“Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” the president told a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001.
A decade later, al-Qaeda still exists, but it has never again executed an operation on the scale of 9/11.
The 10th anniversary of the attacks has raised some concern that the terrorist organization could take the opportunity to strike again, but experts say that scenario is highly unlikely.
British scholar and author Alia Brahimi has written several books about al-Qaeda, terrorism, and religious warfare. She, like most other experts, believes that al-Qaeda was at the peak of its operational powers at the time of 9/11, when it had funding and a base in Afghanistan, and that the following decade has been a disaster for the organization.
The organization’s decline is not only due heavy Western intervention, but also because al-Qaeda operations have killed so many civilian Muslims, thus alienating people in the regions that the group controlled. As a result, the local populations no longer look to them as an alternative.
Al-Qaeda’s claim to be defending Muslims against the Western aggressors has become untenable given that most victims are Muslim civilians. The organization is therefore morally bankrupt, Brahimi says.
“[Al-Qaeda] has never come close to establishing itself as a mainstream movement, which was its aspiration. Where al-Qaeda took territory, as in Iraq, it had nothing to offer the local population but brutality,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Epoch Times.
In a recent blog post, Brahimi details how the population in the areas of Iraq that fell under al-Qaeda rule were subjected to bans on smoking and music, men were forced to wear beards and women to cover themselves. Punishments included rape, mutilation, and beheading of children. The popularity they enjoyed during the early phase of the war in Iraq quickly dwindled.
Indeed, today al-Qaeda is even reluctant to use the name, because of the bad reputation attached to it. In Yemen, where one of the most active branches of al-Qaeda—Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP—is waging a war against the government, they instead often use the name Ansar al-Sharia, as earlier reported by The Epoch Times. This is because the local population, even in remote villages, now reacts negatively to the name al-Qaeda.
The only way for al-Qaeda to try to regain any legitimacy in the Muslim world is to attack Western targets, according to Brahimi. But as the decade has progressed, their attacks have become less and less deadly, now relying on “Western ‘lone wolves’ to self-radicalize on the Internet and plan and conduct their attacks within the Western heartland, entirely unaided,” she wrote.
A recent example is the Stockholm Christmas suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahad, who only managed to kill himself and lightly injure two people, after one of the homemade bombs in his bomb pack went off.
The prospect of a large-scale anniversary attack on 9/11 this year was recently examined by intelligence analysts at STRATFOR. Its conclusion is that al-Qaeda almost certainly would like to carry out a major attack on the anniversary, but the likelihood of success is very low.
First of all, the world’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies are all highly prepared and vigilant around the date, making planning and execution of an attack extra difficult. Secondly, there is nothing to indicate that al-Qaeda has the capacity to carry out a large-scale coordinated attack anymore.
Not only Osama bin Laden, but several other high-ranking leaders of al-Qaeda have also been arrested or liquidated recently. Moreover, along with those operations, Western intelligence agencies have collected a lot of intelligence on the organization. STRATFOR concludes that al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based core group is currently “off balance and concerned for its security.”
Any threat of an attack on Sept. 11, 2011, is more likely to come from the aforementioned lone wolves or “jihadist grass-roots operatives,” but their attacks would be much simpler, more likely to be detected and thwarted, and much less deadly if successful, according to STRATFOR.
Brahimi agrees that a weakened al-Qaeda may not be in a position to mount a large number of successful lone-wolf attacks. But, she cautioned, this doesn’t mean the threat has been entirely eliminated. “[This] isn’t to say that the United States will not eventually suffer another large-scale attack—it probably will.”
