The Rise and Fall of Global Jihadism

Twenty-five years ago, members of the jihadi group al-Qaeda hijacked four American airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. Passengers attempted to seize control of the fourth plane, and it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard. The hijackers killed 2,977 people in total—by far the deadliest single terrorist attack in history. To many Americans, the events of September 11, 2001, seemed to come out of nowhere. Few had even heard of al-Qaeda before the attacks. Yet by September 12, the United States had plunged into what President George W. Bush called “a war against terrorism,” a fight that would persist for decades, ensnare multiple jihadi groups, and extend to all corners of the earth.

The United States had many setbacks in this war. The ways in which it attempted to prevent another 9/11, or an even larger-scale attack, entailed massive, often inefficient investments as well as troop losses. Some of its efforts, such as the full-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, were brutally destructive. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, in particular, drove a surge in jihadi recruitment. In the years since 2001, various new jihadi groups—some of them connected to al-Qaeda, some opposed to it—have set up shop in the Middle East and across East and West Africa, where they have fueled bloody civil wars, shattered local communities, and launched terrorist attacks both in the region and outside it.

But the war on terrorism has not been a complete failure, either. Al-Qaeda itself is devastated. There have been few jihadi attacks on U.S. territory—perhaps the most important measure of success for most American leaders—in the past two and a half decades. According to New America Foundation data, jihadi terrorists have killed 122 people in the United States since 2001, a fraction of what U.S. officials feared in the aftermath of 9/11. And although jihadi groups survive, jihadism has lost much of its ideological salience.

Consider what has happened since 2023. On October 7, Hamas, a group that al-Qaeda regularly criticized for compromising on theological principles in the pursuit of its political agenda, launched a bloody terrorist attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 people. Israel went on to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, many of them civilians, and conduct other attacks in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. In 2025, the United States joined Israel in bombing Iran, and in 2026 the United States and Israel launched a full-scale war with the initial objective of regime change in Tehran. The Israeli war in Gaza led to mass protests around the world, and all of these events offered fodder for conspiracy theories about the enemies of Islam plotting against Muslims. Yet in contrast to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq or the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, they have triggered no jihadi surge. Indeed, the former jihadis who overthrew the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, in 2024, quickly sought to make nice with states that have long fought terror organizations, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, upon taking power.

A quarter century after Osama bin Laden gave the order for the 9/11 attacks, his successors have not built a durable transnational movement capable of repeatedly attacking the United States and forcing governments to bend to their demands. The sense of historic possibility that once made the jihadi movement so threatening to Western countries has faded. The United States may not have won the war on terrorism, but the jihadis clearly lost.

THE BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

In late 2001, al-Qaeda appeared ascendant. The movement grew out of the armed struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and it attracted Muslim fighters from around the world. Under bin Laden’s leadership, al-Qaeda had many goals, including helping the Taliban secure power in Afghanistan and training its members for terrorist and insurgent campaigns throughout the Muslim world, but ousting the United States from the Middle East was at the top of the list. Other jihadis prioritized fighting governments that they saw as foreign invaders in Chechnya and Kashmir, toppling supposedly apostate Arab regimes, battling Shiite Muslims, or creating a caliphate.

The scale of its attack on the United States gave al-Qaeda an aura of momentum and outsize influence within the jihadi movement and beyond. After 9/11, the movement grew in stature, and fighting the United States and its Western allies, which most jihadis had previously considered a relatively low priority, became a more mainstream objective. The fact that the U.S. government would make few distinctions between al-Qaeda-linked groups and jihadis with a more local focus in its subsequent counterterrorism campaign only reinforced that trend.

Several factors had made the 2001 attacks possible. Among them were the many shortcomings in Washington’s approach to counterterrorism, including the mistakes identified by the 9/11 Commission, an independent body set up by the U.S. government in 2002, on which I served as a staff member. Those included poor information sharing among U.S. government agencies, a failure to place on watchlists future hijackers who were suspected of links to al-Qaeda and were believed to be traveling to the United States, a lackadaisical effort to find suspected terrorists believed to be in the United States already, and no response to alarming field officer reports that jihadis appeared to be interested in learning how to fly planes.

