On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the central question is deceptively simple: Is al-Qaeda–and the Salafi-Jihadi terrorist movement it spawned—still a threat we need to worry about? Every U.S. president since the attacks has proclaimed its defeat. And, the conventional wisdom holds that al-Qaeda's failure to strike America again proves its irrelevance. But a survey of the group's global footprint and the resilience of its malignant ideology tell a different story.
Al-Qaeda is not only alive but expanding. The 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the 2022 killing of his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the elimination of countless commanders and fighters has not broken the movement. It now operates through at least two dozen active franchises worldwide. Its violent offshoot and bitter rival, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has nearly as many. Together, these terrorist movements destabilize a vast arc ranging from North Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Arabia, and southern Africa. Their tactics may differ, but their goal does not: unceasing war against the West, the overthrow of "apostate" regimes, and the restoration of a transnational caliphate.
Degraded But Not Deterred
The United Nations' Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, among the most authoritative trackers of the global terrorism threat, offers a sobering assessment on the eve of this anniversary. Al-Qaeda's senior leadership remains marginalized, but the network has been strengthened by financing from al-Shabaab in Somalia and ransom payments secured by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) in North Africa. The latter affiliate killed tens of thousands of civilians in the Sahel last year, before successfully assassinating Mali’s Minister of Defense in April during a broad offensive against the country’s capital, Bamako. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen is described by multiple member states as possessing the greatest intent to carry out international attacks, with expanded operating space and weapons. The UN assessment is hardly more optimistic regarding the ongoing threat to the West. “The terrorist threat in North America and Europe remained contained but persistent,” it warns—hardly the image of a defeated movement.
Even if al-Qaeda hasn't recently carried out a successful international terrorist attack in the United States, it is not for lack of effort. In 2024, a longstanding member of al-Shabaab—al-Qaeda's key African franchise—was convicted in U.S. federal court and sentenced to two life terms for plotting to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into Atlanta's tallest building. While in the Philippines, he had taken flying lessons similar to those of the 9/11 hijackers. He was in fact the second al-Shabaab operative arrested for doing so—this time in an undisclosed African country. Al Shabaab is now working to deepen its relationship with the Iran-aligned Houthis, using its strategic positioning near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait to help choke the Red Sea and attrit the Western economy, while also acquiring advanced weapons that might bring the group within range of U.S. bases in the region. “This isn’t just a regional problem, Dagvin Anderson, commander of United States Africa Command, told the Wall Street Journal. “It has global implications.” AQAP, meanwhile, has also expanded an uneasy alliance with the Houthis, and produces the jihadist magazine Inspire that helped the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers construct their deadly improvised explosive devices.
Terrorism threats are typically measured by analysts as a function of intent and capability—more simply, does a terrorist group wish to conduct an attack, and does it have the means to do so? Twenty-five years of effective counterterrorism against al-Qaeda and its franchises have primarily served to erode capabilities. Forcing its leadership onto the defensive, U.S. and allied counterterrorism succeeded in disrupting the group’s organizational capacity for long enough that it has failed to build momentum in any major offensive plots. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and pivot to “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism, U.S. pressure against terrorist organizations in the Middle East and South Asia has steadily eased, creating space for them to reconstitute erstwhile capabilities. For instance, al-Qaeda has since rebuilt its base of operations in that country, with a presence in at least one third of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Earlier this year, the group resurrected its training camp at Tarnak Farm, outside Kandahar—a facility central to al-Qaeda's pre-9/11 operations, where both Mohamed Atta, the attack's commander, and Ziad Jarrah, pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, recorded their wills. The prior FBI Director, Christopher Wray, warned against the perils of complacency, reminding the American public in December 2023 to “not forget that it didn’t take a big number of people on 9/11 to kill 3,000 people.” His words are particularly pertinent today given that the other half of the equation — intent —never wavered.
Terrorism’s Political Legacy
Even beyond the sheer violence that al-Qaeda retains the intent to commit, the political ramifications of its dogged survival have been significant. Arguably, the most disruptive transatlantic political development of the past decade—the growing popularity of populist, right-wing movements across Europe and the United States, including the rise of Donald Trump as a two-time U.S. president—has been driven to no small extent by anti-immigrant sentiment.
