Al-Qaeda is a fundamentalist organization which is believed to have been founded in Afghanistan in the late 80s during the fight against the Soviet invasion there. Al Qaeda was and remains a strict fundamentalist Islamic organization which seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in the world and to institutionalize Shari'a law to purify the world of individuals deemed to be living outside of the their interpretation of Islam. Al Qaeda has been engaged in terrorist activity around the globe for over two decades and has now splintered into different branches in Iraq, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa.
