The statement also announced the formation of "The World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders," which consisted of a tacit alliance between Bin Laden, his supporters, and a number of regional Islamic militant groups. Following Al Qaeda's bombings of the U. Cole in Yemen , Bin Laden refused to take direct responsibility for the attacks, but claimed that he approved of the strikes and shared the motivations of the individuals who had carried them out.

Bin Laden argued that the bombings should be seen by Americans and the world as retribution for U. Osama Bin Laden's longstanding threats to strike the United States came to fruition on September 11, , and Bin Laden and others subsequently issued several statements confirming Al Qaeda's responsibility for the attacks on New York and Washington.

Following an established pattern, Bin Laden acknowledged his support for the hijackers and repeated his claim that strikes on American targets should be viewed by Muslims and Americans as a defensively motivated response to perceived American aggression in the Islamic world.

Statements attributed to Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri since have promised further attacks and sought to justify Al Qaeda's targeting of American and British civilians by arguing that Western societies are morally corrupt, recent democratic reform and human rights initiatives are insincere or bankrupt, and American and British civilians should be held accountable for the policies of their democratically elected governments in the Middle East that Al Qaeda finds objectionable or unjust.

Several Al Qaeda statements have addressed the motives for the Embassy bombings and other terrorist operations, but relatively few statements have been made regarding Al Qaeda's strategic goals in planning and executing the September 11, , attacks on New York and Washington.

A text attributed to Al Qaeda military commander Sayf al Adl released in May identifies three primary objectives for the September 11 attacks. Al Adl indicates that in the opinion of Al Qaeda's leadership, this primary objective was "partially achieved," although "other strikes" would have had a greater impact if they had been successful.

However, Al Adl does not identify specific planned attacks that may have been disrupted since September Al Qaeda's second objective, as identified by Al Adl, was to signal and support the "emergence of a new virtuous leadership" dedicated to opposing "the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant coalition" that Al Qaeda blames for a litany of social and political ills in the Islamic world.

Analysts have associated this stated objective with Al Qaeda leaders' views of themselves as the vanguard of a broader global Islamic movement and their desire to inspire political upheaval and change across the Islamic world. The third and "ultimate objective," according to Al Adl, "was to prompt [the United States] to come out of its hole. Reflecting on the subsequent U. Al Adl and others have conceded that the attacks on New York and Washington were not totally successful, while arguing that the September 11 attack "was enough to prompt the Americans to carry out the anticipated response"—namely direct military action within the Islamic world.

Both Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri have criticized the population and governments of the Islamic world for failing to answer their calls to arms and for cooperating with the United States and its allies. These criticisms have been coupled with renewed calls for armed "resistance" against the United States and its allies from Al Zawahiri, Al Adl, the late Al Zarqawi, and others. In and , Bin Laden personally addressed the governments and citizens of Europe and the United States directly in an effort to discourage further support for their respective foreign policies in the Islamic world.

In April , Bin Laden proposed a "truce" with Europeans if they agreed to abandon their support for the United States and their military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The offer was resoundingly rejected by European leaders and their citizens. In October , on the eve of the U. These sentiments were echoed in tapes issued by Al Zawahiri in , in which he cited Bin Laden's truce offer and characterized Al Qaeda's message to Americans and their allies as "crystal clear.

Let them bear the consequences of their rejection. Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders have cast further doubt on the validity of their truce proposals by simultaneously calling for further attacks on U. The first tape, released on December 16, , received media attention for its praise of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group's attack on the U. Bin Laden appealed directly to "the silent ulema " religious scholars and business and community leaders in Saudi Arabia to withdraw their support for the ruling Al Saud family.

In the second tape, released on December 27, , Bin Laden underscored Al Qaeda's interest in Iraq and support for the ongoing insurgency. Bin Laden's January message implied that Al Qaeda operatives had infiltrated the United States and were preparing to strike. In December , Bin Laden identified the conflict in Iraq as "a golden and unique opportunity" for jihadists to engage and defeat the United States, and he characterized the insurgency in Iraq as the central battle in a "Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation.

On a strategic level, Bin Laden has employed well-known Quranic injunctions against failing to contribute to "the cause of God" to appeal to Muslims to support Al Qaeda and its jihadist affiliates in Iraq politically, financially, and militarily.

Subsequent statements attributed to Al Zarqawi and Ayman al Zawahiri have underscored the importance of the conflict in Iraq to the jihadist cause from Al Qaeda's perspective.

