Leaderless Jihad Tactics

Al-Qaeda reinvented itself after being pushed out of Afghanistan by adapting the “leaderless jihad” concept, which contradicted its previous bureaucratized structure. Abu Musab al-Suri wrote in his magnum opus that “leaderless jihad” is “a system, not an organization,” meaning that al-Qaeda members share common ideology of defeating enemies of Islam and do not need to be connected through an organization (203). Smaller cells prevented locating leaders of the organization. As a result, there was no evidence of al-Qaeda operations in European cities that were attacked by small groups of ten or less jihadists. The quest for WMD has been unsuccessful for al-Qaeda because of the complexity to develop an atomic weapon. To begin, al-Qaeda did not