Is the U.S. Prepared for a Resurgent Al Qaeda?
The Crime Report
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As a resurgent Al Qaeda threatens to turn its attention away from violent sectarian conflicts in the Middle East and target the West again, a leading counter-terrorism expert questions whether Washington can devise an effective strategy when “we still don’t have deep knowledge of the enemy.”
According to Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisory special agent and current member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, even the most aggressively planned and executed military tactics against Islamic terror groups are doomed without psychological insight and appreciation of centuries of Middle East history.
“We need to have a vision going forward,” he told a recent seminar sponsored by the John Jay College Center on Terrorism.
“Why do you have individuals willing to blow themselves up for an evil ideology?” said Soufan, himself a Muslim—and he noted that answering that question has never been so critical.
“The most potent weapon is not a gun, a knife, or a bomb; it’s an ideology.”
Soufran was expanding on points raised in his new book “Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State,” which describes the history of Al Qaeda before and after 9/11, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the waning threat of ISIS just as a rejuvenated Al Qaeda presents itself to the West—possibly with Osama Bin Laden’s son Hazma as its new leader…
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