The civil war that erupted in Syria a decade ago - in which both the now-defunct al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and ISIS played a prominent role - resulted in an exodus of over a million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers into Europe, subsequently catalyzing an anti-immigrant political success. Merely a month before the 2016 presidential campaign season began, an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at a San Bernardino, California community center killed 14 persons and wounded two dozen more, infusing the Trump campaign with new-found momentum. Trump famously responded by calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” Indeed, immediately after assuming office thirteen months later, the Trump administration imposed travel bans on persons entering the United States from seven Muslim countries. National policies hostile to immigrants have since become a prominent feature of the second Trump administration and various European governments.
On the other end of the political spectrum, profound “anticolonial” sentiments within America’s left wing led several years ago to a TikTok trend in which users read Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and reflected on its apparent prescience and fairness. More recently, support for designated foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah has repeatedly been on display on Western college campuses and in anti-Israel protests. Gina Bennett, arguably the CIA’s most senior and longstanding Osama bin Laden expert, has frequently suggested that bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s “worst day” would be the day they were forgotten. The considerable political ramifications of al-Qaeda’s violence that endure across our political spectrum today prove that such a victory remains far away.
Why the United States Cannot Turn Away
Indeed, perhaps the most worrisome dimension of the threat is that while the U.S.-led war on terror ultimately degraded the leadership and manpower of al-Qaeda and ISIS, it had no effect on an ideology that not only remains robust, but is more geographically widespread and entrenched than ever. From Afghanistan to Iraq and from the Gaza Strip to Iran, the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly failed to construct a strategic counterterrorism or counterinsurgency plan for the Middle East that does not rely primarily on violence, destruction, and lethality. Despite at least four consecutive U.S. administrations having promised a “pivot to Asia” that has yet to be delivered, the Middle East stubbornly remains the center of gravity of American foreign policy. While al-Qaeda and ISIS no longer drive Washington’s immediate focus, the compounding fallouts from irregular threats from 9/11 to October 7 continually prevents the United States from extricating itself from the Middle East.
Osama bin Laden, had he been alive today, would likely be content with the results of his so-called “planes operation.” Although his group has been on the run for decades with few successful attacks and a parade of perished leaders, the so-called “Jewish-Crusader alliance” that he despised and targeted is weaker and more divided than it has been in decades. Bin Laden failed in his goal to unite the “collective movement of the Muslim people,” as he hoped in his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, but he has succeeded in radicalizing enough to keep the conflict going. Many terrorists fighting across the globe today weren’t even born on 9/11.
The 25 years since 9/11 are littered with the dismissal of terrorist threats: President Obama's description of ISIS as a "JV team" in January 2014; the failure to detect the presence in Europe of an extensive support network that would facilitate the November 13, 2015 Paris attack; and Israel's failure to take seriously the warning signs of Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, prominent among them. Yet terrorism retains an agenda-setting function that allows small actors, scattered through the world, to earn disproportionate psychological effect and media coverage to bleed government energy and resources. The rolling, widespread impacts of October 7 — from a new, broad war in the Middle East to division and violence in Western states — underscore the enduring power of rare but highly-lethal terrorist attacks. More American fatalities from al-Qaeda, whether in the United States or on military bases in the Middle East or Africa, would result in significant political ramifications, both for America’s domestic and foreign policy. However, the U.S. National Security Strategy published in November 2025 only mentioned “terrorism” once within the context of immigration, marking a different shift towards a homeland security campaign against immigrants and military operations against cartels newly labelled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
As America commemorates the 25th anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda is still planning its encore. The United States, accordingly, simply must remain focused on the long-term, sustained military and intelligence campaigns that have kept violent threats at bay, while finally building or supporting a stronger program to deter and counter radicalization in the region.
Bruce Hoffman is a professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jacob Ware is an adjunct professor at Georgetown and a 2026 McCain Institute National Security and Counterterrorism Fellow. Together, they are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, the Department of the Army, the Department of War, or the United States Government.
Main image is Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry render honors as fire fighters and rescue workers unfurl a huge American flag over the side of the Pentagon as rescue and recovery efforts continued following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack.
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