Al-Qaida is stronger than ever 25 years after 9/11, experts warn
· Toronto Sun
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OTTAWA — With Friday marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the group responsible for carrying them out is not only still thriving, it’s stronger than ever.
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That’s the conclusion of a number of terrorism and global security experts, who say that al-Qaida — the terror group established in the late 1980s by now-dead Saudi terror mastermind Osama bin Laden — has quietly rebuilt itself into a far more dangerous and decentralized global threat.
“It has decentralized and that makes it much harder to monitor,” Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, told the U.K. Sun newspaper.
“You are dealing with people in different countries and communications between them may be limited.”
That’s an assessment shared by terror expert and George Washington University Fellow Dr. Sara Harmouch, who said al-Qaida ‘s capabilities today are far beyond what they were before the notorious 2001 New York City terror attacks.
“It is mind-blowing that people look at al-Qaida as a dead or defunct organization,” she told the newspaper.
“It now has thousands of fighters across a global network, vastly greater financial resources, new training camps and advanced technology. The warning is that things are aligning. They have the resources, they have the technology, the intent is still there and their adaptability is still there.”
New leader a concern
Osama bin Laden was one of 50 children of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, the billionaire founder of the Saudi BinLadin Group — an enormous construction firm with close ties to Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
Heeding the call to join the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden founded al-Qaida in 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Bin Laden led the group until his death in May 2011, when U.S. Navy SEALs conducted a nighttime raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The group’s current leader, former Egyptian special forces officer Saif al-Adel, has largely run the group from the shadows.
That’s prompted the group to switch from overt terror attacks to calculated, long-term strategies, employing a network of thousands of fighters in cells across the world, backed by millions of dollars in revenue and modern warfare capabilities.
Far removed from al-Qaida ‘s past spectacles of terror — ranging from bombings of hotels, military facilities and U.S. embassies to attacks targeting the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 — organizers are promoting supporters in Western nations to conduct low-tech “lone wolf” attacks.
Security experts are growing increasingly concerned over the group’s adoption of weaponized drones, AI-driven recruitment, threats of cyberattacks and reports of research into chemical and biological weapons.