The Islamic State’s overreach was ultimately its undoing.

Just as important was al-Qaeda’s own organizing. Most of its leaders were creative, dedicated, and willing to work with other groups, giving the movement a large network from which to recruit the best operatives. Critically, al-Qaeda also had a safe haven in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, from which it could strategize, plot attacks, and coordinate with its international partners without interference. The CIA estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers attended training camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, enabling al-Qaeda to build a small army. Recruits from all over the world, but especially the Middle East, learned the basics of insurgent war. The more promising candidates learned advanced counterintelligence and bomb-making techniques. Some of those who received training went to fight alongside the Taliban against the group’s remaining enemies inside Afghanistan, and the Taliban permitted others to leave the country and rejoin local insurgent groups or terrorist cells around the world.

Standout recruits among the mass of volunteers were selected for additional training and assigned to high-priority operations. Many of the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, initially went to Afghanistan with the intention to acquire skills and connections before traveling onward to Chechnya to fight alongside Chechen insurgents against Russian security forces. After they were indoctrinated in the camps, al-Qaeda sent them to attack the United States instead.

Most governments around the world paid limited attention to this growing danger and did little to prevent members of terrorist organizations from recruiting, generating propaganda, fundraising, and networking on their soil as long as they did not carry out attacks there. Various jihadi leaders and operatives planned operations in Algeria, Bosnia, and elsewhere from London in the 1990s, for example. Even the United States was relatively lax; Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over al-Qaeda after U.S. forces killed bin Laden in 2011, had come to the country in the 1990s to fundraise.

THE TIDE TURNS, EVENTUALLY

After 9/11, the United States’ counterterrorism efforts quickly succeeded in dismantling al-Qaeda’s base of operations. As the wreckage of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers smoldered, the United States commenced military operations in Afghanistan. CIA officers and special operations forces, working with anti-Taliban groups and bolstered by U.S. airpower, quickly overthrew the Taliban. Many al-Qaeda members died in the fight. Those who survived lost their safe haven and, critically, their training camps, and were forced to flee. Most went to Pakistan and Iran and carried on the group’s operations from there; most of al-Qaeda’s most successful post–9/11 attacks, such as the 2005 bombings of London’s transportation system, were orchestrated from Pakistan. But both Islamabad and Tehran were less accommodating hosts than the Taliban were. Neither allowed al-Qaeda to establish new training camps, and Pakistani authorities, in particular, regularly helped the United States arrest and kill the group’s operatives.

Without the large-scale training infrastructure that al-Qaeda had set up in Afghanistan, jihadi groups lost much of their ability to mount as sophisticated or distant an attack as 9/11, but they continued to terrorize local populations across the broader Middle East. The United States gave the jihadi cause new energy with its 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war justified in part by the need to confront terrorism. The subsequent U.S. occupation incited anger across the region and fueled the growth of anti-U.S. militant groups in Iraq.

The chaos unleashed by the 2011 Arab uprisings gave these and other groups even more room to grow. The eventual outcome was the rise of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS), which at its height in 2014–15 controlled territory in Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Virginia and home to millions of people. It attracted tens of thousands more recruits from countries in the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia. Other groups, such as al-Shabab, in Somalia, also came to hold territory where they taxed and menaced the population and planned their operations.

Yet persistent American pressure on the remaining jihadi havens bore fruit over time. In Iraq and Syria, the United States steadily eroded the Islamic State’s control until the group lost the last of its territory. Unlike in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which involved tens of thousands of U.S. forces, Washington deployed small special operations teams while local partners, trained by U.S. forces and backed by U.S. airpower and intelligence, did most of the fighting (and the dying). In other places such as Libya and Somalia, Washington supported the national armies and local militias battling jihadi forces and engaged in whack-a-mole with jihadi leaders. The advent of the armed drone aided this effort, enabling the U.S. military to gather more intelligence and strike more quickly, and with less collateral damage, compared with traditional airpower. Increased cooperation with allied intelligence services helped, as well. Much of this work was mechanical and humdrum—for instance, linking a phone number here to a financial transaction there—but it allowed Washington and its partners to uncover and unravel much of the global jihadi web, arresting members of al-Qaeda and other groups and disrupting their operations around the world.

