by Howard LaFranchi
Al Qaeda’s fundamentally
different approach to winning the hearts and minds of the world’s
Muslims – recently thrown into shadow by the bold moves of the Islamic
State – is now showing signs of longer-term success.
Al Qaeda has long espoused “strategic patience” to
establish a global caliphate only after gradual persuasion of Muslims
through a long war with the West. That approach contrasts starkly with
that of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which declared a
caliphate in Syria and Iraq months after breaking with Al Qaeda in 2014.
Now, as ISIS
faces mounting pressure from the outside with apparently scant support
from the populations it dominates, Al Qaeda’s “patience” appears to be
paying off. In
Syria, Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra is solidifying both its place
within the Syrian opposition and its hold on some pro-opposition
communities.
In Somalia, fighters with the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab are making a
comeback and taking back some of the territory they lost over recent
years, as the country’s army fails to repel the group’s advances.
“Al Qaeda is essentially doing the opposite of ISIS
by doubling down and developing deep roots in the local societies where
it has established a presence,” says Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria expert
at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “It’s positioning
itself as an inextricable presence able to pursue its long-term vision
of a global caliphate with local support and legitimacy – something ISIS
hasn’t been able to do.”
With the rise of ISIS, Al Qaeda has faded from global
attention. The Islamist terrorist group that carried out the 9/11
attacks may even have struck many as a bygone threat.
But experts say Al Qaeda is purposely lying low,
learning from the Islamic State’s mounting defeats and preparing to
retake the mantle of leadership of the global jihadist movement.
“Al Qaeda is growing stronger both as a result of
circumstances that have the US and others leaving it alone as they focus
on defeating ISIS, but also because it is an adaptive and networked
organization that has learned from its own mistakes and those committed
by ISIS,” says Katherine Zimmerman, an Al Qaeda expert at the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Al Qaeda is evolving and using this
time to build up its grass-roots support in a way that is going to make
it more difficult to defeat in the long term.”
LEARNING FROM ISIS
ISIS captured the attention – and loyalties –
of many of the world’s jihadists, attracting foreign fighters and
individual Islamists from a wide range of Western, Arab, and other
countries through its slick and mesmerizing use of social media. In
recent years a number of Islamist extremist organizations – groups in
Libya and Somalia are two examples – switched their allegiances from Al
Qaeda to ISIS, seeing the latter as the rising expression of global
jihadism.
Over the years of ISIS’s rise, Al Qaeda has
held fast to its strategic approach, even as it has evolved to embrace
some of the innovations that ISIS pioneered. “Those two are not mutually
exclusive, I think we’ve seen Al Qaeda stick with its core ideology
even as it has adapted to utilize some of the methods that have worked
so well for ISIS,” says Ms. Zimmerman.
Al Qaeda’s evolution has included a savvier use of social media and more public use of the Internet.
“Al Qaeda always used the Internet, but
largely to communicate with close followers and often using encryption,”
Zimmerman says. “ISIS turned that on its head and made it quite public
and a conduit for inculcation and a message of immediate action.”
Recognizing the importance of digital
communication to spreading a global message, Al Qaeda created an online
English-language magazine, Inspire, in July 2010. It has not followed
ISIS’s lead in posting gruesome videos of shocking beheadings and mass
executions – including many involving Muslims.
PERSUASION VS. VIOLENT OPPRESSION
What Al Qaeda has never veered away from, on
the other hand, is its preference for persuasion over violent imposition
to advance its vision of Islamist governance.
In Syria, the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat
al-Nusra, also referred to as Nusra Front, has not met with universal
acceptance. Recent anti-Nusra protests in some of the northwestern
Syrian cities where it is present suggest continuing resistance to its
ideology.
But at the same time, signs are proliferating
across opposition-held Syria that the group is winning followers, Ms.
Cafarella says. She notes, for example, that growing numbers of women
wear the full burqa in opposition-controlled Idlib – not because the
practice has been imposed, as ISIS has done in areas it controls, but
apparently voluntarily.
“Nusra is following the established Al Qaeda
approach of keeping a low profile and establishing legitimacy by
building local support,” Cafarella says. “That includes slowly
introducing its religious agenda and inculcating the local youth – and
we’re seeing that phase now.”
Al Qaeda may be benefiting from the US-led
coalition’s focus on defeating ISIS, but both Cafarella and Zimmerman
say Jabhat al-Nusra has also been strengthened by the Obama
administration’s hands-off approach to the Syrian civil war and in
particular by the US reluctance to jump in forcefully on the side of the
Syrian moderate opposition.
One reason the administration never
wholeheartedly embraced – and armed – the opposition was unanswered
concerns that US aid would fall into the hands of extremist groups like
Nusra.
Degrading
and ultimately destroying ISIS may have appeared as the more urgent
objective to pursue, but leaving Al Qaeda to flourish will lead to new
challenges for the West down the road, experts say.
“It’s not as though defeating ISIS defeats
the message,” says Zimmerman, who adds that deeply implanted communities
of support for extremist Islamist ideology – whether in Afghanistan,
sub-Saharan Africa, or Western Europe – aren’t going to fade away just
because the organization that caught their imagination breaks up.
“Whenever ISIS is defeated, the radicalized
individuals and groups will be looking for leadership,” she says,
predicting “that leader will be Al Qaeda.
