Order from Chaos Al-Qaida today, 18 years after 9/11 - Brookings Institute

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Order from Chaos
Al-Qaida today, 18 years after 9/11
Bruce Riedel    Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the al-Qaida organization that carried them out is a shell of its previous self. The global campaign against Osama bin Laden’s creation has achieved notable success. The ideas that inspired bin Laden and his followers have lost some, but not all, of their attractiveness. There is no place for complacency, but the threat is different.

Bruce Riedel
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Center for Middle East Policy   Director - The Intelligence Project

Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri built the core al-Qaida infrastructure in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s with the protection of the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan. The group functioned as a de facto state within the Taliban Islamic Emirate. It survived the American assault on Afghanistan after 9/11 by moving its leadership and infrastructure to Pakistan where it thrived until 2009. America took its eye off the ball by invading Iraq.

From Pakistan, the al-Qaida core planned and conducted attacks like the Madrid train bombing in 2004, a wave of attacks on targets in Saudi Arabia in 2003-06, and the civil war in Iraq led by Abu Musaib al Zarqawi, bin Laden’s lieutenant. The results were a wave of violence across the world.

In 2009, President Barack Obama’s so-called AfPak strategy gave top priority to the defeat of the al-Qaida core in Pakistan. A relentless campaign, primarily using drones and highlighted by the 2011 commando raid that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, gradually wore down the core by 2015.

More at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/09/10/al-qaida-today-18-years-after-9-11/