How al-Qaeda and Islamic State are digging into Africa
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Thirteen years have passed since al-Qaeda’s last big plot against America, a botched effort to blow up New York’s subway in 2009. The war in Afghanistan is over.
Americans and Europeans are preoccupied with other crises, from Ukraine to Taiwan. But the two Hellfire missiles that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader and Osama bin Laden’s successor, on a balcony in Kabul on July 31st were a reminder of his group’s staying power. Mr Zawahiri would not have dreamed of watching the sunrise from the luxury of Kabul’s diplomatic enclave, had the Taliban not conquered Afghanistan last summer.
His safe house was owned by the Haqqani network, a group with ties to Pakistani intelligence. Siraj Haqqani, its leader, is both deputy head of the Taliban and interior minister of Afghanistan. No wonder that Mr Zawahiri, whose communications were once so patchy that many thought him dead, felt secure enough there to release a stream of videos on topics from Syria’s civil war to pro-hijab protests in India.
In one sense Mr Zawahiri’s tenure, from 2011 to 2022, was a failure. His group mounted few big attacks in America or Europe for a decade. Nor did it topple any supposedly “apostate" Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia’s or Egypt’s.
The rise of Islamic State (is) in Syria and Iraq, which had split from al-Qaeda and in 2014 set up a media-savvy caliphate that held territory for several years, made Mr Zawahiri’s outfit look like an also-ran. It is not. “The al-Qaeda terrorist infrastructure we faced in 2001 is long since gone," said Ken McCallum, head of mi5, Britain’s security service, last year, shortly before Kabul fell.
Read more on livemint.com
