Qaeda in 2013. The Ansar al Dine faction aligned themselves with the AQIM. In 2011, Al-Qaeda's North African wing condemned Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and declared support for the Anti-Gaddafi rebels. Following the Libyan Civil War, the removal of Gaddafi and the ensuing period of post-civil war violence in Libya, various Islamist militant groups affiliated with al-Qaeda were able to expand their operations in the region. The 2012 Benghazi attack, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, is suspected of having been carried out by various Jihadist networks, such as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia and several other Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. The capture of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, a senior al-Qaeda operative wanted by the United States for his involvement in the 1998 United States embassy bombings, on October 5, 2013, by US Navy Seals, FBI and CIA agents illustrates the importance the US and other Western allies have placed on North Africa. Europe Prior to the September 11 attacks, al-Qaeda was present in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its members were mostly veterans of the El Mudžahid detachment of the Bosnian Muslim Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Three al-Qaeda operatives carried out the Mostar car bombing in 1997. The operatives were closely linked to and financed by the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina founded by then-prince King Salman of Saudi Arabia. Before the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, westerners who had been recruits at al-Qaeda training camps were sought after by al-Qaeda's military wing. Language skills and knowledge of Western culture were generally found among recruits from Europe, such was the case with Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian national studying in Germany at the time of his training, and other members of the Hamburg Cell. Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atef would later designate Atta as the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Following the attacks, Western intelligence agencies determined that al-Qaeda cells operating in Europe had aided the hijackers with financing and communications with the central leadership based in Afghanistan. In 2003, Islamists carried out a series of bombings in Istanbul killing fifty-seven people and injuring seven hundred. Seventy-four people were charged by the Turkish authorities. Some had previously met bin Laden, and though they specifically declined to pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda they asked for its blessing and help. In 2009, three Londoners, Tanvir Hussain, Assad Sarwar and Ahmed Abdullah Ali, were convicted of conspiring to detonate bombs disguised as soft drinks on seven airplanes bound for Canada and the US The MI5 investigation regarding the plot involved more than a year of surveillance work conducted by over two hundred officers. British and US officials said the plotunlike many similar homegrown European Islamic militant plotswas directly linked to al-Qaeda and guided by senior al-Qaeda members in Pakistan. In 2012, Russian Intelligence indicated that al-Qaeda had given a call for "forest jihad" and has been starting massive forest fires as part of a strategy of "thousand cuts". Arab world Following Yemeni unification in 1990, Wahhabi networks began moving missionaries into the country. Although it is unlikely bin Laden or Saudi al-Qaeda were directly involved, the personal connections they made would be established over the next decade and used in the USS Cole bombing. Concerns grew over Al Qaeda's group in Yemen. In Iraq, al-Qaeda forces loosely associated with the leadership were embedded in the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group commanded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Specializing in suicide operations, they have been a "key driver" of the Sunni insurgency. Although they played a small part in the overall insurgency, between 30% and 42% of all suicide bombings which took place in the early years were claimed by Zarqawi's group. Reports have indicated that oversights such as the failure to control access to the Qa'qaa munitions factory in Yusufiyah have allowed large quantities of munitions to fall into the hands of al-Qaida. In November 2010, the militant group Islamic State of Iraq, which is linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq, threatened to "exterminate all Iraqi Christians". Al-Qaeda did not begin training Palestinians until the late 1990s. Large groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have rejected an alliance with al-Qaeda, fearing that al-Qaeda will co-opt their cells. This may have changed recently. The Israeli security and intelligence services believe al-Qaeda has managed to infiltrate operatives from the Occupied Territories into Israel, and is waiting for an opportunity to attack. , Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are openly supporting the Army of Conquest, an umbrella rebel group fighting in the Syrian Civil War against the Syrian government that reportedly includes an al-Qaeda linked al-Nusra Front and another Salafi coalition known as Ahrar al-Sham. Kashmir Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri consider India to be a part of an alleged Crusader-Zionist-Hindu conspiracy against the Islamic world. According to a 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, bin Laden was involved in training militants for Jihad in Kashmir while living in Sudan in the early 1990s. By 2001, Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had become a part of the al-Qaeda coalition. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), al-Qaeda was thought to have established bases in Pakistan administered Kashmir (in Azad Kashmir, and to some extent in Gilgit–Baltistan) during the 1999 Kargil War and continued to operate there with tacit approval of Pakistan's Intelligence services. Many of the militants active in Kashmir were trained in the same madrasahs as Taliban and al-Qaeda. Fazlur Rehman Khalil of Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen was a signatory of al-Qaeda's 1998 declaration of Jihad against America and its allies. In a 'Letter to American People' (2002), bin Laden wrote that one of the reasons he was fighting America was because of its support to India on the Kashmir issue. In November 2001, Kathmandu airport went on high alert after threats that bin Laden planned to hijack a plane and crash it into a target in New Delhi. In 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on a trip to Delhi, suggested that al-Qaeda was active in Kashmir though he did not have any evidence. Rumsfeld proposed hi-tech ground sensors along the Line of Control to prevent militants from infiltrating into Indian-administered Kashmir. An investigation in 2002 found evidence that al-Qaeda and its affiliates were prospering in Pakistan-administered Kashmir with tacit approval of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. In 2002, a special team of Special Air Service and Delta Force was sent into Indian-Administered Kashmir to hunt for bin Laden after receiving reports that he was being sheltered by Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which had been responsible for kidnapping western tourists in Kashmir in 1995. Britain's highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative Rangzieb Ahmed had previously fought in Kashmir with the group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and spent time in Indian prison after being captured in Kashmir. US officials believe al-Qaeda was helping organize attacks in Kashmir in order to provoke conflict between India and Pakistan. Their strategy was to force Pakistan to move its troops to the border with India, thereby relieving pressure on al-Qaeda elements hiding in northwestern Pakistan. In 2006 al-Qaeda claimed they had established a wing in Kashmir. However Indian Army General H. S. Panag argued that the army had ruled out the presence of al-Qaeda in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Panag also said al-Qaeda had strong ties with Kashmiri militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed based in Pakistan. It has been noted that Waziristan has become a battlefield for Kashmiri militants fighting NATO in support of al-Qaeda and Taliban. Dhiren Barot, who wrote the Army of Madinah in Kashmir and was an al-Qaeda operative convicted for involvement in the 2004 financial buildings plot, had received training in weapons and explosives at a militant training camp in Kashmir. Maulana Masood Azhar, the founder of Kashmiri group Jaish-e-Mohammed, is believed to have met bin Laden several times and received funding from him. In 2002, Jaish-e-Mohammed organized the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl in an operation run in conjunction with al-Qaeda and funded by bin Laden. According to American counter-terrorism expert Bruce Riedel, al-Qaeda and Taliban were closely involved in the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 to Kandahar which led to the release of Maulana Masood Azhar and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh from an Indian prison. This hijacking, Riedel said, was rightly described by then Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh as a 'dress rehearsal' for September 11 attacks. Bin Laden personally welcomed Azhar and threw a lavish party in his honor after his release. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had been in prison for his role in the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists in India, went on to murder Daniel Pearl and was sentenced to death in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf, who was one of the accused in 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, was related to Maulana Masood Azhar by marriage. Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri militant group which is thought to be behind 2008 Mumbai attacks, is also known to have strong ties to senior al-Qaeda leaders living in Pakistan. In late 2002, top al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was arrested while being sheltered by Lashkar-e-Taiba in a safe house in Faisalabad. The FBI believes al-Qaeda and Lashkar have been 'intertwined' for a long time while the CIA has said that al-Qaeda funds Lashkar-e-Taiba. Jean-Louis Bruguière told Reuters in 2009 that "Lashkar-e-Taiba is no longer a Pakistani movement with only a Kashmir political or military agenda. Lashkar-e-Taiba is a member of al-Qaeda." In a video released in 2008, American-born senior al-Qaeda operative Adam Yahiye Gadahn said that "victory in Kashmir has been delayed for years; it is the liberation of the jihad there from this interference which, Allah willing, will be the first step towards victory over the Hindu occupiers of that Islam land." In September 2009, a US drone strike reportedly killed Ilyas Kashmiri who was the chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, a Kashmiri militant group associated with al-Qaeda. Kashmiri was described by Bruce Riedel as a 'prominent' al-Qaeda member while others have described him as head of military operations for al-Qaeda. Kashmiri was also charged by the US in a plot against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper which was at the center of Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. US officials also believe that Kashmiri was involved in the Camp Chapman attack against the CIA. In January 2010, Indian authorities notified Britain of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack an Indian airlines or Air India plane and crash it into a British city. This information was uncovered from interrogation of Amjad Khwaja, an operative of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who had been arrested in India. In January 2010, US Defense secretary Robert Gates, while on a visit to Pakistan, said that al-Qaeda was seeking to destabilize the region and planning to provoke a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Internet Al-Qaeda and its successors have migrated online to escape detection in an atmosphere of increased international vigilance. The group's use of the Internet has grown more sophisticated, with online activities that include financing, recruitment, networking, mobilization, publicity, and information dissemination, gathering and sharing. Abu Ayyub al-Masri's al-Qaeda movement in Iraq regularly releases short videos glorifying the activity of jihadist suicide bombers. In addition, both before and after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq), the umbrella organization to which al-Qaeda in Iraq belongs, the Mujahideen Shura Council, has a