Twenty-five years ago, 19 hijackers boarded four passenger aircraft in the United States and carried out an attack that changed the world. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001. America went to war, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq hunted al-Qaeda across continents and eventually killed Osama bin Laden. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent building an international counterterrorism architecture designed to ensure that nothing like 9/11 could happen again.
A quarter of a century later, the organisation behind the attacks has been battered, fragmented and has become a shadow of its former self but it never disappeared.
The al-Qaeda of 2026 looks very different from the organisation bin Laden commanded from Afghanistan. Its old central leadership has been devastated. Bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed by an American drone strike in Kabul in 2022. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of 9/11, remains imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay awaiting trial.
Egyptian militant Saif al-Adel is widely regarded as al-Qaeda's de facto leader, but the organisation no longer depends on a single charismatic figure. And I think that is precisely why it has survived.
