A newly released audio message from al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri highlights just how much has changed in the 14 years that have passed since the al-Qaeda-conspired terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Al-Zawahiri chides and reprimands the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the recording, and accuses the militant jihadist organization of sedition.
"We have endured a lot of harm from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his brothers," carps al-Zawahiri in a recording posted on an Islamist web forum earlier this week.
"It's pretty interesting," former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen told ABC News. "Zawahiri until now has not been willing to openly condemn Baghdadi and ISIS. It highlights how deep the division is between al-Qaeda leadership and ISIS. It suggests that the differences are irreconcilable."
The gripes of one generation of jihadi about another -- one can almost hear Zawahiri bellyaching about "back in my day" -- would be amusing, were the stakes not so high, and the enemy so adaptable and deadly.
When President George W. Bush made his now oft-cited 2007 remark that "we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America," the enemy the president likely envisioned at the time functioned more like a crime syndicate: a shadowy, transnational network dedicated to targeting and taking potshots against sensitive locations in the West and around the Muslim world.
But the next-gen jihadists are more terrestrial, more impatient, and more eager to oblige Western desires for confrontation. The offspring of al-Qaeda's efforts in Iraq, the Islamic State, now controls entire territories across two countries, and continues to expand into other unstable, exploitable parts of the Muslim world. Its proclivity for violence and barbarism at times appears boundless, so much so that even its al-Qaeda forerunners have felt compelled at times to condemn them.
One can only hope, then, that ISIS's rapid expansion and penchant for confrontation will in time expedite its demise.
"ISIS's propaganda suffers from the same inborn deficiency of all cultish or messianic messaging: the creation of false expectations, which inevitably leads to anti-climax and disillusionment" write Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, authors of the New York Times bestseller, "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror."
But in the meantime, we continue to fight them over there -- over, and over, and over again. And while the United States has learned how to deliver tactical blows to jihadists, the final knockout punch seems more elusive than ever.
We have also learned, in hindsight, that the war prisons built and maintained by the United States in the early days of the Iraq War in fact served as Petri dishes of jihadism. When, in 2004, Baghdadi left Camp Bucca, a U.S. detention center in southern Iraq named in honor of the remarkable Ronald Bucca, "he had a virtual Rolodex for reconnecting with his co-conspirators and protégés: they had written one another's phone numbers in the elastic of their underwear," writes Will McCants of the Brookings Institution in a recent profile of the ISIS leader.
And though his critics are quick to turn the president's words back on him, most of us have forgotten the words that followed in that 2007 speech before the American Legion:
"In the long-term, we are advancing freedom and liberty as the alternative to the ideologies of hatred and repression. We seek a Middle East of secure democratic states that are at peace with one another, that are participating in the global markets, and that are partners in this fight against the extremists and radicals. We seek to dry up the stream of recruits for al-Qaeda and other extremists by helping nations offer their people a path to a more hopeful future."
That is an admirable sentiment, but ever more unlikely during such a dark period in Middle Eastern history.
Around the Region
Is al-Qaeda winning in Yemen? Al-Qaeda may be down, but it is certainly not out. The terrorist organization now is reportedly exploiting the conflict in Yemen to make territorial gains and win over populations. The Wall Street Journal's Yaroslav Trofimov has the story:
"So far, U.A.E and Saudi forces in Yemen have maintained an informal non aggression pact with al Qaeda, abstaining from hitting each other, coalition officials say.
‘Everywhere in Yemen, you have al Qaeda,' said the Emirati forces' commander in Aden, Brig. Gen. Nasser al-Oteibi. ‘What I hear is that they are not attacking the U.A.E. forces because they know that we are not here to take their country or do something bad, and because we are popular.'
Another coalition official put in more bluntly: ‘We cannot afford to have a second front.'
Putin the Consistent. The National's Alan Philps takes a sunnier view of recent reports that Russian ground forces are preparing to join the civil war in Syria. Philps:
"From this rat's nest of competing interests and electoral calculations, one conclusion is clear. Russia has followed a consistent policy all along. It supports the Syrian regime against what it calls "terrorists" -- though it is not necessarily committed to Bashar Al Assad as president for life -- and is just upgrading that support. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has just launched his own peace proposal calling for elections in Syria, and dialogue with "healthy members of the opposition", which can be understood as regime patsies.
By contrast, the U.S. has never shown any coherence in its policy, having begun the crisis saying Bashar Al Assad should go, while not putting any military force behind this position."
Should Hamas recognize Israel? Shlomi Eldar reports that Hamas' political leadership is divided, and even contemplating the unthinkable:
"Bitter arguments have been taking place for years, but they have become even more vigorous in recent months. Unlike in the past, when a distinction was drawn between Hamas' hawkish and pragmatic camps as well as between the leadership in Gaza and the one abroad, the divisions go deeper. Due to the immense pressure on the leadership, the movement has split into different camps and factions with only one topic preoccupying its leaders: How can the movement survive?
Al-Monitor has learned that one of the camps, which consists of a number of leaders who were once considered the pragmatic stream, believes it is high time to think seriously about the conditions of the Quartet -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- relating to the mutual recognition between Israel and Hamas."
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