regular presence on the Web. The range of multimedia content includes guerrilla training clips, stills of victims about to be murdered, testimonials of suicide bombers, and videos that show participation in jihad through stylized portraits of mosques and musical scores. A website associated with al-Qaeda posted a video of captured American entrepreneur Nick Berg being decapitated in Iraq. Other decapitation videos and pictures, including those of Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, and Daniel Pearl, were first posted on jihadist websites. In December 2004 an audio message claiming to be from bin Laden was posted directly to a website, rather than sending a copy to al Jazeera as he had done in the past. Al-Qaeda turned to the Internet for release of its videos in order to be certain they would be available unedited, rather than risk the possibility of al Jazeera editing out anything critical of the Saudi royal family. Alneda.com and Jehad.net were perhaps the most significant al-Qaeda websites. Alneda was initially taken down by American Jon Messner, but the operators resisted by shifting the site to various servers and strategically shifting content. The US government charged a British information technology specialist, Babar Ahmad, with terrorist offences related to his operating a network of English-language al-Qaeda websites, such as Azzam.com. He was convicted and sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison. Online communications In 2007, al-Qaeda released Mujahedeen Secrets, encryption software used for online and cellular communications. A later version, Mujahideen Secrets 2, was released in 2008. Aviation network Al-Qaeda is believed to be operating a clandestine aviation network including "several Boeing 727 aircraft", turboprops and executive jets, according to a 2010 Reuters story. Based on a US Department of Homeland Security report, the story said al-Qaeda is possibly using aircraft to transport drugs and weapons from South America to various unstable countries in West Africa. A Boeing 727 can carry up to ten tons of cargo. The drugs eventually are smuggled to Europe for distribution and sale, and the weapons are used in conflicts in Africa and possibly elsewhere. Gunmen with links to al-Qaeda have been increasingly kidnapping Europeans for ransom. The profits from the drug and weapon sales, and kidnappings can, in turn, fund more militant activities. Involvement in military conflicts The following is a list of military conflicts in which Al-Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken part militarily. Alleged CIA involvement Experts debate the notion al-Qaeda attacks were an indirect result from the American CIA's Operation Cyclone program to help the Afghan mujahideen. Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." Munir Akram, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations from 2002 to 2008, wrote in a letter published in The New York Times on January 19, 2008: CNN journalist Peter Bergen, Pakistani ISI Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, and CIA operatives involved in the Afghan program, such as Vincent Cannistraro, deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the foreign mujahideen or bin Laden, or that the they armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them. In his 2004 book Ghost Wars, Steve Coll writes that the CIA had contemplated providing direct support to the foreign mujahideen, but that the idea never moved beyond discussions. Bergen and others argue that there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land since there were a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight. Bergen further argues that foreign mujahideen had no need for American funds since they received several million dollars per year from internal sources. Lastly, he argues that Americans could not have trained the foreign mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of them to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan, and the Afghan Arabs were almost invariably militant Islamists reflexively hostile to Westerners whether or not the Westerners were helping the Muslim Afghans. According to Bergen, who conducted the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997: the idea that "the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden... [is] a folk myth. There's no evidence of this... Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently... The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him." Jason Burke also wrote: Broader influence Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, was inspired by Al-Qaeda, calling it "the most successful revolutionary movement in the world." While admitting different aims, he sought to "create a European version of Al-Qaida." The appropriate response to offshoots is a subject of debate. A journalist reported in 2012 that a senior US military planner had asked: "Should we resort to drones and Special Operations raids every time some group raises the black banner of al Qaeda? How long can we continue to chase offshoots of offshoots around the world?" Criticism Islamic extremism dates back to the early history of Islam with the emergence of the Kharijites in the 7th century CE. From their essentially political position, the Kharijites developed extreme doctrines that set them apart from both mainstream Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims. The original schism between Kharijites, Sunnis, and Shiʿas among Muslims was disputed over the political and religious succession to the guidance of the Muslim community (Ummah) after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Shiʿas believe Ali ibn Abi Talib is the true successor to Muhammad, while Sunnis consider Abu Bakr to hold that position. The Kharijites broke away from both the Shiʿas and the Sunnis during the First Fitna (the first Islamic Civil War); they were particularly noted for adopting a radical approach to takfīr (excommunication), whereby they declared both Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims to be either infidels (kuffār) or false Muslims (munāfiḳūn), and therefore deemed them worthy of death for their perceived apostasy (ridda). According to a number of sources, a "wave of revulsion" has been expressed against al-Qaeda and its affiliates by "religious scholars, former fighters and militants" who are alarmed by al-Qaeda's takfir and