Both men vehemently denounced the successful constitutional and electoral processes that have laid the groundwork for the formation of the new Iraqi government: Al Zawahiri has repeatedly argued that the democratic reforms initiated by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan are incomplete and insincere, while Al Zarqawi adopted more sectarian rhetoric in seeking to dissuade Iraq's Sunni community from participating in the country's democratic processes and to condemn Iraq's Shiite political organizations and communities on religious grounds.

On a tactical level, statements from leading Al Qaeda figures have demonstrated a degree of differentiation in their preferred methods for opposing coalition forces in Iraq and the new Iraqi government. Bin Laden has identified "martyrdom operations," or suicide attacks, as "the most important operations" for disrupting the activities of the United States and its allies.

He has applied similar disregard for ethnic, linguistic, and ideological differences in issuing condemnations of so-called collaborators; identifying Arabs cooperating with Iraqi and coalition authorities as equally guilty parties. These differences became public in October after the publication of an intercepted letter reportedly written by Al Zawahiri to Al Zarqawi in which Al Zawahiri offered advice to Al Zarqawi on his campaign in Iraq.

Specifically, Al Zawahiri questioned the wisdom of pursuing a campaign against Shiite Iraqis on a sectarian basis when sectarian violence may reduce overall public support among the region's Sunni Muslim population for Al Qaeda's objectives. Abu Musab al Zarqawi and Al Qaeda military leader Sayf al Adl have referred to the current situation in Iraq as an opportunity for the global jihadist movement to take advantage of insecurity in the heart of the Arab world and to spread into neighboring areas.

Al Adl has speculated that the ongoing violence in Iraq may spread into Syria and Lebanon, which could give "the Islamic action a vast area of action and maneuvering" and help it to attract "tremendous human and financial resources.

Al Zarqawi's group claimed responsibility for two terrorist attacks in Jordan as well as a rocket attack launched against Israel from Lebanon in December The Islamic State and its leaders share the strict anti-Shiite sectarian views of Al Zarqawi and routinely refer to Iraqi Shiites in hostile, derogatory terms while launching attacks against Sunni and Shiite government officials and civilians.

In July , Al Baghdadi released an audiotape threatening to launch attacks against Iran unless the Iranian government withdraws its support for Iraqi Shiites. The Islamic State of Iraq's insistence on enforcing their strict interpretations of religious law on Iraqi civilians and targeting members of other insurgent groups, including the religiously oriented Islamic Army of Iraq, has led to fighting that has killed insurgents and Al Qaeda operatives across western and central Iraq in recent months.

Since December , Ayman Al Zawahiri has congratulated Al Baghdadi for the establishment of the so-called Islamic State and has reiterated his plea for fighters in Iraq to overcome their differences in the aftermath of fighting between the Islamic Emirate and other Sunni insurgent groups. The operations of Al Qaeda affiliates continue to be complemented by centrally-planned ideological outreach activities. In a January 30, audiotape, for example, Ayman al Zawahiri identified "three foundations" of Al Qaeda's political ideology and applied them to events in Iraq and elsewhere.

The "three foundations," as outlined by Al Zawahiri are as follows:. Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi have applied these and other similar principles to issues of democracy, reform, and conflict in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories.

In both of his December statements, for example, Bin Laden clearly stated his view that democracies, constitutional governments, and insufficiently Islamic monarchies are equally unacceptable forms of governance for Islamic societies because they empower human rulers and man-made legal systems rather than "the law of God.

The initial goal would be to concentrate efforts against the U. The next step would then be to overthrow the apostate regimes, creating the conditions for the emergence of authentic Muslim governments. The definition of the U. New York: Alpha. It is our framework that lets us define al-Qaeda as a terrorist group. We then have the use of terror with the intention to alter the correlation of forces, but it is not expected that the terrorist act in itself will directly alter the result in favor of the group.

The statement above can be evaluated by looking at the concrete impacts of the terrorist attacks. Note, therefore, that significant damage was caused, but that the correlation of forces between the U. Besides, the statement cited above can also be evaluated through the prism of al-Qaeda's finances. Most of their resources are directed to carrying out terrorist attacks 14 14 According to data assembled by Byman a, p.

The cost of the attacks on the London metro were somewhere around 8, GBP. With relation to revenue, al-Qaeda seeks to not restrict itself to just one sponsor country. As a result, al-Qaeda had to diversify its sources of income.

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Accessed on January 28, Despite these diverse sources of financing, this total would not sustain a direct confrontation with the U. We therefore have more important evidence that the link between the acts and al-Qaeda's political objective is indirect, which allows us to categorize al-Qaeda as a terrorist group in the terms we have proposed here.

