25 Years On: Where Is Al-Qaeda Now?

On September 2nd, 2026 the Program on Extremism hosted a virtual panel discussion marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks: "25 Years On: Where Is Al-Qaeda Now?"

A quarter century after 9/11, al-Qaeda occupies a strange position in the public imagination — assumed by many to have been defeated. The core organization that conducted 9/11 has been degraded. Its affiliates, however, are having their most successful decade. In Mali, al-Qaeda's Sahelian branch has blockaded fuel supplies to the capital and assaulted a national prison. In Somalia, al-Shabaab reversed three years of government gains in a matter of months. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has rebuilt its finances and resumed English-language propaganda aimed at Western audiences. In Afghanistan, five years after the withdrawal, United Nations monitors continue to report an al-Qaeda presence that the Taliban deny.

This event was moderated by Sara Harmouch, Program on Extremism Fellow.

The panel brought together four distinct vantage points:

Bruce Hoffman: Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Colin Smith: Coordinator of the United Nations Security Council's Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, which monitors the Al-Qaida, ISIL, and Taliban sanctions regimes. He previously served for over two decades as a British diplomat, including as head of the FCDO's Counter Terrorism Department.

Thomas Sanderson: Founder and Principal of Tom Sanderson Consulting, a geopolitical risk firm and he is the former Director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, with field research experience across more than seventy countries.

Justine Fleischner: independent conflict and security analyst and a former Armed Groups Expert with the United Nations Panel of Experts on Al-Shabaab. Her work has documented armed group financing, weapons trafficking, and the diversion of materiel in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.

Dr. Sara Harmouch (moderator): terrorism expert and CEO of H9 Defense, Adjunct Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, a Security Fellow at the Frontier Security Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow with GW's Program on Extremism. Her research examines how militant organizations adapt, endure, and expand operationally, with a focus on al-Qaeda. She has conducted primary-source research and fieldwork across the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and Europe, including direct engagement with members of extremist organizations, and has published extensively on al-Qaeda.

On September 2, 2026, the Program on Extremism hosted a virtual panel discussion marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks: "25 Years On: Where Is Al-Qaeda Now?". The panel hosted Dr. Bruce Hoffman, Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service; Colin Smith, the coordinator of the UN Security Council's Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team; Thomas Sanderson, founder and principal of Tom Sanderson Consulting; and Justine Fleischner, independent conflict and security analyst and a former Armed Groups Expert with the UN Panel of Experts on Al-Shabaab. The panel was moderated by Dr. Sara Harmouch, a non-resident fellow at the Program on Extremism.

Dr. Harmouch opened the discussion by noting that while Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are dead and nothing on American soil has approached the scale of 9/11 since, that picture describes al-Qaeda circa 2001 far better than al-Qaeda today. JNIM is sweeping territory in Mali, al-Shabaab has reversed many of the Somali government's gains, AQAP has gained ground and improved its finances in Yemen, and al-Qaeda continues training and advising groups in Afghanistan under a Taliban government that publicly denies its presence.

Turning to Dr. Hoffman, he argued that al-Qaeda's parts have become "greater than the whole," explaining that the organization deliberately devolved authority to more than two dozen affiliates worldwide, particularly in Africa. He cautioned against using attacks on the American homeland as the sole measure of the group's health, noting that the UN monitoring team's work paints a much more complete picture of ongoing activity. Smith illustrated this networked structure with a detail from the latest UN report: a roughly $50 million ransom payment received by JNIM in the Sahel was partly redistributed to AQIM, then to AQAP in Yemen, and even to al-Qaeda's senior leadership in South Asia. He argued that this demonstrates how the network continues to move resources and plans across regions rather than functioning as a collection of disconnected franchises.

Sanderson said the underlying conditions favoring al-Qaeda's affiliates have shifted sharply in their favor. Chronic deprivation, weak governance, and open borders now combine with cheap drones and encrypted communications, while Western governments are increasingly distracted by issues including Iran, Ukraine, and drug cartels. Fleischner used al-Shabaab as an example of what a modern al-Qaeda affiliate looks like. Despite recent territorial losses, conservative estimates place the group's income at approximately $100-150 million and its strength at roughly 15,000 fighters. That financial capacity has allowed al-Shabaab to experiment with attack drones and cryptocurrency transfers. Fleischner also pointed to the 2019 plot involving an operative trained at a Philippine flight school who intended to fly a plane into a target in Atlanta as evidence of the potential reach and sophistication of the broader network.

The panel then debated whether JNIM and al-Shabaab should be understood as manifestations of a single al-Qaeda problem or as separate insurgencies. Fleischner cautioned that al-Shabaab's recent gains represent a fragile picture, pointing to recurring funding gaps whenever African Union or UN mandates lapse as well as unresolved questions surrounding Somalia's political structure. She and Dr. Harmouch agreed that this reflects a broader asymmetry: al-Qaeda operates on long, patient timelines, while Western counterterrorism engagement tends to follow short political cycles.

