The United States may have just dealt al Qaeda a double-blow: a US airstrike killed al Qaeda’s general manager and head of the virulent Yemeni branch, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Nasser al Wahayshi, in eastern Yemen Friday; and two F-15s, targeting a meeting of radical Islamist leaders in Libya Saturday, reportedly killed al Qaeda veteran operative Mokhtar Belmokhtar. The one-two punch compounds recent al Qaeda leadership attrition. The US also took out two other senior AQAP leaders in the previous few months.
But the long-term impact of degrading al Qaeda’s leadership has not been lasting. Osama bin Laden’s death, trumpeted as a death knell for al Qaeda, is now a blip in history. America’s military and intelligence services appeared to have mastered the craft of killing terrorist leaders, but time and again, leadership attrition alone has proven to be an insufficient condition to defeat an organization.
One needs only to look to Iraq to see the proof. Al Qaeda in Iraq, known today as the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS), was defeated by the time the last US troops left the country in 2011. It did not have the capability to conduct an international terrorist attack; it no longer posed a significant threat to the Iraqi state; and its leaders were either dead or in prison. Yet al Qaeda resurged in Iraq, the group split publicly from the global al Qaeda network, and today, ISIS fields a terrorist army. That army, which President Barack Obama dismissed as a “JV team” after it took Fallujah, Iraq, in early January 2014, recently seized control of Ramadi, Iraq, and Palmyra, Syria. The US killed its founder, Abu Mus’ab al Zarqawi, in 2005; yet, the ideology and strategy Zarqawi espoused lives on.
Al Qaeda and now ISIS are more than just their leaders. They are groups that embody a radical ideology that justifies the use of violence and terror to shape the world. They are part of a movement, once relegated to the fringes, that is sweeping across the Muslim-majority world. They are exploiting what the late bin Laden termed “unprecedented opportunities” brought on by the turmoil of the Arab Spring and are positioning themselves for their future. ISIS boldly declared itself a state just under a year ago and it still has the momentum after 10 months of a US-led air and US-supported ground campaign. ISIS’s brutality and barbarism have captured the attention of policy- and decision-makers. Its continued victories in Iraq, Syria, and also Libya distract from or even mask al Qaeda’s insidious growth in places like Yemen and East Africa. The US strategy to counter these groups through leadership attrition and partners on the ground is failing. The global jihadist movement is on the rise.
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