its killing of Muslims in Muslim countries, especially in Iraq. Noman Benotman, a former militant member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), went public with an open letter of criticism to Ayman al-Zawahiri in November 2007, after persuading the imprisoned senior leaders of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the Libyan regime. While Ayman al-Zawahiri announced the affiliation of the group with al-Qaeda in November 2007, the Libyan government released 90 members of the group from prison several months after "they were said to have renounced violence." In 2007, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Saudi sheikh Salman al-Ouda delivered a personal rebuke to bin Laden. Al-Ouda, a religious scholar and one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that swept through Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, is a widely respected critic of jihadism. Al-Ouda addressed al-Qaeda's leader on television asking him: According to Pew polls, support for al-Qaeda had dropped in the Muslim world in the years before 2008. Support of suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only ten percent had a favorable view of al-Qaeda, according to a December 2017 poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. In 2007, the imprisoned Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, an influential Afghan Arab, "ideological godfather of al-Qaeda", and former supporter of takfir, withdrew his support from al-Qaeda with a book Wathiqat Tarshid Al-'Aml Al-Jihadi fi Misr w'Al-'Alam (). Although once associated with al-Qaeda, in September 2009 LIFG completed a new "code" for jihad, a 417-page religious document entitled "Corrective Studies". Given its credibility and the fact that several other prominent Jihadists in the Middle East have turned against al-Qaeda, the LIFG's reversal may be an important step toward staunching al-Qaeda's recruitment. Other criticisms Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American journalist based in Syria created a documentary about al-Shabab, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia. The documentary included interviews with former members of the group who stated their reasons for leaving al-Shabab. The members made accusations of segregation, lack of religious awareness and internal corruption and favoritism. In response to Kareem, the Global Islamic Media Front condemned Kareem, called him a liar, and denied the accusations from the former fighters. In mid-2014 after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant declared that they had restored the Caliphate, an audio statement was released by the then-spokesman of the group Abu Muhammad al-Adnani claiming that "the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the Caliphate's authority." The speech included a religious refutation of Al-Qaeda for being too lenient regarding Shiites and their refusal to recognize the authority Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, al-Adnani specifically noting: "It is not suitable for a state to give allegiance to an organization." He also recalled a past instance in which Osama bin Laden called on al-Qaeda members and supporters to give allegiance to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi when the group was still solely operating in Iraq, as the Islamic State of Iraq, and condemned Ayman al-Zawahiri for not making this same claim for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Zawahiri was encouraging factionalism and division between former allies of ISIL such as the al-Nusra Front. See also Al-Qaeda involvement in Asia Al Qaeda Network Exord Allegations of support system in Pakistan for Osama bin Laden Belligerents in the Syrian civil war Bin Laden Issue Station (former CIA unit for tracking bin Laden) Steven Emerson Fatawā of Osama bin Laden International propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism (by region) Iran - Alleged Al-Qaeda ties Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition Operation Cannonball Psychological warfare Religious terrorism Takfir wal-Hijra Videos and audio recordings of Osama bin Laden Violent extremism Publications Al Qaeda Handbook Management of Savagery References Sources Bibliography Reviews Government reports Alt URL External links Al-Qaeda in Oxford Islamic Studies Online Al-Qaeda, Counter Extremism Project profile 17 de-classified documents captured during the Abbottabad raid and released to the Combating Terrorism Center Media Peter Taylor. (2007). "War on the West". Age of Terror, No. 4, series 1. BBC. Investigating Al-Qaeda, BBC News "Al Qaeda's New Front" from PBS Frontline, January 2005 1988 establishments in Asia Anti-communism in Afghanistan Anti-communist organizations Anti-communist terrorism Anti-government factions of the Syrian civil war Antisemitism in Pakistan Antisemitism in the Arab world Antisemitism in the Middle East Anti-Shi'ism Anti-Zionism in the Arab world Anti-Zionism in the Middle East Islam and antisemitism Islamic fundamentalism in the United States Islamic fundamentalism Islamist groups Islam-related controversies Jihadist groups in Afghanistan Jihadist groups in Algeria Jihadist groups in Bangladesh Jihadist groups in Egypt Jihadist groups in India Jihadist groups in Iraq Jihadist groups in Pakistan Jihadist groups in Syria Jihadist groups Organisations designated as terrorist by Australia Organisations designated as terrorist by India Organisations designated as terrorist by Iran Organisations designated as terrorist by Japan Organisations designated as terrorist by Pakistan Organisations designated as terrorist by the United Kingdom Organizations designated as terrorist by Bahrain Organizations designated as terrorist by Canada Organizations designated as terrorist by China Organizations designated as terrorist by Israel Organizations designated as terrorist by Malaysia Organizations designated as terrorist by Paraguay Organizations designated as terrorist by Russia Organizations designated as terrorist by Saudi Arabia Organizations designated as terrorist by the United Arab Emirates Organizations designated as terrorist by the United States Organizations designated as terrorist by Turkey Organizations designated as terrorist in Asia Organizations established in 1988 Pan-Islamism Rebel groups in Afghanistan Rebel groups in Iraq Rebel groups in Yemen Al-Qaeda Salafi Jihadism

