“Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” former U.S. President George W. Bush stated days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist assaults. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” he instructed the U.S. Congress.
Afghanistan was the primary outpost in what the Bush administration known as a “global war on terror”. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to do away with the Taliban regime, which refused at hand over 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, and defeat al-Qaeda. Twenty years later, the U.S. exited a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with al-Qaeda networks unfold throughout many nations.
War on al-Qaeda
When the 9/11 assault was deliberate and executed, al-Qaeda had a everlasting base within the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Bin Laden was based mostly within the nation and so they had hundreds of militants who have been protected by the Taliban. The U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban regime and killed many al-Qaeda terrorists and disrupted their community in Afghanistan. It was the heaviest blow to al-Qaeda, which had carried out a number of bombings previously focusing on the U.S., together with the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the assault on USS Cole off Aden, Yemen, in 2000.
But al-Qaeda would discover a possibility to regroup and rebuild its organisation in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordan-born al-Qaeda chief, established al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), capitalising on the chaos Iraq fell into after the invasion. Zarqawi additionally exploited the resentment amongst Iraq’s Sunni group in direction of the political modifications in Baghdad (Shias, the nation’s oppressed majority beneath Saddam Hussein’s rule, rose to energy after the invasion) and launched a sectarian civil struggle.
So inside just a few years of the U.S.’s Afghan invasion, al-Qaeda discovered a brand new haven in post-Saddam Iraq.
The rise of IS
Zarqawi was killed in 2006 and AQI suffered setbacks as Iraqi Sunnis, backed by U.S. forces and the central authorities, shaped native militias to tackle the terrorists. This calmed Iraq, but it surely didn’t final lengthy. When Arab regimes have been rocked by protests in 2011, jihadists discovered a brand new alternative amidst the chaos that adopted. In Syria, regional rivals of President Bashar al-Assad and their allies, together with the U.S., provided assist to totally different insurgent teams, pulling the nation right into a lethal civil struggle. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was the chief of the Islamic State of Iraq, the brand new avatar of AQI, despatched a bunch of his militants beneath the command of Abu Mohammad al-Joulani throughout the border to Syria. Joulani would arrange a brand new al-Qaeda department in Syria — Jabhat al-Nusra — which declared struggle on President Assad’s authorities.
Nusra’s brutal techniques and Islamist vigour helped the group seize territories within the chaotic, multi-directional Syrian civil struggle. An formidable Baghdadi introduced the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), involving his group in Iraq and al-Nusra in Syria. Joulani, who was backed by the al-Qaeda core led by Ayman al- Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor, fell out with Baghdadi. But the faction of the Nusra that backed Baghdadi’s name for an Islamic State joined his new outfit, which might emerge as essentially the most ferocious jihadist group from the Syrian civil struggle, capturing territories from Syria’s Raqqa to Iraq’s Mosul and Falluja, virtually erasing the border between the 2 nations.
For just a few years, the IS would reign because the world’s most harmful terrorist outfit, however it will be defeated by concerted makes an attempt by a number of gamers, together with Kurdish and Shia militias and the U.S., Syria. Iraq, Iran and Russia.
Metastasised menace
If al-Qaeda was concentrated in Afghanistan earlier than September 11, they decentralised themselves and unfold to totally different components of the world through the course of the struggle on terror. The IS did the identical when its ‘Caliphate’ got here beneath assault in Iraq and Syria. It opened new provinces in different war-torn nations resembling Afghanistan, the place the civil struggle was occurring, and Libya, which fell into chaos after the NATO invasion of 2011. Boko Haram, a jihadist group that got here up in Nigeria, declared its loyalty to the IS, permitting the group to broaden its operations in Africa. Now, terrorism just isn’t a concentrated menace, but it surely has unfold throughout nations in Asia and Africa. The IS wing in Afghanistan was sturdy sufficient to hold out the August 26 bombing of Kabul airport by which about 200 folks, together with 13 Americans have been killed.
Baghdadi is lifeless, however the man he despatched to Syria to open an area department of al-Qaeda, Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, is now the de facto ruler of Idlib, the province that stays exterior the management of Mr. Assad’s authorities. Al-Qaeda has totally different operational branches now resembling al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda within the Islamic Maghreb. In Africa, each al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS Greater Sahara and IS West Africa Province) have arrange items, which have carried out brutal assaults lately, particularly within the Sahel area. In Somalia, al-Shabab nonetheless stays sturdy.
When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, its first outpost within the struggle on terror, after 20 years of preventing, the phobia menace, as President Joe Biden stated, has “metastasized across the world”. Instead of 1 centralised outfit with a base, the world now has many al-Qaedas.