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The franchised terrorism of al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden

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Rebel fighters defend a key Libyan oil town of Ras Lanuf in 2011. Uprisings during the Arab Spring weakened governments in Libya and other countries, leading to a rise in militia forces.()
Rebel fighters defend a key Libyan oil town of Ras Lanuf in 2011. Uprisings during the Arab Spring weakened governments in Libya and other countries, leading to a rise in militia forces.()
After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, al-Qaeda became one of the great modern bogeymen, claiming credit for terrorist attacks all over the world. However, the jihadist group is less a centralised organisation than a loose coalition of franchises, writes Annabelle Quince.

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Last week Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, was convicted in New York for conspiring to kill US nationals and conspiring to assist a terrorist organisation, al-Qaeda. The conviction is just one of a number of blows the US has landed against al-Qaeda in recent years. Yet despite these setbacks, the organisation is rematerialising as a political force.

The al-Qaeda that is re-emerging in North Africa and the Middle East today is very different from the al-Qaeda that first emerged under Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Al-Qaeda was originally created as a highly hierarchical organisation with clear aims and philosophy.

Al-Qaeda now is a franchised organisation, they have branches in most of the Middle East and most of the Islamic worlds, and it is growing.

‘Al-Qaeda, at least as it was initially conceived by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and others ... had a range of committees that reported directly to bin Laden, that were involved in financing, religious elements, [issuing] fatwas or religious edicts, propaganda and information operations, military and combat operations, and then finances, both externally bringing in money but also overseeing how money was spent within the organisation,’ says Seth Jones, associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation.

That bureaucratic structure changed completely after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda faced very severe losses and much of its membership was either arrested or killed. Leadership was scattered in two directions, the majority, including Zawahiri, bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, fled to Pakistan. Bin Laden also sent his backup command and control regime to Iran. Initially this was supported by the Iranian regime, but then many of them were put under house arrest.

Al-Qaeda decentralised completely and became a loose organisation with sub-groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, North Africa and Libya.

‘Al-Qaeda now is a franchised organisation, they have branches in most of the Middle East and most of the Islamic worlds, and it is growing,’ says Abdel Bari Atwan, the author of The Secret History of Al Qaeda and After bin Laden: Al Qaeda, The Next Generation.

According to Atwan, the US made a strategic mistake when it invaded Iraq, providing al-Qaeda with a safe haven and a means for recruitment. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the first ‘franchise’ and by 2006 was very influential across the Sunni triangle. But as their influence spread, the Iraqi tribes quickly became disenchanted with their extremist practices.

‘The Americans were very clever,’ says Atwan. ‘General Petraeus, the leader of the American troops in Iraq, he realised that there is an opportunity to fight al-Qaeda by actually recruiting the tribes and creating some sort of awakening groups in order to fight al-Qaeda.’

Rebel fighters belonging to an al-Qaeda-linked group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), inspect the wreckage of a Syrian army helicopter.()

General Petraeus was eventually able to recruit and support more than 18,000 people from the tribes in what was dubbed the ‘Sunni Awakening’. Over the next few years, al-Qaeda lost virtually all of the territory it once controlled in Iraq, which had included Ramadi, Fallujah and parts of Baghdad. Bin Laden, who was in hiding in Pakistan at the time, attempted to rein in the worst excesses of al-Qaeda in Iraq but failed.

‘Osama bin Laden was, we now know, very unhappy about the direction that al-Qaeda in Iraq had gone in,’ says Jones. 'Instead of sending communication to Zarqawi directly, what we do know is he had several of his deputies send letters to Zarqawi telling him to stop the beheadings, stop the killing of Shia, in part because he was undermining local support for al-Qaeda.’

Despite the setback in Iraq due to the awakening campaign, al-Qaeda affiliates continued to increase in number across North Africa and the Middle East. The leaders of these organisations swear allegiance, or bayat, to al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. In 2006 an organisation that had existed under a different name in North Africa re-branded itself as al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb. By 2009 al-Qaeda added a Yemen contingent. In 2012 Somalia’s Al Shabab established a relationship with the al-Qaeda core, while in 2013 Jabhat al-Nusra pledged their loyalty from Syria.

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However, while the number of affiliates expanded, the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan struggled to survive. The CIA’s drone strike program in tribal areas killed many of the group’s senior leaders. Those that survived found it difficult to communicate with the outside world because email, mobile and satellite phone traffic were vulnerable to being monitored and used to target attacks.

‘What this did is it made it difficult for the core to communicate with its affiliates out in the field and then with other Salafi-jihadist groups, say in Nigeria with Boko Haram,’ says Jones. ‘Really, bin Laden before his death was involved at the strategic level in providing some guidance and weighing in on issues that individuals in the field asked for advice on.’

On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed inside a residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but his death had little impact on the spread of al-Qaeda and the ability of the new leadership to influence policy in the affiliates. The drone program continued apace, and there was little that high ranking members like Zawahiri could do to communicate with the rank and file in the field.

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The most dramatic growth in the number of al-Qaeda affiliates came after 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring.

‘The Arab uprisings did several things,’ says Jones. ‘Among the most important and unfortunate was it weakened governments in a number of countries. In Libya for example, after the Gaddafi regime was overthrown, Libya really deteriorated into a series of militia forces with the government controlling cities and parts of cities.’

Atwan argues that it was not just instability that allowed the growth of extremist groups, but also the support and encouragement of international players.

‘Al-Qaeda was invited, it was encouraged and it was armed, directly or indirectly, by Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, like Qatar who have got a lot of money,’ he says. ‘Turkey facilitated passage for those people to come through from different parts of the Muslim and Arab worlds and to go to Syria via the Turkish territories.’

With the number of al-Qaeda groups growing across the Middle East, it was inevitable that disagreements would emerge over territory and control. Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusra, which was formed in late 2011 as a branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq, broke with their parent ‘franchise’ in 2013. Al-Zawahiri sent envoys and attempted mediation, but in January excommunicated al-Qaeda in Iraq from al-Qaeda itself.

‘It's a great example of factional fighting, literal fighting, between two al-Qaeda affiliates in a case like Syria, which is just at the moment where al-Qaeda has expanded on multiple continents, suffering its most significant internal fight,’ says Jones.

Jones points to the core leadership’s inability to control the two groups as an example of how disparate al-Qaeda is today. He splits the organisation into four tiers: a weak core in Pakistan; an increasing number of affiliated groups; jihadist groups more broadly; and ‘lone wolf’ individuals using al-Qaeda as inspiration.

‘What is concerning is the number of these groups is actually increasing,’ says Jones. ‘So what we're seeing is two trends. One is a growing decentralisation, but a second is actually an increase in the number of these Salafi-jihadist groups, an increase in the size of fighters.’

‘Then third, an increase in the number of attacks and casualties and fatalities from those attacks that these groups are perpetrating. So we are tracking multiple different and in some cases conflicting trends.’

Rear Vision puts contemporary events in their historical context, answering the question, ‘How did it come to this?’

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