(Capcom's primary storyline)
The War on Terror is a name given to an international military campaign with the unifying aims of eradicating rebel groups identified as terrorist organizations which prospered in the second half of the 20th century.
Background
The War on Terror dates back to 2001's September 11 attacks which the United States suffered from a series of attacks by the international terrorist organization al-Qaeda.[1] Within four years, these groups changed their tactics towards bio-warfare, aided by the booming bioweapons Black Market. In the aftermath of the 1998 Raccoon City Destruction Incident, the threat of a major bioterrorist attack was already considered to be viable and the US government and military began restructuring to better their responses.
Raccoon City and the Collapse of Umbrella
Much of the War on Terror can be traced to the 1998 Raccoon City Destruction Incident. The t-Virus was released into the city's drinking water following a failed attempt by the Umbrella Security Service to retrieve the newly developed G-Virus from Dr. William Birkin's NEST. Dr. Birkin made plans to sell the virus over to the US military as part of their biological weapons program. The US secretly restarted it in the early 1990s in response to the Collapse of the Soviet Union and Umbrella's migration of business to the Russian Federation, ignoring the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention which forbade such programs. Despite the assistance of former Umbrella researchers such as Dr. Albert Wesker, the US began to see the G-Virus as it's only chance to best Umbrella and it's customers.
During the weeklong epidemic, it became very clear to the US that the bioweapons were uncontrollable, making them too dangerous for use in actual conflicts. It lost an entire Delta Force unit searching for Dr. Birkin's laboratory and Umbrella lost over 120 of its own mercenaries when Congress voted in favor of destroying the city with an experimental thermobaric missile. Officially, this was to contain the virus, but the second aim was to destroy evidence within the city of any US involvement with the company. Following it's destruction, the US President filed an Executive Decree forbidding Umbrella U.S.A. from conducting business within the US before resigning. Though Umbrella's subsequent lawsuit of the US federal government provided convincing evidence of US responsibility for the outbreak, the leaking of its own research data in 2003 led to it being quickly found criminally responsible and the corporation was bankrupted. As early as 2001, it was realized by Umbrella employees what was going to happen and Umbrella U.S.A.'s researchers fled to the other countries to sell bio-weapons on the Black Market which were sold to the terrorist organizations. USSTRATCOM's "Anti-Umbrella Pursuit and Investigation Team", founded immediately after the Raccoon City Incident was initially the US' primary organization for investigating and countering these black market dealings.[1][2][note 1] Until the Terragrigia Panic, bioterrorism was largely covered-up thanks to USSTRATCOM.
US efforts against terrorism
The United States founded the Federal Bioterrorism Commission in 2001 as a response to the 9/11 attacks, the US government expecting Umbrella's assets to be used in the near-future. The FBC, headed by Morgan Lansdale was the primary defense of American interests, the US refusing offers of help from foreign anti-terror units as a matter of prestige. In 2004, Lansdale created the t-Abyss Virus as part of a conspiracy to highlight the threat of bioterrorism to the public and increase powers to the FBC to better equip it to fight the terrorist organizations. To hide his plans, the Italian fraternity organization, Il Veltro was radicalized to lead an attack on the island city of Terragrigia which the FBC would counter. The FBC's destruction of Terragrigia proved highly-controversial and Lansdale's conspiracy was discovered the next year by the BSAA. The FBC was shut down in 2005 and it's assets and personnel are transferred to the BSAA, now under the control of the United Nations.
The US still preferred to handle incidents of bio-terrorism themselves, deploying their own military forces to handle the 2005 Harvardville Airport Incident. This sentiment seemed to wane over the next decade and the BSAA and Blue Umbrella were allowed on US soil to counter Glenn Arias' attack on New York and the Dulvey Incident respectfully.
Sources
References:
Notes:
- ↑ The mention of War on Terror and 9/11 only exists in the original japanese script of the file. This is an Error in the localization which completely removed / missed the reference. It can still be found in the original japanese script and has been fan-translated for reference. The original script is "Canon" and faithful to the original story written by the actual developers. This is further confirmed in the new trailer for Resident Evil: Vendetta, in which the One World Trade Center is seen in the establishing shot of NYC.
| |||||||||||
