Al-Qaeda regroups in Afghanistan, 25 years after 9/11

Al-Qaeda’s plans for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took root in dusty, mud-walled compounds in Afghanistan that served for years as terrorist training camps.

A quarter-century later — despite decades of U.S. military and counterterrorism operations aimed at eradicating those strongholds — al-Qaeda is again operating training camps in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Western intelligence officials and a United Nations organization responsible for monitoring terror networks.

The terror organization and its offshoots have set up at least eight training sites over the past three years, taking advantage of the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul and the security void created by the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal, according to U.N. reports and security officials.

Other terror groups, including an affiliate of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda’s main rival, also have set up new training sites, officials said, giving militant Islamist groups a foothold in at least 14 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

These officials and others in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Because the Taliban has again provided “a permissive environment,” a U.N. report said, al-Qaeda has been able “to consolidate, with the presence of safe houses and training camps across Afghanistan.”

There are notable differences from the pre-9/11 period, officials and counterterrorism experts said.

The groups now training in Afghanistan seem more focused on regional fights than mounting elaborate plots against the United States or its allies. They appear to be constrained by Taliban hosts wary of again drawing the wrath of global powers. And with al-Qaeda’s top leaders still believed to be hiding in Iran or elsewhere, no Osama bin Laden-like figure has emerged to galvanize followers.

Even so, the reappearance of training camps is a cause of growing concern.

“They’re not following the pre-9/11 game plan of going after the far enemy,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But I think they hope that with local and regional gains they can start to rebuild momentum. They haven’t forgotten us.”

The U.S.’s failure to dismantle al-Qaeda’s training camps in the 1990s still looms as one of the major missed opportunities to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

The idea of flying hijacked planes into U.S. buildings was first proposed by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996 at an al-Qaeda complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, according to the U.S. 9/11 Commission.

Bin Laden later approved the operation at a site near Kandahar. Before storming the cockpits of four transatlantic flights, all 19 of the hijackers had spent time at al-Qaeda camps or safe houses in Afghanistan.

U.N. and other security officials said they had recently investigated claims that al-Qaeda was seeking to re-establish a presence at Tarnak Farms, a sprawling compound near the Kandahar airport where one of the first CIA Predator drone surveillance flights caught a pre-9/11 glimpse of bin Laden. A Washington Post examination of satellite imagery found no visible sign of resumed activity at Tarnak.

The new camps are being used to train fighters on weapons, explosives, and guerrilla tactics that would be familiar to the thousands of recruits who passed through al-Qaeda’s camps in the 1990s, officials said. But they also cited indications of instruction on the use of encryption, artificial intelligence, drones, and other technologies that were in their infancy in 2001.

The number of militants in Afghanistan considered part of core al-Qaeda, the parent group that spawned affiliates and imitators, is probably 100 or fewer, said Colin Smith, coordinator of a U.N. monitoring team that tracks the threat posed by terror groups and oversees international sanctions on them.

Instead of spearheading operations, “we’ve seen al-Qaeda acting as a consulting service for other groups,” Smith said. “Giving them advice and training on things like covert operations and information security.”

The arrangement has put core al-Qaeda in a supporting role to larger affiliates including Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a group that seeks to overthrow the government in Pakistan and establish an Islamic state.

A U.N. report in 2024 said that al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan’s Kunar province were “conducting suicide bomber training for TTP.”

The Pakistan-focused group is believed to have as many as 7,000 fighters in Afghanistan, Smith said. U.N. reports said that TTP had established camps in at least four Afghan provinces “with al-Qaeda and Taliban involvement,” and that the group has carried out hundreds of cross-border attacks on Pakistani military outposts and other targets.

Al-Qaeda’s main rival has also worked to establish a foothold in Afghanistan. An Islamic State affiliate known as Islamic State-Khorasan, for the historical region of Khorasan, has attracted about 2,000 recruits and used northern Afghanistan as its “main hub” for training and planning operations across Central Asia, according to officials and U.N. reports.

Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State remain fierce rivals, fighting for dominance of the jihadist movement and overseeing splinter groups that compete with one another, officials said.

Both groups seem focused mainly on recruiting operatives from within Afghanistan or neighboring states, unlike in the 1990s when al-Qaeda attracted thousands of foreign fighters from Saudi Arabia — where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from — and other Middle Eastern countries.

“What I’ve seen from al-Qaeda media suggest that they’re not really looking for foreign fighters right now,” said Sara Harmouch, a terrorism expert at George Washington University who tracks the group’s propaganda and social media messages. “They don’t want eyes on them as they try to rebuild these capabilities.”

U.S. and other security officials said that their ability to monitor the new training camps has been hampered by a drawdown in CIA personnel and other U.S. intelligence capabilities that accompanied the 2021 military withdrawal. The U.S. has since shifted resources to the war in Iran and other priorities.

Even so, the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded bin Laden as al-Qaeda’s leader, in a 2022 drone strike in Kabul showed that the U.S. has intelligence and strike capabilities that survived the chaotic pullout of U.S. forces.

Al-Qaeda is now led by Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian, who spent years helping to run training camps in Afghanistan after his 1988 arrival. But al-Adel is believed to remain in hiding in Iran, officials said, underscoring the organization’s concern about security in its former stronghold.

Terror watch lists, travel surveillance, and other security measures adopted after 9/11 would likely put any visitor to Afghanistan’s training camps under intense scrutiny, officials said. Instead, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have sought to recruit operatives online and urged sympathizers in Western countries to stay in place for “lone wolf” operations.

Many of these plots have been disrupted. In a recent case, a 35-year-old woman in Albany, N.Y., was arrested last month and charged by the Justice Department with pursing an “ISIS-inspired” terror plot to bomb the state capitol.