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Twenty-five years after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center towers, the United States, its Western allies, and many Muslim-majority countries have secured countless tactical victories against the terrorist organization and other jihadist groups. Bin Laden was killed in 2011, the so‑called Islamic State’s territorial caliphate was destroyed in 2019, and its “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed the same year. The direct threat to Europe has markedly diminished compared with 2015-2016. Militarily, these are considerable successes. Strategically, the record is more than thin.
For jihadism today, the story is different: it is more widespread than ever. From Indonesia to Mauritania, via Mozambique and Afghanistan, jihadist groups operate in dozens of countries. In Africa alone, fifteen states have seen Islamist militant violence in the past twelve months, claiming nearly 24,000 lives. Attacks inspired or organized by this milieu have struck as far as Australia, Russia, France, Germany, or the United States.
This is one of the major errors that accompanied the “war on terror” over the past twenty-five years. The destruction of an organization, a territory, or a leader was mistaken for the disappearance of a far broader ideological current. This seems to validate a proverb attributed to the Taliban when they fought the Americans: “You have the watches; we have the time.” This saying remains valid in the smartphone and artificial intelligence era. First, because practitioners of this deadly ideology believe they prevail in every scenario, with death promising martyrdom; and second, because Western democracies—especially the United States—have pursued erratic, short‑term policies, characterized by grave missteps, which Europe, often inconsistent, weak, and impatient, has largely followed.
September 11 changed the face of the world, and its consequences will continue to shape the coming years, while current Middle East conflicts threaten to prolong this dynamic. The wars against Iran, the unresolved Palestinian question, the Gaza conflict, the expansion of settlement activity in the West Bank, Israeli interventions in Lebanon and Syria—these again offer jihadists images, narratives, and grievances to exploit.
Where were you on September 11, 2001?
That day I was in Serbia, on a café terrace beside the Danube. Suddenly, everyone began staring at the television. We watched the first plane strike the twin towers, then the second. We learned that four passenger planes had been hijacked in total. One would hit the Pentagon, another would crash into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew attempted to regain control. People were stunned and silent, although many Serbs weren’t particularly fond of the Americans. Two years earlier, NATO—led by the United States—had bombed Belgrade to force Serbia out of Kosovo. The next day, September 12, for the first and only time in its history, NATO activated Article 5.
When American intelligence services indicated they suspected Al-Qaeda, it became clear that these attacks, the deadliest in the history of terrorism, would have global consequences. The American president said that evening that the United States would make “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Yet no one could have imagined how profoundly they would mark the start of the twenty‑first century.
Two Binary Visions of the World
As early as February 1998, with the creation of the “Global Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” Bin Laden had laid out his aims: killing Americans and their allies, civilians as well as soldiers, would be “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do so, in any country where it is possible.”
The date of September 20, 2001, saw Bush summarize the new world order in terms almost as binary: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” The response from Bin Laden arrived on October 7, the day the strikes in Afghanistan began: “These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels.”
This total polarization did not take the form of a clash between civilizational blocs, and the then-popular thesis of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” did not materialize in such a direct way. But the world became polarized. Suspicion toward Muslims surged in Western societies, deepening with each new shock—wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Madrid and London attacks, then Paris, Brussels, Nice, and Berlin. Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, which restricted entry of nationals from several Muslim-majority countries, would have been hard to imagine before 2001. And while the rise of populist right-wing parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere has many causes, jihadist terrorism, Middle East wars, and debates over immigration and Islam provided highly potent rallying themes.
The idea of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” according to which liberal democracy had no universal ideological competitor after the Soviet collapse, was partly disconfirmed. Jihadism never became a political-economic system capable of rivaling liberal democracy as communism had; yet it demonstrated that a radically anti-liberal, religious, revolutionary ideology could mobilize tens, then hundreds of thousands of people, provoke wars, destabilize states, and reshape international politics.
Al-Qaeda Is Not Jihadism
I am often asked, and I am asked again, about the future of Al-Qaeda. It has never been the sole, or even the most important, component.