Zarqawi even went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, but returned to Jordan at the end of the conflict, ending up participating in groups opposed to the government. However, he was arrested in after batches of explosives were found in his possession. After leaving prison in , Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan, seeking the support of bin Laden in order to build his organization. Furthermore, bin Laden and Zawahiri disagreed with the extremist views of Zarqawi, particularly with his emphasis on attacking Shiites, who the Jordanian accused of betrayal.

Despite their differences, both groups managed to work together, above all because of the fact that Zarqawi operated in the Levant — a region that spans from Jordan to Syria — where al-Qaeda was fragile. The U. Chosen by then-President George W. Bush to command the provisional authority of Iraq, Paul Bremer took two decisions that contributed to increasing the destabilization of the country.

In , taking advantage of this situation, Zarqawi swore loyalty to bin Laden, giving birth to al-Qaeda in Iraq. This association brought benefits for both groups. Despite these gains, the relationship continued to be permeated with divergences because bin Laden and Zawahiri were pressing for terrorist attacks focused on U. After the death of Zarqawi in June and a series of attacks on al-Qaeda in Iraq when Sunni tribes allied with the U.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri looked to intervene, advising the remnants to discard the objectives and tactics designed by Zarqawi and to seek the support of the local population. The decision taken, however, went contrary to that advice. Shortly before his death, Zarqawi had founded a council composed of various jihadist groups acting in Iraq because he recognized that it made no sense for al-Qaeda in Iraq to compete with them. This council then announced the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq, leading Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Zarqawi's successor, to swear loyalty to this new body, which was led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

However, in , the Islamic State of Iraq seemed to have its days numbered. Two events, however, ended up helping the Islamic State of Iraq survive. First, after the withdrawal of U. Such a stance galvanized Sunni resistance, throwing it into the arms of extremist movements acting in the country, especially the Islamic State of Iraq. The second event was the emergence of the civil war in Syria in If the sectarianism between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq was of the utmost importance in allowing for the regrouping of the Islamic State of Iraq, the Syrian context allowed al-Baghdadi to expand his operation radius.

The border between Syria and Iraq had always been porous, which allowed jihadists to penetrate Iraqi territory. Jihadist groups now returned to Syrian territory and destabilized the country even more. The Islamic State of Iraq took advantage of this situation and entered the conflict, especially through the Jabat al-Nursa organization, which was formed in January Finally, on July 04, , after taking large portions of Syrian and Iraqi territories, Baghdadi declared the formation of a new caliphate, occupying the position of caliph himself.

Like Al-Qaeda, the origin contexts cited above point to the relevance that U. Likewise, the status quo that it so longed to alter was also one of asymmetry between Muslim countries and the West. The difference, as one will see, rests in the justifications for the goals sought by ISIS, as with the means of action, which will be explored in the next section. In ideological terms, however, the biggest difference between the groups was perhaps the apocalyptic bias of ISIS.

It deals with a process of purifying Islam, to the degree that some chosen ones will determine who should be extirpated from the political community, as well as those from outside it who threaten that same community. Furthermore, Baghdadi, in addition to having a degree in Islamic studies from the University of Baghdad and having worked as an Imam in Baghdad and Fallujah, considers himself to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, which would legitimize even more his interpretation of Muslim teachings.

This vision of the world presents relevant implications, above all about the definition of enemies of the caliphate. Among its list of antagonists, ISIS believes that it must begin to eliminate those who are closest, such as the Shiites and Kurds, for example. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. All told, the political objective of ISIS is also the reversal of the situation of the Muslim world's submission.

However, in contrast to al-Qaeda, such a reversal has, as stages, the territorial affirmation of ISIS, which implies the definition of local and regional enemies. This is to be carried out without overlooking, however, the threat that external actors such as the U.

To reach the objectives delineated above, it is possible to argue that ISIS has, roughly, two types of main strategies, each of which is related to one of its tasks. With relation to the territorial consolidation of the caliphate, the strategy used is to build a state while its transnationalization involves other means, among them the terrorist political use of terror.

Both the U. Annual Review of Political Science. Taking this path, it seems to us that the events above allowed for ISIS to undertake a war of conquest on the territories and incite a political revolution in the region.

The conquest of a territory the size of the United Kingdom is a more concrete example of this. The second step, however, is understanding which strategies for political stabilization ISIS used.

Finally, 'caudillismo' is when the government of a certain country is successively filled by notable figures that can only stabilize it provisionally. In general, totalitarian regimes stabilize themselves by imposing power bargains between classes, parties, ethnicities, etc. At the same time, they incorporate old structures of power with a new political apparatus, interested above all in a continuous ideological transformation. Such an institutional design has as a goal not only the control of the areas it has seized, but also that of minimizing the impact that the occasional death of one of its leaders could have on the functioning of the organization.