No less consequential were massive U.S. investments in homeland security. The Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002, was meant to bring together airport security, border protection, and other parts of the national security apparatus that would be involved in preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. territory. Increased spending at airports, on disaster response, and on improved communication between federal, state, and local officials was meant to ensure that information about new threats would be shared quickly, that terrorists would be prevented from entering the country, and that the response to any future attack would be better coordinated. The FBI made counterterrorism a top priority, and it aggressively investigated individuals suspected of terrorist activity. At times it was too aggressive; civil liberties organizations contend that the bureau detained and questioned large numbers of Muslim men and monitored mosques without evidence of wrongdoing. But overall, the effort was effective at preventing attacks.

Each measure bolstered the others. Without training camps, would-be terrorists had no place to gain skills and network. Insufficient training could make them more prone to small mistakes that made their fundraising and recruiting efforts more easily detected. More active U.S. and allied security services would be ready to catch them, and then make the intelligence they gathered from those they arrested available to help target overseas networks and havens.

The erosion of jihadis’ havens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere steadily damaged the groups’ credibility and appeal. At the height of the Islamic State’s power, holding territory demonstrated its prowess and attracted followers who wanted to live in a place governed by the group’s version of Islamic law. But when the Islamic State lost territory, its calls for new fighters to come to defend its self-declared caliphate began to ring hollow. Recruitment became much harder. Fewer and fewer would-be jihadis wanted to join a group that increasingly looked like it was losing.

OWN GOALS

It was not only U.S. pressure that brought about the decline of jihadism. The jihadis themselves repeatedly made choices that reduced their appeal. For one, they made too many enemies. Al-Qaeda’s foes included not just the United States but also other supposed foreign occupiers, such as India, Israel, and Russia. Some strands within the broader movement also opposed regimes in Muslim countries that they considered impious, including the governments of Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The Islamic State’s list of foes was even longer; it fought most fiercely against Shiites and other non-Sunni Muslims.

Declaring so many enemies enabled these groups to attract a wide variety of followers, but it also meant that they diffused their energy. Attacking everyone everywhere all at once made it difficult to put sustained effort into achieving any single goal. Even more damning, it ensured that everyone would attack them. Fighting jihadi terrorism was one of the few causes that united countries around the world, and the United States was able to solicit support for its intelligence and military campaigns from foreign governments that disagreed with Washington on many issues but shared an interest in quashing these groups.

The persistence of an ideology is not the same as salience.

Even more consequentially, some jihadi groups turned Muslim publics against them by mistreating Muslim civilians. People who might have been sympathetic to their fights against the United States and other foreign powers did not approve of jihadis’ killing of Saudi police and security officials in 2003 and 2004, for instance, or of an al-Qaeda affiliate’s slaughter of both Sunni and Shiite civilians in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Such killings diminished the jihadis’ influence. In Saudi Arabia, the government, with the broad support of the public, killed or arrested al-Qaeda members, devastating the group’s operations in the country. In Iraq, the faction earned rebukes from clerics who had previously supported global jihad as well as from more mainstream religious leaders.

The Islamic State’s overreach in Iraq and Syria was ultimately its undoing. Its declaration of a caliphate in 2014 was electrifying to many Muslims, coming at a time when the group seemed to be successfully expanding its borders and fighting off enemies. Yet the project created the conditions for the group’s eventual defeat. As bin Laden himself had privately warned another jihadi leader in Yemen years earlier, building a state would give the United States and other countries a place to concentrate their firepower. When the Islamic State declared its caliphate, not only did its territorial control make the group easier to target but its governing also exposed the group’s brutality. Its maximalist claims also made it impossible to work with other jihadis, let alone other countries.

