Osama bin Laden’s death has not left al-Qaeda leaderless, or without presence around the globe.

 

Stepping in to replace bin Laden as the top al-Qaeda man is Ayman al-Zawahiri, an eye surgeon who helped found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant group. He has been the group’s chief ideologue and may have played a major role in pulling off the September 11 attacks. He has been indicted for his alleged role in the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the U.S. government has offered a reward of up to $25 million for information leading to his capture or death.

 

Zawahiri, who was last seen in Afghanistan in October 2001, will oversee a loose terrorist network that reaches from the Asia-Pacific region to Africa and the Middle East.

 

By all accounts, al-Qaeda, which was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988, has been severely weakened in the “Af-Pak” region. In June 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta publically stated that there were between 50 and 100 al-Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan.

 

Militant groups from Saudi Arabia and Yemen joined forces in 2009 to form Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), bent on overthrowing the governments of both countries. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Northwest flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is said to have been trained by AQAP in Yemen.

 

Created in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq was weakened by the loss of its founding leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 and his successor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, in 2010, and by loss of support from Sunni Arab leaders. The group is also known as Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia

 

The terrorist group has been in East Africa since at least the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The insurgent group al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaeda, controls much of southern and central Somalia.

 

Al-Qaeda has been most active in Algeria in this region, but has made inroads in Mali and Niger. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is led by Algerian bomb-maker Abou Mossab Abdelwadoud.

 

Two groups with links to al-Qaeda are Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiah and the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf group.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

 

Al-Qaeda around the World (BBC News)

Al-Qaeda's Remaining Leaders (BBC News)

Profile: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (BBC News)

Al-Qaeda Criticizes Democratic Revolution in Egypt (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Real War against Terrorists Isn’t in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)