In addition to political bargains with the population for the establishment of a new government structure, another strategy of the foremost importance is the provision of services. ISIS has renovated roads and highways, improvised free community kitchens and looked to guarantee the supply of energy. These actions are evidence not only of a preoccupation in establishing legitimacy with the populations of the occupied territories, but they also point to efforts to control the territories because, for example, the repair of highways is fundamental for the movement of troops.

However, we cannot forget another facet that has made ISIS become known worldwide: the episodes of abuse and violence perpetrated in its territories.

No less revolting are the occurrences of abduction and slavery, targeted primarily against ethnic and religious minorities. These and other examples allow us to state that ISIS's strategy of local control entails the provision of services and the non-terrorist use of terror, that is, that the use of terror is directly linked to the objective of controlling the local population in the present moment.

In: Bringing the state back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Establish a presence in societies marked by sectarian, tribal, ethnic, and political tensions; Accentuate these divisions by making use of calculated terrorist attacks, creating internal conflicts or even external confrontations between potential adversaries with the purpose of undermining morale and strength; When the military control of territories is possible, extract all resources possible in order to finance additional expansion; Use, in a planned way, propaganda to air an image of strength; So far, al Qaeda has given priority to widening its regional reach.

As of early , it has six core branches stretching from the Sahel to the Indian Subcontinent. The Pentagon estimated that it still had at least 10, fighters. In , it managed to sustain attacks—notably assassinations and bombings—in both countries. Yet there were key differences between the two battlefields. Image Credit Data collected by Aaron Y. It vanquished Huras al Din, the local al Qaeda branch in June But there are still questions about whether its political project—through the Salvation Government—will succeed or, instead, illustrate shortcomings ruling a society.

HTS has not been as authoritarian as ISIS, but it has frequently arrested opponents or killed activists and civilians. If HTS can survive, its brand of insurgency and governance could appeal to other jihadi groups looking for a model, especially given the failure of ISIS to hold its territorial control. The Islamic State is playing this game too, and wherever there is a call to jihad, there is a rivalry. Although attention is focused on the Islamic State, Al Qaeda affiliates have done well in recent months.

The Islamic State has gained support from a number of important jihadist groups. In March, Islamic State supporters in Yemen bombed Houthi mosques, playing on the sectarian war narrative that the Islamic State has long emphasized and Al Qaeda has long sought to suppress—indeed, AQAP immediately issued a statement publicly disavowing any involvement in the mosque bombings.

It is difficult, however, to gauge the overall level of Islamic State support. Al Qaeda has historically been fairly quiet for a terrorist group when it comes to claiming and boasting of attacks, while the Islamic State often exaggerates its own prowess and role to the point of absurdity.

In the past, when an affiliate joined Al Qaeda, it usually took on more regional activities and went after more international targets in its region, but did not focus on attacks in the West.

By taking on the Islamic State label, local groups seem to want to attach themselves to a brand that has caught the attention of jihadists worldwide. Yet this ascendance may be transitory. Like its predecessor organization in Iraq, the Islamic State may also find that its brutality repels more than it attracts, diminishing its luster among potential supporters and making it vulnerable when the people suddenly turn against it.

The good news is that the Islamic State is not targeting the American homeland—at least for now. Its emphasis is on consolidating and expanding its state, and even the many foreign fighters who have flocked to its banner are being used in suicide bombings or other attacks on its immediate enemies, not on plots back in the West.

Western security services are on high alert against the Islamic State threat. The thousands of foreign fighters under its banner are post a risk of greater regional instability at the very least, and U. Many of these individuals will have had little or no contact with the Islamic State as an organization, but they find its ideology and methods appealing and will act on their own. Ironically, some of these individuals may have preferred to go to Iraq and Syria, but Western disruption efforts make it easier for them to attack at home.

The United States and its allies should try to exploit the fight between the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and, ideally, diminish them both. Efforts to stop foreign fighters should stress this infighting.

Playing up its atrocities, especially against other Sunni Muslims, will steadily discredit the group. Military efforts matter tremendously beyond the immediate theater of operations. For Al Qaeda, the constant drone campaign has diminished the core in Pakistan and made it harder for it to exercise control over the broader movement.

Zawahiri himself is an important target, as he is the last major figure of the original generation of Al Qaeda with a global profile, and he will not be easily replaced. For the Islamic State, defeat on the ground will do more to diminish its appeal than any propaganda measure. If it fails at this mission by losing territory, its luster will diminish. The threat to U. Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and local jihadist groups have long put them in their crosshairs, and the Islamic State is likely to do the same.

The overall level of risk remains roughly similar, but their manner of death if captured is likely to be more gruesome at the hands of the Islamic State.