In late 1996, Bin Laden first announced his global Radical Islamic war coalition in his first fatwa (religious declaration) of world war against America, announcing his alliance with a host of Islamic insurgencies around the world. Eighteen months later, he published a second, more precise fatwa announcing the names of the Islamic militant groups that officially joined this binding religious war pact as a coalition named "The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders".
Although nominally founded as a united Muslim military front against the Western presence in Saudi Arabia, the expansive first fatwa ordered the establishment of an umbrella guerrilla terrorist organization to wage war in a united global military front inside Muslim lands under "Crusader occupation", including in Islam's holiest land Saudi Arabia, Palestine and Chechnya, directed primarily against the superpower America, Israel and Russia, respectively. Bin Laden described this new coalition as a continuation of his own global terrorist war against America, for the first time claiming publicly personal responsibility (through his characteristic method of innuendo) for attacks on Americans in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Beirut and the first World Trade Center bombing in New York (a claim he made indirectly though convincingly through his praise for Al Qaeda's spiritual leader, the Blind Sheik Omar Rahman, an imprisoned collaborator in the bombing).
