In the 1990s, a wealthy Saudi dissident, Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda (an internationalist Islamist paramilitary headquartered in Afghanistan) declared a fatwa calling for the killing of "Americans and their allies – civilians and military... in any country in which it is possible to do it" to bring to an end the ongoing enforcement of the blockade against Iraq and presence of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula. The declaration followed earlier bombings and declarations of Jihad, which had brought Australians into the line of fire in what would latterly grow to be called the "War on Terror". In September 2001, John Howard went to Washington to meet the new president of the United States, George W. Bush and to commemorate the anniversary of the ANZUS alliance. During Howard's visit, on 11 September 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked by Al Qaeda and used as missiles to attack civilian and military targets in New York (World Trade Center) and suburban Washington, D.C. (the Pentagon). The attacks surpassed the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor as the most deadly attack against United States territory of modern times. In response, the Howard Government invoked the ANZUS Treaty and offered support to the United States. The Howard Government subsequently committed troops to the Afghanistan War (with bi-partisan support) and the Iraq War (meeting with the disapproval of other political parties). The international Al Qaeda threat became a major backdrop to the 2001 Australian federal election and became among the most significant foreign policy challenges of the Howard Government's terms of office. By the time of Bin Laden's death a decade later at the hands of US Special Forces, 105 Australians had been killed in Al Qaeda attacks in New York, Bali, London and Mumbai and a further 24 Australian military personnel had been killed while serving in the Afghanistan conflict (including one with the British Armed Forces).