1955

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe%20Inc.

Adobe Inc.

Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print. Its flagship products include Adobe Photoshop image editing software; Adobe Illustrator vector-based illustration software; Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Portable Document Format (PDF); and a host of tools primarily for audio-visual content creation, editing and publishing. Adobe offered a bundled solution of its products named Adobe Creative Suite, which evolved into a subscription software as a service (SaaS) offering named Adobe Creative Cloud. The company also expanded into digital marketing software and in 2021 was considered one of the top global leaders in Customer Experience Management (CXM). Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. Adobe later developed animation and multimedia through its acquisition of Macromedia, from which it acquired Adobe Flash; video editing and compositing software with Adobe Premiere, later known as Adobe Premiere Pro; low-code web development with Adobe Muse; and a suite of software for digital marketing management. As of 2021, Adobe has more than 24,000 employees worldwide. Adobe also has major development operations in the United States in Newton, New York City, Minneapolis, Lehi, Seattle, Austin and San Francisco. It also has major development operations in Noida and Bangalore in India. History The company was started in John Warnock's garage. The name of the company, Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind Warnock's house. That creek is so named because of the type of clay found there, which alludes to the creative nature of the company's software. Adobe's corporate logo features a stylized "A" and was designed by Marva Warnock, a graphic designer who is John Warnock's wife. In 2020, the company updated its visual identity, including updating its logo to a single color, an all-red logo that is warmer and more contemporary. Steve Jobs attempted to buy the company for $5 million in 1982, but Warnock and Geschke refused. Their investors urged them to work something out with Jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company. Jobs paid a five-times multiple of their company's valuation at the time, plus a five-year license fee for PostScript, in advance. The purchase and advance made Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to become profitable in its first year. Warnock and Geschke considered various business options including a copy-service business and a turnkey system for office printing. Then they chose to focus on developing specialized printing software and created the Adobe PostScript page description language. PostScript was the first truly international standard for computer printing as it included algorithms describing the letter-forms of many languages. Adobe added kanji printer products in 1988. Warnock and Geschke were also able to bolster the credibility of PostScript by connecting with a typesetting manufacturer. They weren't able to work with Compugraphic, but then worked with Linotype to license the Helvetica and Times Roman fonts (through the Linotron 100). By 1987, PostScript had become the industry-standard printer language with more than 400 third-party software programs and licensing agreements with 19 printer companies. Warnock described the language as "extensible", in its ability to apply graphic arts standards to office printing. Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts, which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1, worked on by Bill Paxton after he left Stanford. Apple subsequently developed a competing standard, TrueType, which provided full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines, and licensed it to Microsoft. In the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator, which grew from the firm's in-house font-development software, helped popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. Adobe entered the NASDAQ Composite index in August 1986. Its revenue has grown from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $4 billion in 2012. Adobe's fiscal years run from December to November. For example, the 2020 fiscal year ended on November 27, 2020. In 1989, Adobe introduced what was to become its flagship product, a graphics editing program for the Macintosh called Photoshop. Stable and full-featured, Photoshop 1.0 was ably marketed by Adobe and soon dominated the market. In 1993, Adobe introduced PDF, the Portable Document Format, and its Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. PDF is now an International Standard: ISO 32000-1:2008. In December 1991, Adobe released Adobe Premiere, which Adobe rebranded as Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003. In 1992, Adobe acquired OCR Systems, Inc. In 1994, Adobe acquired the Aldus Corporation and added PageMaker and After Effects to its product line later in the year; it also controls the TIFF file format. In the same year, Adobe acquired LaserTools Corp and Compution Inc. In 1995, Adobe added FrameMaker, the long-document DTP application, to its product line after Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. In 1996, Adobe acquired Ares Software Corp. In 2002, Adobe acquired Canadian company Accelio (also known as JetForm). In May 2003 Adobe purchased audio editing and multitrack recording software Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software for $16.5 million, as well as a large loop library called "Loopology". Adobe then renamed Cool Edit Pro to "Adobe Audition" and included it in the Creative Suite. On December 3, 2005, Adobe acquired its main rival, Macromedia, in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion, adding ColdFusion, Contribute, Captivate, Breeze (rebranded as Adobe Connect), Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FlashPaper, Flex, FreeHand, HomeSite, JRun, Presenter, and Authorware to Adobe's product line. Adobe released Adobe Media Player in April 2008. On April 27, Adobe discontinued development and sales of its older HTML/web development software, GoLive, in favor of Dreamweaver. Adobe offered a discount on Dreamweaver for GoLive users and supports those who still use GoLive with online tutorials and migration assistance. On June 1, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, a series of web applications geared for collaborative work. Creative Suite 4, which includes Design, Web, Production Premium, and Master Collection came out in October 2008 in six configurations at prices from about US$1,700 to $2,500 or by individual application. The Windows version of Photoshop includes 64-bit processing. On December 3, 2008, Adobe laid off 600 of its employees (8% of the worldwide staff) citing the weak economic environment. On September 15, 2009, Adobe Systems announced that it would acquire online marketing and web analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion. The deal was completed on October 23, 2009. Former Omniture products were integrated into the Adobe Marketing Cloud. On November 10, 2009, the company laid off a further 680 employees. Adobe's 2010 was marked by continuing front-and-back arguments with Apple over the latter's non-support for Adobe Flash on its iPhone, iPad and other products. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that Flash was not reliable or secure enough, while Adobe executives have argued that Apple wish to maintain control over the iOS platform. In April 2010, Steve Jobs published a post titled "Thoughts on Flash" where he outlined his thoughts on Flash and the rise of HTML 5. In July 2010, Adobe bought Day Software integrating their line of CQ Products: WCM, DAM, SOCO, and Mobile In January 2011, Adobe acquired DemDex, Inc. with the intent of adding DemDex's audience-optimization software to its online marketing suite. At Photoshop World 2011, Adobe unveiled a new mobile photo service. Carousel is a new application for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that uses Photoshop Lightroom technology for users to adjust and fine-tune images on all platforms. Carousel will also allow users to automatically sync, share and browse photos. The service was later renamed to "Adobe Revel". In October 2011, Adobe acquired Nitobi Software, the makers of the mobile application development framework PhoneGap. As part of the acquisition, the source code of PhoneGap was submitted to the Apache Foundation, where it became Apache Cordova. In November 2011, Adobe announced that they would cease development of Flash for mobile devices following version 11.1. Instead, it would focus on HTML 5 for mobile devices. In December 2011, Adobe announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier. In December 2012, Adobe opened a new corporate campus in Lehi, Utah. In 2013, Adobe endured a major security breach. Vast portions of the source code for the company's software were stolen and posted online and over 150 million records of Adobe's customers have been made readily available for download. In 2012, about 40 million sets of payment card information were compromised by a hack of Adobe. A class-action lawsuit alleging that the company suppressed employee compensation was filed against Adobe, and three other Silicon Valley-based companies in a California federal district court in 2013. In May 2014, it was revealed the four companies, Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel had reached agreement with the plaintiffs, 64,000 employees of the four companies, to pay a sum of $324.5 million to settle the suit. In March 2018, at Adobe Summit, the company and NVIDIA publicized a key association to quickly upgrade their industry-driving AI and profound learning innovations. Expanding on years of coordinated effort, the organizations will work to streamline the Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning structure for NVIDIA GPUs. The joint effort will speed time to showcase and enhance the execution of new Sensei-powered services for Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud clients and engineers. Adobe and NVIDIA have co-operated for over 10 years on empowering GPU quickening for a wide arrangement of Adobe's creative and computerized encounter items. This incorporates Sensei-powered features, for example, auto lip-sync in Adobe Character Animator CC and face-aware editing in Photoshop CC, and also cloud-based AI/ML items and features, for example, picture investigation for Adobe Stock and Lightroom CC and auto-labeling in Adobe Experience Supervisor. In May 2018, Adobe stated they would buy e-commerce services provider Magento Commerce from private equity firm Permira for $1.68 billion. This deal will help bolster its Experience Cloud business, which provides services including analytics, advertising, and marketing. The deal is closed on June 19, 2018. In September 2018, Adobe announced its acquisition of marketing automation software company Marketo. In October 2018, Adobe officially changed its name from Adobe Systems Incorporated to Adobe Inc. In January 2019, Adobe announced its acquisition of 3D texturing company Allegorithmic. In 2020, the annual Adobe Summit was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event took place online and saw over 21 million total video views and over 2.2 million visits to the event website. The software giant has imposed a ban on the political ads features on its digital advert sales platform as the United States presidential elections approach. On November 9, 2020, Adobe announced it will spend US$1.5 