In the aftermath of an American airstrike believed to have killed a senior Al Qaeda militant this week in eastern Libya, the United States must reassess its priorities in its evolving war on terror. Since the September 11 attacks, America has led a broad military campaign against Al Qaeda and its global offshoots. Part of the motivation for its open-ended campaign stems from America’s understanding that Al Qaeda is the dominant face of the global terror threat. While that was once the case, and Al Qaeda has certainly played its part in orchestrating spectacular attacks of terror across the planet, the reality on the ground reveals a different story and America must catch up.
The airstrike that is said to have killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a senior Al Qaeda field commander and the alleged mastermind of a 2013 siege on an Algerian gas plant in which 38 hostages died, is a welcome event in the continuing war against extremism. Al Qaeda remains a threat to the security of the international community but its reach is waning. If you take a step back and view the region as a whole, Belmokhtar’s death pales in comparison to the growing footprint of ISIL.
Unlike Al Qaeda, which has staged extravagant attention-grabbing attacks on civilians around the world, ISIL has mainly focused on consolidating territory for its so-called state. It has poured resources into achieving battlefield victories in the Middle East and North Africa, and has been careful not to extend itself far beyond its insular borders. While ISIL makes a point of recruiting fighters from the West, particularly in Europe, the full danger of the group is not yet fully understood in America. The United States has led an anti-ISIL coalition that has degraded the group’s operational abilities in Iraq and Syria, but much work is left to be done before ISIL is defeated.
The nature of the war on extremism is changing and with it, collective mentalities must evolve according to the threats posed by groups like ISIL. It took September 11 for Americans to grasp the threat from Al Qaeda: they can ill afford to wait for ISIL to stage a grand attack on US soil to realise the gravity of the threat it poses. Yet, if we fail to contain and ultimately defeat the ISIL threat in the Middle East, the group’s long reach will extend to the American heartland. The time to change priorities is now.
