On 9/11 anniversary, experts say al-Qaeda rebounding as a threat

Al-Qaeda is on the rise again in the shadow of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, 16 years after the attackers shocked the United States in the September 11, 2001 attacks, experts said on Monday.

They said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni group that last month seized control of the northern Syrian city of Idlib, is simply a "rebranding" of al-Qaeda that is positioning itself as more moderate than IS in hopes of a resurgence.

"ISIS may be today's preeminent terrorist threat, but al-Qaeda in Syria is worrisome. It is al-Qaeda's largest global affiliate at this point," said former White House counterterrorism director Joshua Geltzer, using a different acronym for IS.

Speaking on the current terror threat against the United States at the New America think tank, Geltzer and other experts said they expect HTS to take centre stage among militants as IS loses ground on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq.

HTS is simply a cosmetic name-change for al-Qaeda, they said. In consolidating control of much of Idlib province, it has eliminated or absorbed rival groups, and is modernising its propaganda on the web-savvy model of IS.

"The organisation itself seems to have more lives than a cat," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, co-author with Geltzer of a New America report on the current Islamist militant threat.

He called al-Qaeda a "much stronger" organisation than in 2010, when its weakness gave way to the rise of IS.

"It has skillfully played itself off of ISIS to portray its organisation as being the 'moderate jihadists,' people who you might not like but you can do business with."

As such it has more popular support, and some official support in the Gulf states.

"Being more restrained than ISIS has been very helpful," Gartenstein-Ross said.

The New America report stresses the need to focus on IS as the most dangerous external threat at the moment, while noting that since 9/11 all lethal militant attacks in the United States have been by US citizens or permanent residents.

But it says al-Qaeda could resume the role of the foremost threat in the future, gathering followers turned off by the IS's most extreme tactics.

While current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is turgid and uninspiring, the younger leaders in Idlib are learning from the way that IS mastered the use of social media to attract followers.

"Al-Qaeda in Syria has undergone cosmetic changes to its naming and organisational design, but without truly renouncing its affiliation with its mother organisation," the study said.