Download Al-Qaeda

United States Involvement
in the Middle East
Iraq-Iran War
First Persian Gulf War
• Iraq invaded__________in _________________ following a
long history of border disputes and fears of Shia insurgency
among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the
Iranian Revolution. For the next _________________ years
the war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage - a
half a million Iraqi and _____________ soldiers as well as
civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more
injured and wounded.
Persian Gulf War-Operation Desert
Storm
Iraq invaded ___________________Claimed
Kuwait was stealing oil
money owed to other countries for previous
Iran-Iraq War.
Saddam _________________thought no one
would stop him
(Operation Desert Storm)
Iraq invaded _______________in August of_____________,
under the direction of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The
Iraqi army took control of Kuwait in a very short amount of
time. The United nations responded to the Iraqi invasion
by demanding that Iraq withdraw its troops
from______________. The United nations asked other
countries to cut off trade to Iraq (Embargo) in an attempt
to force them to withdraw, that attempt
__________________.
The United States and thirty other countries formed a coalition
and began sending military troops into Saudi Arabia over
the next few_______________.
• The united Nations set a date
for_____________ to leave ________________,
Iraq rejected the date and refused to leave. The
____________ and their allies began attacking
Iraq through the use of air power then by a
ground assault. After a devastating battle
resulting in many Iraqi deaths, the Iraqi’s were
driven _______________ of Kuwait.
Afghanistan
 On September 11, _____________, Al-Qaeda attacked
two targets in the U.S. Al-Qaeda is a group of Islamic
terrorists that were largely based in Afghanistan. They
hijacked____________________ airplanes and
intentionally crashed two of them into the World
Trade Center in new York. The third plane was
crashed into the _____________ in Virginia and the
fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania in route to its
target, the White House in Washington, D.C. The
terrorist attacks on that day killed nearly
____________________ people.
 Osama bin__________________ was blamed for
the attacks, U.S. President George ________called
on other countries to help wage a war on
terrorism to crush al-Qaeda. In October 2001,
U.S., British, and Canadian forces ______________
Afghanistan in search of bin Laden and to destroy
al-Qaeda and their allies the Taliban (Operation
Enduring Freedom). Although bin Laden was
never found the grip of the Taliban and al-Qaeda
on Afghanistan was___________. The U.S. let
forces still struggle to control portions of the
______________.
The Iraq War
(Operation Iraqi Freedom)
 Saddam Hussein was still______________________
Iraq at the time of the Afghanistan invasion. Officials in
the U.S government feared connections between
Hussein and al-Qaeda and the allegations that Iraq
was building Weapons of Mass Destruction
(___________) in the form of Nuclear, Biological, and
Chemical weapons. The United Nations sent
inspectors to Iraq to check for WMD’s however Iraq
failed to allow them to complete their inspections. In
response the U.S. Congress passed an Iraq
_____________ Resolution that authorized the
president to go forward with a war in____________.
• In March______________, the U.S. began bombing
targets in the capital of Baghdad. British,
Australian, Polish, and _____________________
soldiers invaded Iraq and defeated the Iraqi army.
Saddam Hussein was__________________, put on
trial for crimes against humanity by the Iraqi’s.
• Weapons of ____________Destruction were never
found in _______________. It is difficult to
determine how many Iraqis have died since the
invasion, but as of 2007, more than 500,000 Iraqis
may have died according to one study. Many
deaths are due to sectarian violence. Over 4,000
American ________________ have been killed and
over 20,000 have been wounded in Iraq thus far.
Why is the U.S. interested in the M.E.?
• ____________
• ___________Terrorists
• Spread _________________
Al-Qaeda
• The group is wanted by the United States for its
September 11,__________, attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as a host
of lesser_________________.
• To escape the post-9/11 U.S.-led war in
Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s central leadership is
believed to have fled eastward
into________________, securing a safe haven in
loosely governed areas there.
What is al-Qaeda?
• Al-Qaeda seeks to rid Muslim countries of what it sees as the
influence of the West and replace their _________________
with fundamentalist Islamic regimes.
• After Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks
on_______________, the United States launched a war in
Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda’s bases there and overthrow
the Taliban, the country’s ______________ fundamentalist
rulers who harbored bin Laden and his________________.
• “Al-Qaeda” is Arabic for “The Base.”
What are al-Qaeda’s origins?
• Al-Qaeda grew out of the opposition to the 1979
Soviet ________________of Afghanistan. In the
1980s, bin Laden and the Palestinian religious
scholar Abdullah Azzam, recruited,
________________, and financed thousands of
foreign mujahadeen, or holy warriors, from more
than fifty countries. Bin Laden wanted these
fighters to continue the “__________ war" beyond
Afghanistan. He formed al-Qaeda around 1988.