Terrorists group, Al Qaeda, is showing signs of resurgence following ISIS’s near-defeat in Iraq and Syria, experts warn.
Al Qaeda shares the same long term goals as ISIS, but appears to be pursuing them more slowly and carefully, Jennifer Cafarella, intelligence planner with the Institute for the Study of War, told FoxNews.com.
“ISIS’s shock-and-awe tactics enabled it to mobilise tens of thousands of foreign fighters quickly, but did not enable it to sustain its battlefield successes or the scale of its recruitment,” Cafarella said.
“Al Qaeda has been investing in the long game, and may now resurge as the leader of the global jihadist movement.”
It was on August 11, 1988, in Peshawar, Pakistan, that Osama bin Laden conducted a meeting to discuss “the establishment of a new military group” called Al Qaeda, or the base.
Handwritten notes of the meeting’s minutes were seized in Bosnia after 9/11.
Ten years later on August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda extremists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in near-simultaneous attacks.
Another attack resulted in the death of 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
A year later, on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda operatives at bin Laden’s direction hijacked four jets and rammed three of them into New York’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
The fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
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The 9/11 terror attack killed nearly 3,000 people which led to the U.S. global War on Terror.
The manhunt for bin Laden came to an end in 2011 when Navy SEALs raided his compound in Pakistan and killed him –an event that some predicted would lead to Al Qaeda’s demise but that didn’t happen.
ISIS started as an Al Qaeda offshoot to fight U.S. troops in Iraq and then, after a falling out, gobbled up huge amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria while engaging in horrific attacks of brutality.
At the same time ISIS leaders declared the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate spanning the two countries.
