Cartoon by Tom Stiglich

Whatever Happened to Al Qaeda?

By Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

Foreign Policy: On July 31, 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at a Taliban guest house in Kabul. A year later, al Qaeda has still not announced Zawahiri’s successor.

This has made it difficult for the core group to stake a claim to the leadership of the global jihadi movement or even to remain an important player regionally or internationally. Indeed, al Qaeda, the broader set of affiliate groups it claims to lead, and the jihadi movement as a whole have all suffered repeated blows in recent years—reducing the threat to the United States and its allies.

For an organization that once struck fear into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans after Sept. 11, 2001, and sparked a so-called global war on terror that dramatically reoriented U.S. foreign policy for two decades, al Qaeda’s almost complete disappearance from both the daily news headlines and the broader foreign-policy conversation in Washington these days is remarkable.

A quick look at the number of deadly jihadi attacks in the United States since 9/11 suggests the organization’s decline in both capabilities and ideological influence. According to data from the New America Foundation, jihadis have killed 107 Americans on U.S. soil since 9/11, compared with the 130 killed by right-wing terrorists. The last significant jihadi attack was four years ago, when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s Yemen branch, killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in 2019. Pensacola was the only post-9/11 attack on U.S. soil that a jihadi group abroad coordinated; the others involved jihadis who were inspired by al Qaeda or its onetime affiliate turned competitor, the Islamic State, but who had little or no contact with the groups themselves.

The core organization that Zawahiri led has not directed an attack on the United States since 9/11, and after a spate of bloody attacks in Europe, has not conducted one there since the London attacks of 2005—almost 20 years ago. In Europe, affiliates such as AQAP have had more success, such as that group’s 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, but their operations have also decreased in recent years. The Islamic State has conducted more attacks than al Qaeda affiliates, including devastating shootings and suicide bombings in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016 respectively, but a pattern of decline in Europe is clear.

Once-strong affiliates such as AQAP, as well as al Qaeda-linked groups in the Philippines, Syria, and other countries, have suffered numerous leadership losses, internal divisions, and other debilitating problems, making it harder for them to conduct external attacks. Measuring overall support is difficult, but foreign fighters no longer flock to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, where the Islamic State and al Qaeda were once ascendant and are now far weaker. To be clear, the picture is not all bad for jihadis—in Africa, new jihadi organizations are emerging, and strong groups such as al-Shabab in Somalia are flourishing—but decline is evident in most of the rest of the world.

Part of this weakness is due to the civil war that erupted in 2013 within the jihadi movement between al Qaeda and its upstart offshoot, the Islamic State. In many Muslim countries, most notably Afghanistan, parts of the Sahel, and Syria, al Qaeda and its allies directly waged war against the rival Islamic State organization and its so-called “provinces.” Today in Afghanistan, allies of al Qaeda—the Taliban—are in a bloody fight with the Islamic State’s proxy. In addition to the tangible impact the death toll has had on the capabilities of all involved, this infighting also discredited both movements: Few starry-eyed, would-be holy warriors are eager to sign up to kill other holy warriors.

The movement has also fragmented and localized. Most of the affiliate groups— from Mali to Nigeria to Afghanistan—now focus almost exclusively on the local civil war or insurgency that they are fighting in. You still do not want to be a Western missionary or tourist who stumbles across their path, but this shift in focus reduces the chance of an international terrorist attack. Some jihadi groups, such as those in West Africa, probably could launch a terrorist strike on the West if they put in the effort—they are just focused elsewhere. Their brutality is directed toward their own countries and at their neighbors, with thousands of people—many of them Muslims themselves—dying from terrorist attacks and civil wars involving jihadi groups.

The enduring counterterrorism campaign against al Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as the Islamic State and other parts of the movement, has also taken its toll. U.S. drone strikes have relentlessly decimated the ranks of the senior al Qaeda core, affiliate leaders, and other jihadi figures, even when they try to hide in remote parts of Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Today, the core al Qaeda organization has “far fewer” than 200 fighters, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The anti-Islamic State campaign, too, has proved highly effective. At the height of its so-called caliphate in 2014 and 2015, the group ruled over millions of people and controlled territory in Iraq and Syria the size of Great Britain. But by 2019, the U.S.-led coalition drove the caliphate underground. The group still launches attacks in Iraq and Syria and has thousands of fighters there, but like many al Qaeda affiliates, it appears focused on the civil war it is fighting, not international terrorism.

U.S. training and aid extended to foreign militaries and security forces has made them more capable of and more willing to target local jihadi groups, while an ongoing global intelligence campaign disrupts jihadi cells around the world. Because of this constant manhunt, it is dangerous for jihadi leaders to communicate, making it hard for them to direct affiliate groups and operatives, further decentralizing the movement. As the groups weaken, they have a harder time overcoming more rigorous airport screening and travel controls, while more aggressive FBI efforts make it more likely that plots in the United States will be discovered.