On 9-11 Anniversary: How Strong is Al Qaeda?

According to interrogation documents of militant volunteers and counterterrorism experts and officials worldwide, al Qaeda is a fractured, cash-strapped organization unable to recruit enough foot soldiers to plot and execute spectacular attacks like those of 9-11, reports the Guardian.

The main source of this assessment has been the tales of European volunteers to al Qaeda that returned home after seeing the conditions at al Qaeda training camps.

Interrogation documents seen by the Guardian show that European Muslim volunteers faced a chaotic reception, a low level of training, poor conditions and eventual disillusionment after arriving in Waziristan last year.

"Core" al-Qaida is now reduced to a senior leadership of six to eight men, including Bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to most informed estimates. Several other Egyptians, a Libyan and a Mauritanian occupy the other top positions. In all, there are perhaps 200 operatives who count.

According to a related Guardian article, Jason Burke and Ian Black report that the interrogation documents reveal the European militants were expected to pay for $1,000 for their weapons, food, clothing, and shelter. Online recruitment videos showing overflowing terrorist training camps were propaganda, an al Qaeda handler told the militants.

Counterterrorism officials and experts say U.S. drone strikes and electronic surveillance combined with fraying relations with the Taliban along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have put intense pressure on the core organization.

"Al-Qaida has become a liability for the Taliban," Mustafa Alani, a terrorism expert at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai , told the Guardian. "There is a good possibility that the Pakistanis or the Americans will be able to get good intelligence on the ground and kill Bin Laden."

And with the core relatively contained, the al Qaeda brand has had to rely on "franchises" in Yemen and North Africa made up of members with little or no ties to core al Qaeda.

Despite these significant set backs, counterterrorism officials and experts still consider al Qaeda dangerous. As the Irish Republican Army's maxim went, "You only need to get lucky once."

Photo of Osama Bin Laden by KarlMarx/Flickr