Al-Qaeda is an organization. Jihadism is a much broader current, a political, religious, ideological, and military phenomenon whose organizations are only successive expressions. They are born, split, rename themselves, lose their leaders, their territories, and sometimes most of their fighters. The phenomenon outlives them. September 11 thus marked both the apex of central Al-Qaeda and the founding moment of a broader movement larger than Bin Laden’s organization.
The military, technological, and intelligence superiority of the United States and its allies proved extraordinarily effective at destroying organizations, sanctuaries, territorial entities, and command chains. It proved far less capable of destroying an ideology or transforming the political conditions that continually regenerate jihadist mobilization. Worse, the dialectic between jihadism and the war on terror amplified the former to unprecedented heights. In 2001, jihadism was geographically concentrated in Afghanistan, Algeria, Chechnya, Pakistan, Yemen, and previously in Bosnia, and the number of militants belonging directly to organizations was limited. The phenomenon now covers a vastly larger space.
How did we get here? Rather than an exhaustive history, we can pause at a few key moments, including those that fostered genuine hopes.
Kabul, December 2001, The Missed Hope
The geopolitical shift Bin Laden hoped to provoke would begin by dragging the United States into a war of attrition in Afghanistan, to deliver a defeat comparable to the one experienced by the Soviet Union. He wanted then to expel from the region this “distant enemy” who, in his view, supported the dictatorial and monarchic regimes of the Arab and Muslim world. His aim was to topple these regimes, first in Egypt and then in Saudi Arabia.
In the first instance, the opposite happened. In December 2001, I was in Kabul. The Taliban had been ousted by a lightning campaign, and Al-Qaeda sanctuaries, notably at Tora Bora, had been destroyed. Hundreds of fighters were killed, and the others were in retreat. A serious caveat: the command structure survived; Bin Laden had managed to escape, due to a lack of sufficient American deployment to seal off the long Pakistan border.
Afghanistan nonetheless seemed to be taking a new start, and many Kabul residents welcomed that prospect. According to the UNHCR, about 1.8 million Afghan refugees returned home during 2002 alone, not counting hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. An interim government was formed under Hamid Karzai, from a respected Pashtun family. A few months later, King Zahir Shah, exiled in Rome for twenty-nine years, also returned. It seemed then that the era of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda might be definitively over.
But disaster was already in the making. Karzai and the king wished, as they told me at the time, for the Taliban to be brought into a process of national reconciliation. They ran into a categorical refusal from the George W. Bush administration. It was a grave mistake. A more serious miscalculation lay in wait.
Iraq, the Matrix of the Perfect Storm
The neoconservatives around the president dreamed of a new Middle East and, in the context of the war on terror, the removal of Saddam Hussein under the false pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction and collaborating with Al-Qaeda.
I was in Iraq before, during, and after the invasion, whose legality was deeply disputed internationally. The vast majority of Iraqis supported the removal of Saddam by the Americans: members of the Shiite Republican Guard presumed loyal to him, the remnants of the Sunni middle class, Kurds, and even jihadists already established in the northern mountains. “We have to fight the black with black,” a jihadist leader told me at the time.
While the invasion itself is subject to critique, it is mainly the aftermath that proved catastrophic due to the lack of preparation. The Bush administration entrusted much of the postwar to exiles, largely Shiites, based in London or the United States, largely disconnected from Iraqi realities. Two of its first decisions were de-Ba’athificacion, which excluded many Baath Party members from political life and administration, and the dissolution of the army, which, although dominated by Sunni leadership, had united Iraqis of all faiths and, since the Iran‑Iraq war, stood as one of the country’s few major national institutions.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, especially Sunnis, found themselves excluded, humiliated, or without work. Some joined the rebellion and quickly allied with Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. Those who held a stronghold in Kurdish-inhabited areas near the Iranian border formed cells across the country. Attacks struck the UN headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, then Shiite mosques. Iraqi locals and many foreigners were abducted. The country then plunged into a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, making the image of George W. Bush declaring, on May 1, 2003, from the USS Abraham Lincoln, the end of major combat operations under the banner “Mission accomplished” look farcical.
