Terrorists usually try to stay in the news, but Ayman al-Zawahiri has seemed an exception. Al Qaeda’s leader has gone almost a year between public statements before breaking his silence last Thursday. The archterrorist’s remarks, however, were as underwhelming as they were overdue. Zawahiri declared his loyalty to Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the new Taliban leader, but otherwise his communiqué contained little of interest.
Much has occurred in the world of jihad since Zawahiri’s last public statement in September 2014: the death of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was widely considered to be al Qaeda’s second in command and had close personal ties to Zawahiri and his predecessor Osama bin Laden; the deaths of two other al Qaeda heavyweights, likely in U.S. airstrikes; the continued rise of the Islamic State as a direct threat to al Qaeda’s leadership of the global jihadi movement; the decision by Saudi Arabia to intervene in the Yemeni civil war; and, of course, the revelation that Taliban leader Mullah Omar has apparently been dead for the past two years.
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