part 2

The move from avoiding unnecessary friction to taking care of populations is a new stage in al-Qaeda’s pragmatism, which has been visible in Yemen, too. With the collapse into civil war last year, caused by Shia rebels’ armed takeover of much of the country and a Saudi-led intervention to push them back, al-Qaeda took control of the port of al-Mukhalla. It kept it running, levying taxes on oil imports. It administered the city through existing tribal structures. Supplies of water and electricity increased. Visitors described security as better than elsewhere in Yemen. “They wanted to show that they could rule better than anyone else,” says Elisabeth Kendall of Oxford University. By and large, she says, they succeeded.

In April, though, special forces from the United Arab Emirates, with the reported help of American ones, put an end to al-Qaeda’s “Hadramawt province”. Its fighters moved east into al-Mahra, prompting internecine fighting for control of smuggling routes into Oman. Far from the rivalry in Syria, al-Qaeda is flirting with a nascent IS offshoot in Yemen.

Harried by American strikes, and more involved in local conflicts, jihadists have not been able to attack the West on the scale of 9/11. But 15 years on, says Nicholas Rasmussen of America’s Counterterrorism Centre, “the array of terrorist actors around the world is broader, wider and deeper than at any time since that day.”

IS and al-Qaeda may yet swap roles. If and when the IS caliphate is destroyed, say Western officials, it might go global, dispersing among its regional franchises, or turning to full-blown international jihad. It would thus become a bit like the al-Qaeda of yesteryear. And if there is no reasonable settlement to the war in Syria, al-Qaeda will plant stronger local roots. Its future emirate, should it come to it, may be more firmly supported by the local population, and therefore even harder to extirpate, than the barbarous IS caliphate.