By 2006, American statistics recorded roughly 6,600 terrorist attacks in Iraq and about 13,300 deaths. Not all were attributable to jihadists. Militia groups, insurgents, and other armed factions contributed to this wave of violence.
The Surge and the Illusion of Victory
The situation had become so catastrophic that the United States had to change strategy. In January 2007, Bush launched the “surge,” sending more than 20,000 additional troops and bringing American presence in the country to roughly 170,000 personnel. Americans drew on a movement born a few months earlier in the Anbar Province: the Sahwa, or Sunni Awakening. Tribes and former insurgents turned against Al-Qaeda, whose assassinations and efforts to dominate local communities sparked growing opposition. The surge generalized this alliance with former enemies.
The strategy appeared to be paying off. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successor, the Islamic State of Iraq, seemed to have been eradicated. The “Butcher of Baghdad,” Abu Musab al‑Zarqawi, had been killed by a U.S. strike in June 2006. The United States then reduced its forces. From about 170,000 soldiers in 2007, they fell to under 50,000 in 2010, before a near-total withdrawal in December 2011.
All of this proved premature. Cells went underground. In American and Iraqi prisons, former Saddam Hussein regime cadres and jihadists met and formed links that would later play a central role in reconstituting the Islamic State. The first wave of European jihadists going to Iraq dispersed to Arab countries, notably Yemen. Others returned to Europe and radicalized a new generation. In France, the Buttes-Chaumont network, active between 2003 and 2005, included Cherif Kouachi, who was arrested as he prepared to depart. Ten years later, he participated with his brother in the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Thus, clouds of disaster gathered in advance: a war of invasion without post-Saddam planning; a reduced commitment before stabilization; a massive re-engagement when the situation became untenable; then a new withdrawal when no durable political stabilization had been achieved and jihadist cells had not disappeared.
Arab Spring, Caliphate, Attacks in Europe
In 2011, another moment of hope arose, this time for the entire Arab world. The protests sparked by the self‑immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, in Sidi Bouzid, spread, toppled Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, and Hosni Mubarak on February 11. For a few months, one could believe that Arab youth would marginalize jihadism. For years jihadists claimed that only violence could topple dictators, but hundreds of thousands of Tunisians and Egyptians had just proven otherwise. Bin Laden himself was killed on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
None of this prevented the global expansion of jihad that he had urged. In Syria, protests met with the regime’s brutal repression. An armed opposition formed, and a civil war ensued, which benefited the jihadist cells in Iraq, many of whom were Syrian. The Islamic State managed to spread in Syria by infiltration and thanks to experienced fighters as state authority collapsed. With weapons, men, and territory thus acquired, it symbolically abolished the Sykes-Picot border, then returned to Iraq in a lightning campaign and captured Mosul, a city of over a million inhabitants, on June 10, 2014. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s pseudo-caliphate had been born.
Thousands of young Europeans, many of them French, joined this “jihad,” drawn by highly effective propaganda on social networks and recruited by networks already established in Europe, including those created by veterans of the Iraqi networks of 2003-2006. The consequences are well known: Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, the Bataclan and the Stade de France in November 2015, Brussels in March 2016, Nice in July 2016, Berlin in December 2016.
In 2017, the caliphate lost its capitals: Mosul in July, then Raqqa in October. It was definitively destroyed as a territorial entity only in March 2019, with the fall of Baghouz in eastern Syria. Baghdadi was killed on October 27, 2019, in an American operation in the country’s northwest. It was another tactical victory, but not the end of jihadism. The Islamic State survived in the shadows in Iraq and Syria, and its “provinces” elsewhere continued or grew in importance.