billion to acquire Workfront, a provider of marketing collaboration software. The acquisition was completed in early December 2020. On August 19, 2021, Adobe announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Frame.io, a leading cloud-based video collaboration platform. The transaction is valued at $1.275 billion and closed during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year. On September 15, 2021, Adobe Inc formally announced that it will add payment services to its e-commerce platform this year, allowing merchants on their platform a method to accept payments including credit cards and PayPal. Finances Products Digital Marketing Management Software Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 6.2), XML Documentation add-on (for AEM), Mixamo Formats Portable Document Format (PDF), PDF's predecessor PostScript, ActionScript, Shockwave Flash (SWF), Flash Video (FLV), and Filmstrip (.flm) Web-hosted services Adobe Color, Photoshop Express, Acrobat.com, Behance and Adobe Spark 3D and AR Adobe Aero, Dimension, Mixamo, Substance 3D by Adobe Adobe Renderer Adobe Media Encoder Adobe Stock A microstock agency that presently provides over 57 million high-resolution, royalty-free images and videos available to license (via subscription or credit purchase methods). In 2015, Adobe acquired Fotolia, a stock content marketplace founded in 2005 by Thibaud Elziere, Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Patrick Chassany which operated in 23 countries. It is run as a stand-alone website. Adobe Experience Platform In March 2019, Adobe released its Adobe Experience Platform, which consists family of content, development, and customer relationship management products, with what it calls the "next generation" of its Sensei artificial intelligence and machine learning framework. Reception Since 2000, Fortune has recognized Adobe as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. In 2021, Adobe was ranked 16th . Glassdoor recognized Adobe as a Best Place to Work. In October 2021, Fast Company included Adobe on their Brands That Matter list. In October 2008, Adobe Systems Canada Inc. was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc. and was featured in Maclean's newsmagazine. Adobe received a five-star rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation with regards to its handling of government data requests in 2017. Criticisms Pricing Adobe has been criticized for its pricing practices, with retail prices being up to twice as much in non-US countries. For example, it is significantly cheaper to pay for a return airfare ticket to the United States and purchase one particular collection of Adobe's software there than to buy it locally in Australia. After Adobe revealed the pricing for the Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which was £1,000 higher for European customers, a petition to protest over "unfair pricing" was published and signed by 10,000 users. In June 2009, Adobe further increased its prices in the UK by 10% in spite of weakening of the pound against the dollar, and UK users were not allowed to buy from the US store. Adobe's Reader and Flash programs were listed on "The 10 most hated programs of all time" article by TechRadar. In April 2021, Adobe received heavy criticism for the company’s cancellation fees after a customer shared a tweet showing they had been charged a $291.45 cancellation fee for their Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Many also showed their cancellation fees for Adobe Creative Cloud, with this leading to many encouraging piracy of Adobe products and/or purchase of alternatives with lower prices. Security Hackers have exploited vulnerabilities in Adobe programs, such as Adobe Reader, to gain unauthorized access to computers. Adobe's Flash Player has also been criticized for, among other things, suffering from performance, memory usage and security problems (see criticism of Flash Player). A report by security researchers from Kaspersky Lab criticized Adobe for producing the products having top 10 security vulnerabilities. Observers noted that Adobe was spying on its customers by including spyware in the Creative Suite 3 software and quietly sending user data to a firm named Omniture. When users became aware, Adobe explained what the suspicious software did and admitted that they: "could and should do a better job taking security concerns into account". When a security flaw was later discovered in Photoshop CS5, Adobe sparked outrage by saying it would leave the flaw unpatched, so anyone who wanted to use the software securely would have to pay for an upgrade. Following a fierce backlash Adobe decided to provide the software patch. Adobe has been criticized for pushing unwanted software including third-party browser toolbars and free virus scanners, usually as part of the Flash update process, and for pushing a third-party scareware program designed to scare users into paying for unneeded system repairs. Customer data breach On October 3, 2013, the company initially revealed that 2.9 million customers' sensitive and personal data was stolen in security breach which included encrypted credit card information. Adobe later admitted that 38 million active users have been affected and the attackers obtained access to their IDs and encrypted passwords, as well as to many inactive Adobe accounts. The company did not make it clear if all the personal information was encrypted, such as email addresses and physical addresses, though data privacy laws in 44 states require this information to be encrypted. A 3.8 GB file stolen from Adobe and containing 152 million usernames, reversibly encrypted passwords and unencrypted password hints was posted on AnonNews.org. LastPass, a password security firm, said that Adobe failed