TerrorismAl-Qaeda Is Stronger Today than It Was on 9/11
Despite a United States-led global “war on terror” that has cost $5.9 trillion, killed an estimated 480,000 to 507,000 people and assassinated bin Laden, al-Qaeda has grown and spread since 9/11, expanding from rural Afghanistan into North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, the Gulf States, the Middle East and Central Asia. In those places, al-Qaeda has developed new political influence – in some areas even supplanting the local government.
Al-Qaeda has recruited an estimated 40,000 fighters since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Osama bin Laden-led extremist group attacked the United States, according to the not-for-profit Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite a United States-led global “war on terror” that has cost $5.9 trillion, killed an estimated 480,000 to 507,000 people and assassinated bin Laden, al-Qaeda has grown and spread since 9/11, expanding from rural Afghanistan into North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, the Gulf States, the Middle East and Central Asia.
In those places, al-Qaeda has developed new political influence – in some areas even supplanting the local government.
So how does a religious extremist group with fewer than a hundred members in September 2001 become a transnational terror organization, even as the world’s biggest military has targeted it for elimination?
According to my dissertation research on the resiliency of al-Qaeda and the work of other scholars, the U.S.“war on terror” was the catalyst for al-Qaeda’s growth.
Bin Laden and the ‘war on terror’
Al-Qaeda was founded in Afghanistan in 1988 in response to the Soviet invasion of that country.
For decades, it was a small, weak and uninspiring movement. Bin Laden sought to raise an Islamic coalition of forces to establish a caliphate – an Islamic state governed with strict Islamic law – across the Muslim world. But as late as 1996 he had just 30 fighters willing to die for the cause.
For years, bin Laden tried to merge with such extremist groups as Egypt’s Ibn al-Khattab and the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, hoping to create a global Islamist movement.
These organizations rejected bin Laden’s overtures. These disparate groups lacked a common enemy that could unite them in al-Qaeda’s fight for an Islamic caliphate.
So bin Laden shifted his strategy. He decided to make the United States – a country most Islamic extremist groups see as the enemy of Islam – his main target.
In 1998 al-Qaeda waged successful attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. In 2000, it bombed the USS Cole, a military ship refueling in a Yemen harbor, killing 17 sailors.
Bin Laden hoped the U.S. would respond with a military invasion into Muslim majority territory, triggering a holy war that would put al-Qaeda at the forefront of the fight against these unholy invaders.
