Learning the Wrong Lessons? Counterterrorism Amid a Jihadist Revival

16 Mar 2026 10:48 AM

With violent extremism pushed to the periphery of mainstream security debates, the concern is not just a lack of resourcing, but a revival of obsolete assumptions and policy approaches.

The UN Sanctions Committee’s latest report on Al-Qaeda (AQ) and Islamic State (IS) takes stock of global jihadism today. The prognosis for policymakers is bleak, reflecting a complex, multipolar threat dispersed across different theatres; a polycentric network where momentum generated in one context provides capability, narrative and facilitation in another. There is no ‘epicentre’, only epidemicity.

Additionally, anxiety is growing over an ‘increase in the effective use of new technology’, with groups exploiting satellite communication systems, artificial intelligence and UAVs. Much of this equipment is cheap and readily accessible, supplied as component parts from (legitimate) commercial vendors or pilfered from local warzones.

Leakage from Sudan – a country now saturated in heavy weapons, loitering munitions, small arms and missiles – is a prime example, with the conflict quickly assuming regional proportions. Emadeddin Badi has already described a ‘collateral circuitry’ of weapons, fighters and fuel crosscutting the Sahel – dynamics analogous to (and surpassing) Libya’s collapse in 2011, while others reference the transit of illicit goods through entrepôts along the Darfuri border. Allegations of a (planned) drone delivery to IS brokers suggest the spillover may reach as far as West Africa: a precursor to an interconnected crisis spanning the Horn to the Gulf of Guinea.

The scale of contemporary jihadism is similarly alarming. The Sanctions Committee indicates Al-Qaeda’s membership, alongside its immediate affiliates, could amount to 25,000 alone, a figure eclipsing the few hundred acolytes led by Osama Bin Laden back in 2001. Nor does this estimate include sympathetic outfits like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP); IS’s various wilayat (stretching from Lake Chad to the Sinai, eastern Congo, Somalia, Mozambique and Afghanistan); or the amorphous assembly of individuals and ‘small cells’ operating without any ‘defined or discernible . . . structure at all’. After a 25-year long ‘War on Terror’ (WOT), the threat has metastasised even as global attention – and funding for preventive programming – wanes.

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