Staying Solvent: Assessing al Qaeda's Financial Portfolio

By Michael Jacobson

My colleague Matt Levitt and I published a piece in Jane's Strategic Advisory Services, as one of a series of articles for a supplement they put together on the state of al Qaeda. We wrote about the financial troubles the al Qaeda core is encountering in recent months, and the impact that this is having on the organization.

Here is an excerpt:

In a speech in Washington, DC in August 2008, Ted Gistaro, then the United States national intelligence officer for transnational threats, painted a picture of a resurgent Al-Qaeda core, with an increasingly secure safe-haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had, in Gistaro’s view, “maintained or strengthened key elements of its capability to attack the United States over the past year”, despite the deaths of a number of its key figures.

Little more than a year later, Al-Qaeda’s leadership appears to be in disarray. During 2008, Al-Qaeda lost 10 of its most senior leaders, including three of the chiefs of its external operations branch – individuals responsible for directing terrorist attacks against the West. According to Dennis Blair, the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), these deaths have taken a serious toll on the organisation’s capabilities, “forcing [Al-Qaeda] to draw upon younger, less experienced individuals to fill some critical positions”. The remaining Al-Qaeda leaders now spend much of their time in hiding, attempting to avoid being targeted by the unmanned drones that have killed so many of their fellow terrorists over the past year.

This situation has taken its toll, not only on the Al-Qaeda core’s ability to direct and plan operations, but also on the organisation’s financial health, which is critical to its long term survival and capabilities.

To read the rest of the piece, click here.