With no US troops on the ground, the Taliban have served as the main counterterrorism force against the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K), which remains among the most operationally active transnational terrorist groups operating today. Al Qaeda has been significantly weakened during the nearly 20-year US-led war on terror, and the organization is plagued by significant shortcomings, including financial problems, leadership disruptions, limited command and control, and internal strife.
Worry
However, the United States and its allies have underestimated al Qaeda in the past, and with counterterrorism now overshadowed by a focus on great power competition, there is growing concern that al Qaeda may be able to regenerate its networks in Afghanistan and across South Asia, infiltrating through its cores in the Indian subcontinent (AQIS) in collaboration with Pakistani jihadist groups such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or the Pakistani Taliban.
Al Qaeda’s core has weakened, but several al Qaeda franchise groups and regional branches remain prominent, especially its affiliates in sub-Saharan Africa, where al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) in the Sahel have grown and developed in recent years. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen also remains a persistent threat and is likely looking for ways to exploit the ongoing instability in that country to recruit new members and bolster its ranks. However, in most areas around the world, al-Qaeda affiliates have been eclipsed by rivals belonging to the Islamic State.
IS-K is one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world right now, fighting to hold footholds in Afghanistan while launching several high-profile foreign operations, including attacks in Iran, Turkey and Russia.
Several IS-K plots have also been foiled, including one targeting a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria intended to cause massive civilian casualties. US intelligence passed information to their Austrian counterparts and helped foil this criminal conspiracy. Many of the people IS-K has radicalized are extremely young, having spent time watching IS-K propaganda videos on TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms.
Network
Elsewhere, the Islamic State continues to thrive. It maintains regional subsidiaries in the Sahel, Central Africa, Mozambique and Somalia. The Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP) and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) continue to expand their operations, which now extend from the West African coastal region to the Lake Chad Basin. Whole areas of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have been overrun by jihadists.
Multiple coups in sub-Saharan Africa saw the rise of military regimes, which in turn recruited Russian mercenaries from Wagner, now known as the Africa Corps. Russian mercenaries have been running campaigns killing civilians and committing human rights abuses, which only further exacerbates the grievances of the local population suffering in the arms of terrorist groups. In Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State is on the offensive. Meanwhile, Iran continues to work behind the scenes to pressure Iraqi leaders in Baghdad to end the US troop presence in Iraq.
Beyond Salafist jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the US and the West also face threats from Iranian-sponsored terrorism, including Tehran’s proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthi movement in Yemen and various militia groups throughout Iraq and Syria.
ENEMY WITHIN THE GATES
«Agathi” in soft hypogastrium of America
Far-right extremists also pose a threat to the United States and the West more broadly, including neo-Nazi and white-collar networks and groups such as the Base, the Atomwaffen Division, the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), and others. The US has moved to target several of these groups, including RIM and NRM, while working to help dismantle the support networks that support racially and ethnically motivated and violent extremists around the world. On the domestic front, domestic terrorism remains a significant concern, with individuals and small groups of extremists from across the ideological spectrum motivated by a range of tendencies. This includes so-called ‘salad bar terrorism’, where extremists pick up various aspects of wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory ideologies after radicalizing themselves online on social media forums or gaming websites.
Automatic weapons
In the US this threat is exacerbated by easy access to automatic weapons. The terrorist threat is anything but static. Instead, violent non-state actors are constantly looking for new ways to innovate, “embracing” emerging technologies and working to leverage unmanned aerial systems (UAS), artificial intelligence, 3D printing and other methods. And with terrorist groups competing with each other for supremacy, the over-thematization process could lead one group to attempt a chemical or biological weapons attack in an attempt to gain the upper hand over its rivals.
The challenge is compounded by shifting priorities in the United States. After two decades of aggressive counterterrorism operations around the world, there is a certain sense of counterterrorism fatigue throughout the U.S. government. Moreover, with the rise of China and the invasion of revanchist Russia in Ukraine, as well as Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, there have been other priorities that have overtaken the counterterrorism mission. The under-resourcing of counter-terrorism is likely a trend that will continue, even if many analysts see the correction as more of an over-correction and thus short-sighted in scope and character.
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