A quarter-century after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington killed nearly 3,000 people, a single kingpin of the international jihadist movement is difficult to identify.
More than two decades of the U.S.-led global war on terrorism have seen Osama bin Laden and other key leaders of his al-Qaida network killed, captured or imprisoned. Senior figures of its deadlier rival, the Islamic State group, have met the same fate.
Yet the two organizations and their affiliated Sunni Islamist militant groups have survived as far more diffuse networks, making them harder to eliminate. Their ideologies continue to elicit support and attract recruits.
Among the various Islamic State and al-Qaida branches, prominent figures in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia are pursuing divergent paths and offer distinct capabilities. None apparently match bin Laden’s charismatic leadership. Most fall short of his profile as an exceptional combination of leader, ideologue, financier and propagandist. But some offer dangerous prospects and continue to pose significant threats not only to regional and global security but also to the very idea of the postcolonial state, which is already unraveling in some Muslim societies.
“Someone like bin Laden wouldn’t last long in this current environment,” said Lucas Webber, a Canadian researcher whose Militant Wire website tracks militant groups. “They are eliminated very quickly just because of how tracking methods for militaries and intelligence agencies have become so advanced.”
Some of today’s most prominent figures in international jihad are relatively unknown and shadowy. Unlike bin Laden, they cannot conduct press conferences or meet Western journalists for interviews. Even open-source investigators can use topographical or geographical information to pinpoint locations shown in videos, a favored method bin Laden used to relay his messages.
That is one reason none of today’s jihadist kingpins have bin Laden’s profile or are as widely known. Consider the current purported Islamic State leader, Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. The killing of his predecessors has forced him into such obscurity that intelligence services dispute his real identity or even whether he is a real person, according to the United Nations.
Experts studying Islamist militant groups are, however, divided over their strength, effectiveness and the threats they now pose.
“One of the weaknesses of this Sunni Jihadi or Jihadi Salafi movement writ large is that it does lack a kind of unifying figure like Osama bin Laden,” said Cole Bunzel, a historian and regional expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “It really hasn’t had such a figure since Osama bin Laden.”
Bunzel argues that bin Laden’s killing in a U.S. special operations raid in the northwestern Pakistani city of Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, was a major turning point.
“Current leaders are kind of shrouded in secrecy. Their status is diminished, and it’s more of a leaderless movement now,” he said.
Niccola Milnes, a counterterrorism and conflict adviser, however, sees al-Qaida functioning globally rather than fading. She says that under the broad strategic vision of its de facto leader, Sayf al-Adl, who is believed to operate from Iran, none of its branches have broken with the organization in the four years since bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
“Clearly, Al-Qaida’s model of strategic patience is paying off,” she said. Since losing its sanctuary in Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion prompted by the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaida adopted “strategic patience,” a vision of slow progress toward its goal of establishing an Islamic state governed by its ultraradical interpretation of Islamic law.
More than two decades later, some of its affiliates are ascendant. In April, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, or JNIM, an al-Qaida affiliate in Africa’s Sahel region led by Iyad ag Ghaly, took part in a sweeping offensive across Mali that killed the country’s defense minister in the capital Bamako. JNIM has expanded its reach across large parts of Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso while raising millions of dollars through kidnapping for ransom.
In Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is led by Saad bin Atef al-Awlaki, who has relied heavily on tribal alliances as the organization seeks to rebuild its capabilities. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, has been a prominent AQAP figure and propagandist. In South Asia, a mysterious Pakistani figure known by his nom de guerre, Osama Mahmood, has kept al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent alive despite heavy pressure.
In contrast, Islamic State leaders continue to be targeted regularly, perhaps partly because the group is averse to local alliances and has created too many adversaries. Last week, Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari, a key Islamic State propagandist and the group’s spokesman, was killed in Yemen. In May, a joint U.S.-Nigerian military operation killed Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, a senior Islamic State leader.
Yet some Islamic State leaders continue to pose significant threats. Sanaullah Ghafari, who goes by the alias Shahab al-Muhajir and leads the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP, continues to oversee a branch blamed for devastating terrorist attacks. Abdulkadir Mumin, a Somali cleric and senior Islamic State figure, is another key leader in the organization’s increasingly important African network.
“History counsels humility,” Milnes said. “IS has also shown that as an organization, they have a deep bench and can absorb these high-level losses.”
