On May 1, 2011, a group of U.S. soldiers boarded helicopters at a base in Afghanistan, hoping to find a man named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, was responsible for a number of terrorist attacks around the world, including those of September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. The United States had been looking for bin Laden for nearly 15 years. On this May night, U.S. soldiers found him hiding in a large house in Pakistan with members of his family and a few al Qaeda members. The soldiers killed bin Laden and four others and flew back to their base in Afghanistan. Ten years after 9/11, the United States is still fighting a war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, an extreme Islamist group that controlled Afghanistan's government. This article details key issues and events including the rise of the Taliban and the emergence of Osama bin Laden as a global terrorist figure.