Al Qaeda is being hollowed to its core

Al-Qaeda’s central leadership was forced to grapple with the loss of the group’s number two, Abu Muhammed al-Masri, who was assassinated in Iran in August, and of Hossam Abdul Raouf, a senior media official and a member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council who was killed in October in Afghanistan. Unconfirmed reports that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri died magnify the sense of the group’s misfortunes. Al-Zawahiri could still be alive, but the lack of compelling evidence to prove that — a new video message from him that refers to events that happened after he supposedly died — exposes al-Qaeda’s problems.

Two things drove the setbacks suffered by al-Qaeda over the course of 2020. First, continuous counter-terrorism pressure by the United States and its allies has paid off. While the United States likely provided valuable intelligence, the operations against al-Masri in Iran and Droukdel on the Malian-Algerian border, were executed by Israel and France, respectively. Second, the further erosion of the organization’s cohesion means that al-Qaeda is no longer greater than the sum of its parts, as it was in the past. The shift to a more decentralized model (which we discuss more below) has exposed the varying objectives between core al-Qaeda and its branches. Core al-Qaeda has always sought to attack the West, even when it lacked such capabilities. Most of al-Qaeda’s regional branches, on the contrary, have prioritized local issues and conflicts with other non-state armed groups and regimes in the region. Some, especially al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, have plotted high-level external operations.