The Return of the Taliban
In August 2021, the Taliban retook Kabul. They had sheltered Al-Qaeda and refused to hand over Bin Laden, one of the main reasons for the October 2001 invasion. The Trump administration had signed a Doha agreement with them on February 29, 2020, planning the withdrawal of American troops, which Joe Biden decided to carry out. The withdrawal unfolded in chaos, as shown by images of Afghans desperately clinging to aircraft at Kabul airport. On August 26, 2021, the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K) attacked Abbey Gate, killing 13 American soldiers and around 170 Afghan civilians.
The irony was brutal. Twenty years after invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and destroy Al-Qaeda, the United States left the country and handed power back to the Taliban, who were struck in the final days of evacuation by a new branch of the Islamic State. The paradox is twofold. In 2001-2002, when it might have been possible to integrate some Taliban into a political process, Washington refused. Twenty years later, it negotiated directly with them and effectively abandoned the country. Moreover, the Taliban had never severed ties with Al-Qaeda. The successor to Bin Laden, Ayman al‑Zawahiri, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on July 31, 2022, less than a year after their ascent to power.
The American withdrawal also complicates the fight against IS‑K, which today represents one of the most worrying transnational threats. The Taliban fight it and have inflicted heavy losses, without eliminating it. The organization maintains recruitment capacity, notably in Central Asia, a strong digital presence, and the ambition to strike far beyond its Afghan sanctuary, as shown by the Kerman attacks in Iran on January 3, 2024 (95 dead) and the Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow on March 22, 2024 (145 dead). European security services remain particularly vigilant, even if the bulk of Europe’s threat now comes from locally radicalized individuals rather than cells dispatched from Afghanistan.
A Far More Globalized Jihadism Than Ever
It was the Afghan-Soviet war (1979–1989) that laid the ideological and organizational foundations of contemporary jihadism and Al-Qaeda. But it is September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, with the mistakes made in Afghanistan and the woefully misplanned invasion of Iraq, that partly fulfilled Bin Laden’s wish. He wanted to provoke a massive American intervention in the Muslim world and to enshrine jihad in a global confrontation. Al-Qaeda, as an organization, did not win. The regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were not overthrown, and no universal caliphate emerged. But jihadism is more globalized than ever. It is the most worrying development of the past twenty-five years.
The short-term policies that helped drive this dynamic have not disappeared, far from it. Donald Trump, who had made disengagement from “endless wars” one of his principal aims, himself found himself drawn into direct conflict with Iran, largely because of his own mistakes. This conflict hides a striking and dangerous paradox. The Islamic Republic, a Shiite power, is one of the ideological enemies of jihadist Sunnis, with the Islamic State considering Shiites as apostates. Yet Saif al‑Adl, whom the United Nations regards as the de facto leader of Al-Qaeda, would still be in Iran. What would happen if he and other senior figures had free rein and Iranian support to carry out attacks?
The Palestinian question is the other major reservoir of jihadist propaganda. The suffering of Gaza’s population, the images of destruction and civilian victims, the continued growth of settlements in the West Bank, and the widespread feeling in the Arab and Muslim world of a double standard by the West provide propagandists with highly persuasive arguments to recruit and present their struggle as a global defense of Muslims.
Africa, the New Center of Gravity
The gulf between military victories since 2001 and the geographical expansion of the phenomenon is most striking in Africa. While Western attention was focused on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and European attacks, the epicenter of jihadist violence shifted to the African continent. The Sahel, left to juntas and their Russian allies, implicates European responsibility, particularly France. The region has become the main hotspot of this violence, with nearly 10,000 deaths in the last twelve months, mainly in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The JNIM, linked to Al-Qaeda, is responsible for more than three-quarters of these losses and is pressing into large swaths of territory. Movements emerging from the Sahel jihadist ecosystem have extended their operations to West African coastal states.
The phenomenon extends far beyond the Sahel. Al-Shabaab remains extremely powerful in Somalia. Boko Haram, its factions, and the Islamic State in West Africa are active in the Lake Chad basin. IS-linked movements even exist as far as Mozambique. Twenty-five years after 9/11, it is impossible to claim that jihadism has been strategically vanquished.
