Al-Qaeda has new foothold in Taliban-run Afghanistan

The killing of al-Qaeda’s leader in a US drone strike in 2022 was hailed by Joe Biden as a moment of “closure” for the families of the victims of 9/11.

- ARPAN RAI

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who replaced Osama bin Laden and who had direct involvement in planning the attack on the World Trade Center, had been traced to a home in Kabul almost one year after another militant group – the Taliban – took control of the Afghan capital.

It is now three years since Afghanistan fell to Taliban rule following the withdrawal of Nato forces, a moment marked last week by militants parading captured and repurposed US military hardware through Bagram airbase, host to the last American presence in the country before the US’s hurried evacuation.

Experts say Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul was significant if not unexpected, and that since his death many other senior figures within al-Qaeda have followed him in relocating to Afghanistan, finding an environment that allows them to continue operating with minimal interference from the country’s Taliban rulers.

Al-Qaeda today is much diminished from the organisation that carried out the 9/11 attacks, and the recent US intelligence reports argue the group is less of a threat in the region than the likes of Isis. Nonetheless, its new leader Saif al-Adel – an Iran-based explosives expert – remains the FBI’s most wanted terrorist, with a $10m bounty on his head.

Ahmad Zia Saraj, who handled Afghanistan’s intelligence operations as chief of the National Directorate of Security up until the fall of Kabul in August 2021, claims the Taliban has absorbed what is left of al-Qaeda into a de facto coalition, with the two groups’ leaders regularly engaging in talks in the capital.

Between 2017 and 2018, Zia Saraj led a crackdown on al-Qaeda operatives; it saw more than 400 detained. During interrogations, he says, these captives described ongoing plots to target the West, being hatched by hundreds of commanders and fighters still in hiding.