Bartolomé de Medina and the Formulation of…

...Jalalabad also fall to Dost Mohammad.

Jalalabad is no more than a wide place in the road with a fort, held by about two thousand troops under General Sir Robert Sale.

After the massacre of the British force during their retreat from Kabul in January 1842, Jalalabad had been surrounded by Afghan forces, which have  launched a series of attacks on the force.

The British have managed to beat off the assaults, and had even captured three hundred sheep from the besieging force when rations ran short.

Eventually, after five months under siege, Sale mounts an attack against the Afghan forces on April 13, captures their main camp, baggage, stores, guns, and horses and the Afghans flee to Kabul.

Wazir Akbar Khan, son of Dost Mohammed Khan, had captured Bala Hissar in Kabul in 1842 and become the new emir of Afghanistan.

He dies in Jalalabad in 1845; his father, Dost Mohammad Khan, succeeds him.

Throughout the brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden has provided logistical and humanitarian aid to the victorious mujahideen, although it is uncertain whether he actively participated in battles.

The American CIA directly or indirectly aids seven Islamic groups in fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, funneling its aid through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), to various cells in Afghanistan.

One of these, the “Service Office,” Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), formed by Saudi Arabian nationals citizens Osama bin Laden, Wa'el Hamza Julaidan, and influential lecturer Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, recruits and trains Muslim volunteers from Egypt, Algeria, and other countries to fight in the Afghan war.

In 1984, bin Laden breaks with the MAK and forms a separate, more radical splinter group that espouses a harsh, fundamentalist version of Islam dedicated to the liberation of Islamic nations from any foreign influences, from Israel to the United States to the Soviet Union.

By the time of the Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden&emdash;reportedly minus a toe on one foot, said to be the result of a battle wound&emdash;has emerged as the leader of an organization of battle-hardened veterans and religious fundamentalists crusading to oppose non-Islamic governments with violence.

(According to later allegations by US government officials, Bin Laden calls his group al Qaeda, or al Qaida, Arabic for "The Base." However, Doctor Saad Al-Fagih, a Saudi Arabian dissident living in exile in London who took part in the Afghanistan resistance against the Soviet invasion and now heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, challenges the US government's characterization of Al Qaeda.

In an interview with PBS Frontline, al-Fagih asserts that Al Qaeda is simply a benign "record of [Saudi Arabian] people who ended up in Peshawar [Pakistan] and joined [the mujahideen in the 80s], and moved from Peshawar to Afghanistan.")

On September 11, 1996, Taliban forces capture Jalalabad, Afghanistan's major eastern city bordering Pakistan.

In a November 1996 interview with Gwynne Roberts for the British documentary program Dispatches, bin Laden threatens to wage an Islamic holy war against the United States and its allies if Washington does not remove its troops from the Gulf region.

(Source: Reuters 2.20.97).

Bin Laden, further combining religion with his nationalistic cause, broadens his fatwah to include civilian targets.

On February 23, 1998, under the banner of the "World Islamic Front," he issues a joint declaration co-signed by officers of the Islamic Group of Egypt, Al Jihad, the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, and the "Jamaat ul Ulema e Pakistan" that Muslims should kill Americans anywhere in the world.

In this call to arms, bin Laden states, "We&emdash;with God's help&emdash;call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.

We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's US troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Asqua Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca, Saudi Arabia) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."

In May 1998, ABC's John Miller interviews bin Laden at his mountaintop camp in southern Afghanistan.