Syria, the Great Exception
Syria today stands as a major exception in the history of jihadism. Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024. Ahmed al-Charaa, the man who now leads the country, previously headed the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, the Jabhat al-Nusra. He publicly broke with the organization in 2016 and, in January 2017, morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). He thus abandoned much of the transnational jihad project in favor of a struggle for power in Syria. The new regime proclaims its aim to build “a country for all Syrians.” This evolution must be judged by its deeds, not its rhetoric. But the paradox is noteworthy: a man from Al-Qaeda’s network governs Damascus not because he realized Bin Laden’s project, but because he distanced himself from it.
Meanwhile, the remnants of the Islamic State continue to carry out attacks in Syria and seek to portray the new authorities as traitors to Islam. Israeli strikes in Syria give them further ammunition to argue that the new rulers cannot defend the territory. The consequences of a potential assassination of Ahmed al-Charaa by IS could be dizzying: a new fragmentation of power, a renewed civil war, and fresh space for jihadists beyond control, which would pose a great danger to Europe.
To Have Time
Scholars have long debated “the Islamization of radicalism” versus the “radicalization of Islam,” or, in many respects, whether this phenomenon resembles a sect. These debates matter for understanding the phenomenon. Yet they weigh less than the need to finally develop a coherent strategy that addresses both its causes and its manifestations.
Indeed, the watch-like proverb illustrates the greatest asymmetry between jihadist movements and democracies. Governments operate on electoral mandates. Administrations change; priorities shift. An intervention is decided, then abandoned. A war is deemed essential, then, a few years later, considered an error to withdraw from as quickly as possible. The jihadists, by contrast, can wait. They can lose a territory, go underground, rename themselves, lose iconic leaders, reconstitute around a new generation, and wait for conditions to become favorable again. Afghanistan offers the most striking illustration. Twenty years after being driven from power, the Taliban are back in Kabul.
To confront jihadism, we must, therefore, also have time. As Europeans, we must develop strategic autonomy, political coherence, and a long-term will, independent of the erratic policies of the United States. Otherwise, jihadism will remain the hydra it is often compared to. We will sever one head only to see two grow back.
Jihadism has expanded because it feeds on all real or imagined misfortunes and promises some ultimate remedy, a salvation in a heaven whose fulfillment cannot be proven. We must instead address problems concretely and verifiably, taking into account geopolitical, socio-economic, cultural, ideological, and psychological factors, the ground underfoot, local networks, as well as propaganda. It is not enough to explain the dangers of this movement in Europe and to implement deradicalization programs. We need a comprehensive approach that does not overlook any of these groups, wherever they are: from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to the JNIM in the Sahel, through the Islamic State and its branches in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa, as well as Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and the Lake Chad basin groups and those in South East Asia.
We must confront jihadism as a global phenomenon, including militarily when necessary—without repeating the United States’ missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, where fragile states, weak institutions, traumatized populations, and new triggers for mobilization were left behind. Force can be indispensable at times. But no drone strike destroys an ideology, no special operation eliminates a political injustice, and no bombardment substitutes for a functioning state. We must, at the same time, resist authoritarian models that claim to fight extremism while trampling human rights, and provide long-term assistance that enables populations to help themselves. Integrating marginalized groups into political processes, upholding the rule of law, fostering economic development, improving education, ensuring access to information, fighting discrimination, and disaster prevention are the foundations of functioning civil societies. Only they can offer young people a sense of purpose that does not require the global upheaval of a counterculture.
The Third Reich was defeated. Extreme right-wing movements and antisemitism persist, even eight decades after its fall. The same is likely to be true of jihadism, which we will probably never eradicate. Yet we can work relentlessly to make it less appealing and to reduce its lethality. We can strengthen our free societies against this threat and other forms of extremism, and help to build such societies. They are the best defense against the hydra.
Twenty-five years after September 11, the lesson may be simple. We learned how to destroy the heads of the hydra. We must learn to prevent them from regrowing.
Facing jihadism, we have the watches. We must now also have time.