ISLAMIC EXTREMIST TARGETING AMERICANS.

Byline: Tim Weiner The New York Times

Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad Bin Laden is the self-appointed president of a University of Holy War in Afghanistan, U.S. officials say.

From his Afghan redoubt, he has declared war against U.S. interests everywhere, fueled by rage against U.S. power in the Middle East, and backed, the officials say, by an international network of terrorists and companies.

Two years ago he moved his base from Sudan, where he lived from 1991 to 1996, forming a close alliance with that nation's most powerful man: Hassan Turabi. The leader of Sudan's ruling party, the National Islamic Front, Turabi saw himself as the grand vizier of Islam, the leading voice for Islamic fundamentalism in the world.

Bin Laden has saved his strongest anger for U.S. forces and U.S. allies in his homeland, Saudi Arabia. This year, he publicly warned that American civilians were his targets as well. Thursday, the United States made war on him and his Sudanese allies.

Just a decade ago, the United States considered bin Laden himself an ally.

``We knew him as one of the Saudi benefactors who took care of widows and orphans'' of the U.S.-backed Afghan rebels who fought off Soviet invaders in the 1980s, said a retired U.S. official who helped fight that long battle.

Bin Laden spent millions supporting the Afghan guerrillas, financing thousands of volunteer foreign soldiers who came to Afghanistan from throughout the Islamic world, and creating a network of guest houses and charities to support them and their families.

``He had a common cause with the United States,'' said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former State Department and Pentagon official of Afghan descent who monitored the war. ``But with the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, his struggle became the struggle against the United States, the dominant power in the world and in the Middle East.''

Bin Laden returned to his native Saudi Arabia in 1989, and began to support militant Islamic groups opposing moderate Islamic governments.

His rage against the United States took root during the 1991 Gulf War, with the continuing presence of U.S. troops on the sands of his native Saudi Arabia. ``He regarded that as an occupation of the Islamic holy places by the United States,'' Khalilzad said, and bin Laden swore vengeance against what he called ``the crusaders'' of Christianity trespassing on Mecca and Medina.

``What this man thinks about every day is: How do I get the U.S. out of my home in Saudi Arabia, and how do I get those corrupt pharaohs out of power?'' said Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst who is the Congressional Research Service's resident expert on Middle Eastern terrorism.

Bin Laden's views are shared by Turabi, whose bond with bin Laden helped place Sudan on the United States' short list of state sponsors of international terrorism, officials said.

``Bin Laden is inspired by Turabi's expansive vision; he sees eye to eye with him,'' Katzman said. ``They are allies. They are close associates. They are business partners. Bin Laden is Turabi's alter ego, his field commander, his operations chief.''

Several intelligence analysts noted Thursday that the U.S. Embassy in Sudan was all but evacuated in 1996, following a terrorist threat - and relocated at the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, which was bombed Aug. 7, along with the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania.

Terrorist fronts

Businesses - and fronts for terrorism - established by bin Laden in Sudan in the early 1990s continue to flourish. The National Islamic Front is a financial partner in bin Laden's import-export, agricultural cooperative, construction and Islamic banking businesses based in and around Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

``Bin Laden has made financial contributions to the Sudanese military-industrial complex,'' a senior U.S. intelligence official said Thursday, ``of which, we believe, the Shifa pharmaceutical facility is part.'' That plant was attacked by the United States on Thursday.

In 1991 and 1992, bin Laden gave jobs in Sudan to hundreds of his proteges, veterans of the Afghan war who had come from across northern Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. These veterans became the core of an international network. They started looking for new worlds to conquer.

They told each other: ``We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave,'' said a politically moderate Afghan veteran commander, Abdul Haq.

Bin Laden, a skilled construction engineer, began working to build that grave.

He went to work trying to form ``a multinational organization for jihad, to purge the world of Western corrupters and their Arab friends,'' a U.S. intelligence official said. Jihad is the Arabic word for holy war.

His goal, said the official, was ``a stateless, global jihad without borders,'' and with his millions, he aimed to build ``a huge alliance of like-minded groups.''

He became the world's leading individual sponsor of terrorism against Americans, spending a large part of the $250 million fortune he inherited from his father, who built palaces, mosques and public works for the Saudi royal family. That money went to help create a global network of armed fundamentalists, backed by businesses and banks that functioned as front organizations.

``He has a very intricate financial infrastructure,'' said a senior U.S. intelligence official. ``He has networks on every continent almost. He has an infrastructure that's very, very replete with capability, people, money.''

Over the years, United States intelligence agencies have tried to track bin Laden and have compiled a chronology of his career, including these highlights:

In December 1992, his operatives tried to bomb a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where 100 U.S. soldiers were billeted en route to support United Nations peacekeeping operations in Somalia. The job was botched; two Australian tourists were killed.

In February 1993 came the World Trade Center bombing in New York. No concrete evidence ties bin Laden's followers to that attack, but Pakistani intelligence officials say Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the bombing, spent most of the following three years until his arrest at a guest house called the House of Martyrs in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was owned by bin Laden.

Beginning in 1993, bin Laden channeled tens of millions of dollars a year through Islamic banks and charities to terrorist organizations, militant groups and extremist political movements based in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines, as well as providing support for the shadowy and stateless group known as Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials say. He has also claimed to support Islamic movements in Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, Chechnya and Somalia.

By January 1994, bin Laden had established at least three terrorist camps in Sudan, where rebels from a half-dozen different nations received training and shelter, according to U.S. intelligence analysts. And by 1995, bin Laden's businesses and training camps in Sudan had provided safe haven to radical followers who had then fanned out over the Islamic world, from North Africa, across the Middle East, to South Asia.

In May 1996, under intense pressure from the United States, Sudan expelled bin Laden, hoping to receive U.S. economic assistance. It never came. He returned to Afghanistan, where he received political protection and support from the Taliban, the armed religious extremist group that now controls much of Afghanistan.

Training sites

He has been living in Afghanistan, first outside Jalalabad, then outside Khandahar, ever since. He established at least two sets of terrorist training camps in that war-shattered land: the biggest, near the provincial capital of Khost, was attacked by the United States on Thursday.

Members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad were located in the Khost camp, including their leader, Ayman el-Zawahri, who is wanted for terrorism in Egypt. So were members of the Islamic Group, which assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

``Terrorists of various nationalities have trained there,'' a senior intelligence official said Thursday. ``This is the largest Sunni terrorist training facility in the world.''

Bin Laden is thought to have, at minimum, a supporting role in the bombing of two U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia that killed a total of 24 Americans in 1995 and 1996.

``This is a war,'' Khalilzad said. ``They did two bombings, we did two, in two different countries, two different targets. If the targets associated with bin Laden were destroyed, there will be some effect on his ability to do things. Whatever plans he may have had in place, whether those will be affected by the attacks, we can't tell. Whether his organization will be deterred, who knows. But this is a strong message to those people who thought they could remain beyond the reach of civilized law in the anarchy of Afghanistan.''

Thursday night, the man in charge of the camps was reported by his followers in Afghanistan to have survived, making it likely that his violent dialogue with the United States would continue.

``We don't know where bin Laden is,'' a senior intelligence official said, adding: ``The prospect of retaliation against Americans is very, very high.''

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Photo: no caption (bin Laden)