Sanderson described how several Sahelian states have replaced Western security partners with Russian forces operating under Africa Corps. He argued that this shift has primarily protected coup leaders from international pressure over promised elections rather than meaningfully rolling back JNIM. He also emphasized the scale of the regional problem, noting that Africa accounted for 51 percent of worldwide terrorism deaths in 2024. Dr. Hoffman stressed that although individual affiliates adapt their operations to local conditions, the underlying ideology remains consistent across the network. He cited al-Shabaab's radicalization of Somali-Americans in Minneapolis and its acquisition of bomb-making expertise from AQAP as evidence that the affiliate system is more sophisticated and interconnected than it is often portrayed. Smith reinforced this network framing by pointing to the AQ Shura Council's cross-affiliate membership. He argued that joining a named affiliate represents a deliberate commitment to violence, after which the decision to conduct attacks locally or internationally becomes an ongoing cost-benefit calculation rather than a permanent strategic choice.

Turning to Afghanistan and Yemen, Smith described the AQ-Taliban relationship as an opaque arrangement in which al-Qaeda can train fighters so long as it avoids actions that would visibly embarrass its Taliban hosts. He also noted that al-Qaeda is increasingly capable of operating through umbrella organizations such as Jaish al-Mujahideen Pakistan, allowing it to preserve a degree of deniability. Dr. Hoffman added that the UN's finding of an al-Qaeda presence across roughly one-third of Afghanistan's provinces, combined with reports of the reopening of the Tarnak Farm facility, suggests an active rather than dormant organization. He cautioned against interpreting the absence of a spectacular attack as evidence of decline.

Smith similarly pointed to AQAP as an organization with genuine ambitions rather than merely a propaganda operation. He cited improved finances, a growing drone arsenal, and efforts to establish a maritime operations cell as indicators of increasing capability. Fleischner placed weapons flows between Yemen and Somalia within a much older regional smuggling corridor, cautioning that these transfers generally move through commercial networks used by multiple armed groups rather than through logistics systems dedicated exclusively to al-Qaeda.

The discussion then shifted to U.S. counterterrorism capabilities. Sanderson argued that effective "over-the-horizon" counterterrorism requires a degree of ground presence that the United States no longer possesses, particularly five years after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Fleischner described three successive pullbacks in counterterrorism capacity. The first being COVID-19, then following the Afghanistan withdrawal, and finally through more recent budget cuts. She argued that these reductions have affected not only U.S. capabilities in Afghanistan but also support for important regional partners such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

When asked what constraint most explains the absence of another 9/11-scale attack, the panelists offered different explanations. Dr. Hoffman suggested that terrorist organizations may currently judge the risks of such an operation to be too high. Smith identified a "failure of imagination," suggesting that policymakers may not adequately anticipate how terrorist organizations could exploit emerging capabilities. Sanderson pointed to the increasing difficulty of attacking the U.S. homeland compared with the abundance of opportunities available to terrorist groups overseas. Fleischner warned that quiet experimentation abroad, particularly with technologies such as drones, could eventually generate strategic surprises.

During the Q&A, panelists also discussed changes in U.S. counterterrorism institutions and terrorist communications. They noted that the State Department's counterterrorism coordination office had been dismissed roughly a year earlier and that al-Qaeda's increasing use of encrypted platforms such as Signal has made monitoring its activities more difficult. At the same time, AQAP propaganda has increasingly encouraged Western sympathizers to pursue lone-actor attacks, creating another challenge for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

The panel concluded by considering what evidence would demonstrate that al-Qaeda had entered a genuine and lasting decline. Sanderson said a verifiable mass defection from al-Qaeda to ISIS would convince him that the organization was fundamentally weakening. Smith pointed to the group running out of money to pay its fighters as a potential indicator of collapse. Dr. Hoffman said serial ideological defections across multiple franchises would be significant, but noted that there is currently no evidence of such a trend. Fleischner identified governments durably reclaiming territory and preventing al-Qaeda affiliates from returning as the clearest indication of lasting decline.

Dr. Harmouch closed by observing that 25 years have been long enough for al-Qaeda to be declared defeated multiple times. The more difficult question, she argued, is whether there has ever been a clear agreement about what "defeat" actually means. The discussion ultimately suggested that measuring al-Qaeda solely by its ability to conduct another 9/11-style attack may obscure the organization's broader evolution. Rather than disappearing, al-Qaeda has adapted into a decentralized network of affiliates capable of operating locally while maintaining ideological, financial, and operational connections across regions.