The name "Al-Qaida" or "the Base" is originated from the term used to refer to the place where Saudi militant Osama bin Ladin train terrorists against the United States and other western countries. It was established around 1988 and the top members of the organization come from all over Islamic world. Al-Qaida is a network of many different fundamentalist organizations in diverse countries. Its primary ideology is the using of terrorism to attain their political goal and to overthrow western-influenced government and to replace them with Islamic regimes under the rule of Shariah, or Islamic law.
In 1979, when the Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, Osama bin Ladin moved his business to Afghanistan and enter to his first part of holy war. He helped to recruit young Muslims from all over Arab world, and set up facilities to train them. The Afghan government donated land and resources, while bin Ladin brought in experts from all over the world to fight against the Soviet. Within a little over a year, it was estimated that as many as 10,000 volunteers received training in his camps. Nearly half of them came from bin Ladin's native Saudi Arabia. Others came from Algeria, Egypt, and some other Muslim countries such as Yemen, Pakistan and Sudan.
The war in Afghanistan had led to the major stand-offs between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States favored Osama bin Ladin at that time, and America's Central Intelligence Agency put $500 million-per-year campaign to arm and train bin Ladin's Mujahedin guerrillas to fight the Soviet Union. After ten years of savage fighting, the Mujahedin were able to fight the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. The departing of Soviet troops left behind the Afghanistan with well-organized and equipped modern army from a variety of Islamic countries. Under the leadership of Osama bin Ladin, he organized those Afghan war veterans and started to build his al-Qaida network and continued the work of Jihad.