to use best practices for securing the passwords and has not salted them. Another security firm, Sophos, showed that Adobe used a weak encryption method permitting the recovery of a lot of information with very little effort. According to IT expert Simon Bain, Adobe has failed its customers and 'should hang their heads in shame'. Many of the credit cards were tied to the Creative Cloud software-by-subscription service. Adobe offered its affected US customers a free membership in a credit monitoring service, but no similar arrangements have been made for non-US customers. When a data breach occurs in the US, penalties depend on the state where the victim resides, not where the company is based. After stealing the customers' data, cyber-thieves also accessed Adobe's source code repository, likely in mid-August 2013. Because hackers acquired copies of the source code of Adobe proprietary products, they could find and exploit any potential weaknesses in its security, computer experts warned. Security researcher Alex Holden, chief information security officer of Hold Security, characterized this Adobe breach, which affected Acrobat, ColdFusion and numerous other applications, as "one of the worst in US history". Adobe also announced that hackers stole parts of the source code of Photoshop, which according to commentators could allow programmers to copy its engineering techniques and would make it easier to pirate Adobe's expensive products. Published on a server of a Russian-speaking hacker group, the "disclosure of encryption algorithms, other security schemes, and software vulnerabilities can be used to bypass protections for individual and corporate data" and may have opened the gateway to new generation zero-day attacks. Hackers already used ColdFusion exploits to make off with usernames and encrypted passwords of PR Newswire's customers, which has been tied to the Adobe security breach. They also used a ColdFusion exploit to breach Washington state court and expose up to 200,000 Social Security numbers. Anti-competitive practices In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus Corp., a software vendor that sold FreeHand, a competing product. FreeHand was direct competition to Adobe Illustrator, Adobe's flagship vector-graphics editor. The Federal Trade Commission intervened and forced Adobe to sell FreeHand back to Altsys, and also banned Adobe from buying back FreeHand or any similar program for the next 10 years (1994–2004). Altsys was then bought by Macromedia, which released versions 5 to 11. When Adobe acquired Macromedia in December 2005, it stalled development of FreeHand in 2007, effectively rendering it obsolete. With FreeHand and Illustrator, Adobe controlled the only two products that compete in the professional illustration program market for Macintosh operating systems. In 2011, a group of 5,000 FreeHand graphic designers convened under the banner Free FreeHand, and filed a civil antitrust complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Adobe. The suit alleged that Adobe has violated federal and state antitrust laws by abusing its dominant position in the professional vector graphic illustration software market and that Adobe has engaged in a series of exclusionary and anti-competitive acts and strategies designed to kill FreeHand, the dominant competitor to Adobe's Illustrator software product, instead of competing on the basis of product merit according to the principals of free market capitalism. Adobe had no response to the claims and the lawsuit was eventually settled. The FreeHand community believes Adobe should release the product to an open-source community if it cannot update it internally. , on its FreeHand product page, Adobe stated, "While we recognize FreeHand has a loyal customer base, we encourage users to migrate to the new Adobe Illustrator CS4 software which supports both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista." , the FreeHand page no longer exists; instead, it simply redirects to the Illustrator page. Adobe's software FTP server still contains a directory for FreeHand, but it is empty. Chief executive officers John Warnock (1982-2000) Bruce Chizen (2000-2007) Shantanu Narayen (2007–present) See also Adobe MAX Digital rights management (DRM) List of acquisitions by Adobe List of Adobe software US v. ElcomSoft Sklyarov References External links 1982 establishments in California Companies based in San Jose, California Companies listed on the Nasdaq Multinational companies headquartered in the United States Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 1982 Type foundries American companies established in 1982 1980s initial public offerings Software companies of the United States

2112

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative%20algebra

Associative algebra

"In mathematics, an associative algebra A is an algebraic structure with compatible operations of ad(...TRUNCATED)

2114

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM%20AIX

IBM AIX

"AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced , “ay-eye-ex”) is a series of proprietary Unix (...TRUNCATED)

2807

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active%20Directory

Active Directory

"Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It(...TRUNCATED)

2923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM%20%28software%29

AIM (software)

"AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, (...TRUNCATED)

3712

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%20Labs

Bell Labs

"Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),\nthen AT&T Bell Labora(...TRUNCATED)

3742

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth

Bluetooth

"Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between f(...TRUNCATED)