On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, murdering approximately 3,000 people and wounding thousands of others.
In 2012, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — the leader of ISIS — tasked Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani) with forming a contingent of al-Qaeda in Syria. Sharaa then set up this al-Qaeda branch, naming it the Nusrah Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), and put into action taxing civilians, looting factories, and kidnapping civilians for hefty ransoms. At one point, the Nusrah Front was helping support the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq. In 2013, Sharaa declared the organization’s allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and expressed their “pride in the banner of the Islamic State in Iraq.”
