Five Years After bin Laden’s Death, al-Qaeda Lives On

The Atlantic
By: Kathy Gilsinan

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Five years ago, the United States completed a nearly decade-long manhunt for the architect of 9/11. Early in the morning on May 2, local time, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and shot dead the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, the group that had perpetrated the deadliest foreign attack on the United States in the country’s history…

Al-Qaeda’s decentralized “franchise” model also has its weaknesses. In a late-2014 brief on targeting al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, The Soufan Group, an intelligence consultancy, pointed out that al-Qaeda’s “reliance on the need to project terror from tenuous positions has long forced [it] into a hub-spoke structure, in which energetic operatives seek to turn guidance from AQ’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, into plots that tend to involve many moving parts over a stretched logistical tail.” The result has been that such plots have been relatively easy for counterterrorism services to disrupt. “The relentless targeting of AQ’s external operations has been arguably the most successful component in the U.S. and international [counterterrorism] efforts against AQ, keeping the group off-balance.”

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To read the full article please click on the link below:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/al-qaeda-bin-laden-death/480801/

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