By the mid-2020s, the jihadi movement was in no position to capitalize on upheaval in the Middle East. The war in Gaza, the fall of Assad to former jihadis, and the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran all supplied the kinds of grievances, images, and narratives that once fueled the movement’s global spread. But with the important exception of Somalia and large parts of West Africa, jihadi groups have not managed a mobilization comparable with the ones after the 2003 Iraq War or during the rise of the Islamic State. At those times, their ideology still had international momentum. Yet after the definitive collapse of the Islamic State’s territorial project, in most places the idea of global jihad lost its former appeal. The past few years might have provided an ideal opportunity to recruit disaffected Muslim youth in Europe and the Middle East, but the jihadis could not seize the moment.

THE UNFINISHED FIGHT

Despite the decline of jihadism and the relative safety of U.S. territory from attack after 9/11, it is difficult to claim that the United States won its war on terrorism. Neither major war fought under that banner, those in Afghanistan and Iraq, ended well. U.S. forces swiftly removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, eliminating the safe haven jihadis had enjoyed, but the campaign turned into a grinding stalemate and then, in 2021, a humiliating defeat when a reconstituted Taliban retook control of the country. The war in Iraq eventually allowed a better government than Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to emerge, but it also set the groundwork for the rise of the Islamic State. These and other wars in the region came at a huge human cost, too. The Brown University Costs of War project has estimated that almost a million people, nearly half of them civilians, died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen between 2001 and 2023. The United States lost more than 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and more than 4,000 in Iraq, and more than 50,000 were wounded between the two conflicts. Washington spent $8 trillion on its post-9/11 wars through 2021.

Counterterrorism efforts did not stop jihadism entirely, either. For years, U.S. military campaigns and effective al-Qaeda and Islamic State propaganda amplifying American and allied abuses kept alive the political conditions that enabled the ideology’s spread. And although no jihadi group was able to carry out another operation on the scale of 9/11, the United States and its allies were the target of numerous plots and attacks by individuals who were inspired by jihadi ideology even if they had never met an al-Qaeda or Islamic State member. Many attempted attacks have been foiled thanks to better countermeasures, but the desire to kill Americans and citizens of other countries on jihadi groups’ lists of enemies has not gone away. Efforts by successive U.S. administrations to take on jihadi propaganda directly—including numerous programs aimed at “countering violent extremism”—were not particularly effective at winning the hearts and minds of people who opposed U.S. policy and were disinclined to trust the United States while Muslim civilians were dying in its wars.

It will take constant effort to ensure that jihadis cannot rebuild.

The persistence of an ideology is not the same as salience, however. At their height, jihadi groups proved capable of spectacular violence, forming alliances amid civil wars and even seizing territory. But they failed to translate those achievements into a durable political project or sustained global appeal. Outside sub-Saharan Africa, jihadism no longer offers anything like the same persuasive answer to Muslim grievances or plausible path to political transformation that it did in the first two decades of this century. Jihadis are not flocking to battle Israel or the United States, and the former Syrian jihadis sitting in Damascus seem to prefer attracting foreign investment to fighting infidel powers.

This leaves Washington with tough decisions about how far it should go to fight the jihadi groups that remain active today. Most of them have survived by getting involved in civil wars that have been highly destructive but have erupted in places that are peripheral to U.S. interests, such as Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. There is a risk that jihadi groups could turn their involvement in these wars into opportunities to create new safe havens from which to organize international attacks. But if the United States attacks them directly, it also risks inviting retaliation and getting bogged down in new conflicts. In places such as Somalia and Yemen, Washington’s solution has been to launch drone attacks on jihadi leaders and operatives and provide limited support to regional governments, warlords, and tribal leaders to keep jihadi groups off balance. Yet as long as the governments in these countries remain weak and security assistance fails to move the needle significantly—or if, as the Trump administration has done in many African countries, Washington cuts its aid entirely—jihadi groups will remain active.

The United States must accept that jihadism may never truly vanish. For now, U.S. and allied counterterrorism campaigns and jihadis’ poor track record are keeping these groups relatively contained. But it will take continued, constant effort—intelligence cooperation with allies, drone strikes on jihadi operatives, and military training for local partners—to ensure that they cannot start rebuilding in weak states. All of this is best done behind the scenes, denying jihadis easy propaganda victories and limiting the cost to the United States. If Washington can maintain vigilance without overextending itself, it can keep jihadism a manageable danger rather than letting it once again become a defining threat.

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