25 years after 9/11, al Qaeda remains a threat – even as Washington looks away

Twenty-five years after 9/11, al Qaeda is a very different force from the one that struck at the heart of America. But it is far from spent.

The global jihadist network has suffered major blows over the past two decades and a half, notably losing its leader Osama bin Laden in a US raid in Pakistan in 2011 and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri in a strike on Kabul just over a decade later.

WatchLive: New York marks 25 years since 9/11 attacks

It was last able to mount an attack on US soil in December 2019, when three people were killed and eight injured at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, in an attack claimed by AQAP, the al Qaeda branch based in the Arabian Peninsula.

While its ability to strike on Western soil appears diminished, the jihadist network remains a deeply destabilising force in several parts of the world, including the Sahel, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“It is not the same organisation that existed on 9/11. But that does not mean it has disappeared completely,” Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told a roundtable discussion at George Washington University earlier this month.

A less centralised organisation than in bin Laden’s days, al Qaeda “has adopted a strategy of devolving authority to its franchises and affiliates, and there’s at least two dozen of them throughout the world”, Hoffman added.

WatchTen years after Paris attacks, West Africa has become world's terrorism hotspot

Among its regional branches, those based in Africa are currently the most active, particularly in the semi-arid Sahel region stretching across Western and north-central Africa, according to FRANCE 24’s Wassim Nasr, an expert on jihadist networks.

Nasr said the recent withdrawal of French and other international troops from the Sahel had “paved the way for a lasting and interconnected presence of jihadist groups throughout the region”. He pointed to the JNIM (Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims), “al Qaeda’s most active affiliate in the region, which extends across Mali and Burkina Faso, as well as Niger, Togo, Benin and Nigeria”.

Regional outfits, global reach

In the eastern Horn of Africa, the al Qaeda-aligned al Shabaab is another active and potent force. It now controls vast swathes of territory in Somalia, having undone years of painstaking efforts to stabilise the war-torn country.

Across the Gulf of Aden, in the Arabian Peninsula, years of conflict have weakened AQAP militarily, though it has managed to replenish its financial resources and resume its propaganda campaigns in both Arabic and English, aimed at Western audiences.

Al Qaeda also remains active in Afghanistan, five years after the withdrawal of US forces and 25 years after bin Laden directed the 9/11 attacks from his Afghan lair. Despite the Taliban’s denials, “al Qaeda continues to enjoy a permissive operative environment” in the country, wrote South Asia specialist Pearl Pandya in a study published by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a US-based research centre on armed conflicts.

The organisation’s various branches and affiliates have retained an ability to plan and think on a global scale, said Colin Smith, the UN coordinator responsible for monitoring sanctions regimes targeting al Qaeda, the Islamic State (IS) group and the Taliban. He highlighted al Shabab’s role as a strategic hub between Africa and branches in the Middle East and Asia.

According to a report released by his team last month, part of a $50 million ransom paid to free a hostage seized by JNIM in Mali in late 2025 was channelled to affiliates including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the organisation’s senior leadership, believed to be in Afghanistan or Iran.

“This demonstrates just how global the organisation is,” Smith told the roundtable at George Washington University.

Threat downgraded

Analysts say the resilience shown by al Qaeda-linked groups is cause for concern at a time when the threat from Islamist terrorism is no longer at the heart of US strategic thinking.

When the White House unveiled a much-anticipated US Counter-terrorism Strategy earlier this year, the first since 2018, many experts were stunned to discover that transnational cartels and criminal gangs – newly designated as foreign terrorist organisations – topped the list of terror threats.

Listed in second place, jihadist organisations were limited to a handful of groups deemed capable of carrying out external operations against US territory and its interests abroad.

“To a reader of official government documentation regarding the terrorism threat landscape twenty-five years after 9/11, it would appear that the story that began with the attacks has largely concluded and that jihadism no longer presents an urgent and lethal threat to the West,” wrote Colin P. Clarke and Clara Broekaert, executive director and researcher respectively at the Soufan Centre, in a study on the future of the global jihadist.

Watch more9/11 then and now: Do September 2001 attacks still shape our world?

As a result of Washington’s shifting priorities, many analysts and officers highly specialised in international jihadism have been transferred to other units. They are now tasked with monitoring threats posed by drug cartels and far-left groups, which the Trump administration regards as the third highest ‘terror’ threat.

In testimony to the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in June, CFR’s Hoffman warned that “the counter-terrorism architecture built after 9/11 is eroding – through budget cuts, personnel losses, and the diminution of terrorism as a national security priority – recreating the conditions of under-resourcing and institutional neglect that preceded the 2001 attacks”.

Speaking at a conference in Dallas on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of those attacks, former president George W. Bush lamented a return to isolationism in the US. In a thinly veiled dig at the Trump administration, he criticised those who “don’t pay attention to the lesson of 9/11, because what happens overseas mattered to our national security at home”.

Homegrown menace

The fight against Islamist terrorism remains a priority in much of Europe, even though the outbreak of war on the continent’s eastern border means it is no longer perceived as the most pressing security threat.

“Right now, the greatest threat to Western European countries is not Islamist terrorism, but rather Russian interference and the war in Ukraine,” said FRANCE 24’s Nasr. “This is because jihadist groups no longer have the same capacity to operate across borders, as was the case when the Islamic State group could mount attacks from territories it controlled in the Middle East.”

Nasr said security services monitoring jihadist activity were mainly focused on the homegrown threat: people already based in the West carrying out attacks in response to calls from terrorist organisations abroad.

“This does not mean intelligence services have lost sight of foreign-based groups. It does not necessarily involve the same services or the same resources,” he cautioned.

Earlier this month, French police detained three people on suspicions they were planning to attack Jewish communities in France and then escape to North Africa to join an IS group affiliate. One of the three had been in touch with suspected US jihadist Jessica Bowie, who was arrested by the FBI last month and charged with plotting an attack on the New York State Capitol.

While Islamist militants lured by jihadist groups remain a threat to the West, the groups’ own priorities have shifted since 9/11, often moving away from the global jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden.

The objectives of the most active organisations are now rooted in their local contexts, said Nasr, noting that the Sahel-based JNIM had ceased to take Western hostages since France had pulled its last troops from the region last year.

Read moreInsurgent alliance strikes at heart of Mali’s junta, exposing limits of Russian protection

“In fact, JNIM is now keen to deny involvement when a Western national is abducted in the region,” he added. “Despite its allegiance to al Qaeda, it operates within the framework of a regional insurgency.”