Its founder, Osama Bin Laden, embodied global jihad and inspired a generation of activists.
For five months, al-Qaeda has however been deprived of a tutelary figure and has refrained from admitting the death, announced by Washington, of its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
On August 2, US President Joe Biden announced that he had killed the Egyptian jihadist in Afghanistan by a drone strike.
Since then, the official media of the jihadist center have continued to broadcast, like last week, undated audio or video messages from the uncharismatic leader with the long white beard.
Without confirming or denying his death.
Read alsoAl-Qaeda: Ayman al-Zawahiri, the tireless right arm of Osama Bin Laden
“
It's really weird.
A network only works with a leader.
You need a person around whom everything revolves
, ”observes for AFP Hans-Jakob Schindler, the director of the independent think tank Counter-Extremism project (CEP).
Almost all options remain open.
“
It could of course be that the United States is wrong about his death
,” researchers Raffaello Pantucci and Kabir Taneja noted in early December on the Lawfare site.
They recalled that the announcements of the execution of major jihadist executives, who then reappeared, had already struck Westerners.
"
It seems unlikely given the confidence with which President Biden has mentioned the strike
," they noted, however.
Multiple assumptions
Another hypothesis, the group would have failed to contact the presumed successor of Zawahiri, his ex-number two, Saif al-Adl.
This former lieutenant-colonel of the Egyptian Special Forces joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (JIE) in the 1980s.
Arrested for the first time and then released, he had reached Afghanistan and joined al-Qaeda, like Zawahiri, where he had become number two.
But al-Adl is regularly described as hiding in Iran, the Shia Islamic republic showing little sympathy for the ultra-radical Sunni movement.
He "
clearly lives in a dangerous and constrained environment
", assured the two researchers.
For Hans-Jakob Schindler, “
Saïf is a responsibility but also an asset for the Iranian regime
”.
Tehran could, according to its interests, hand him over to the Americans or, on the contrary, let him strike them.
Read alsoPakistan, historic refuge for al-Qaeda cadres
Still another scenario, the silence of al-Qaeda would be imposed by the Taliban.
Zawahiri was gunned
down in an affluent neighborhood of Kabul, where Afghanistan's masters could not ignore his presence.
Qaeda
”, while sparing Washington to whom they promised not to let the group do as it pleases.
Al-Adl could also be dead.
Or hide, to avoid the fate of his predecessor and the two leaders of the rival jihadist group and sworn enemy Islamic State (IS), killed eight months apart in 2022.
Obviously, nothing is crystal clear within an organization now very different from that which perpetrated the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
