It will come as little comfort to the victims of the July 7 bombings in London, whose terrible ordeal was remembered on Tuesday with quiet dignity in ceremonies marking the atrocity’s 10th anniversary. But Al Qaida, the terror group that planned and carried out the suicide attacks against the British capital’s transport system, has today been reduced to a state of near irrelevance as a result of the West’s relentless counter-terrorism campaign. At the time of the suicide bombings in the summer of 2005, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, Al Qaida had established itself as the world’s pre-eminent terrorist organisation.
Having masterminded the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, it claimed responsibility for a string of other outrages, including bombings in Bali, Riyadh and Istanbul. So far as the London attack was concerned, Mohammad Seddiqi Khan, the leader of the terror cell, had undergone training at an Al Qaida camp in Pakistan, and Al Qaida eventually admitted its role in planning the attacks. In a video issued from his hideout on the Afghan border, Ayman Al Zawahiri — then the group’s deputy leader — claimed Al Qaida had enjoyed the “honour” of carrying out the London bombings. But now, looking back, the July 7 attacks turned out to be the high point of Al Qaida’s attempts to terrorise the British mainland. Subsequent efforts to carry out similar outrages in the UK, such as blowing up a number of US-bound transatlantic flights in mid air and bombing high-profile shopping malls, were thwarted by the improved intelligence on Al Qaida’s operations available to UK officials.
Moreover, the unremitting military campaign by coalition forces to destroy and disrupt Al Qaida’s infrastructure has proved to be highly successful. The killing of Osama Bin Laden by a team of US Navy Seals at his hideout in Pakistan in May 2011 may have stolen all the headlines, but the campaign’s real success has been to kill or capture most of the senior figures responsible for running Bin Laden’s operation, thereby severely limiting their ability to carry out “spectacular” attacks against the West. Consequently, the July 7 bombings were the last time Al Qaida carried out a major attack in Britain.
There was a brief revival in Al Qaida’s fortunes in Yemen, where a terror cell run by the American-educated Anwar Al Awlaki plotted a series of attacks on the US before he was killed by an American drone strike in late 2011. The truth of the matter, though, is that Al Qaida has now been replaced by the far better organised, ruthlessly efficient supporters of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), who have superseded Bin Laden’s group, both in terms of notoriety and cruelty, so much so that Al Zawahiri castigated the newcomers for their barbaric treatment of fellow Muslims.
If Al Qaida is a busted flush in terms of its ability to mount high-profile attacks, the same cannot be said for Daesh, as last month’s killings in Tunisia have demonstrated. Daesh’s main objective may be the establishment of an independent Islamist state administered on the basis of Sharia. But it also understands the value of committing appalling acts of terrorism, such as public beheadings and suicide bombings, to demoralise and defeat its opponents. The challenge now for British leaders is to apply the same resolve and resources that were used to destroy Al Qaida to defeat Daesh. These include maintaining the highest standards in intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as carrying out clinical “kill-or-capture” missions against Daesh extremists. For, without a clear and coherent strategy for defeating Daesh, the streets of Britain could once again be filled with the acrid smell of death and destruction.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
