 I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. Today we have Trisha Bacon, who's an assistant professor at American University. She did her PhD at Georgetown University. Before that she spent more than 10 years at the State Department in various bureaus including counterterrorism, intelligence, and research, and diplomatic security. We're here to discuss her newest book, Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances. With that I'll turn it over to her to give a short presentation. I'll ask some questions and then we'll turn it over to you for Q&A. Good afternoon. I'm glad to be here today. I did a book talk a couple of days ago at the National Security Agency and you know when you immediately go in you have to do your fingerprints and they like ask you all these personal questions and then the last thing they said is will you enter your weight in the keypad? And I had to ask myself some real serious questions about whether I would lie to the NSA or not. So already I feel like this book talks going better. Let's just put it that way. No thanks a lot for coming today and I'm glad to get to talk about this book which is really the culmination for me of almost 13 or 14 years of looking at these questions and I think even though I started looking at them a number of years ago it still remains a really relevant piece of how we think about the terrorist landscape. It was even put into part of the US counterterrorism strategy as early as 2003 that what one of the things we were trying to do is break the relationships between these organizations so that the threat would be more manageable and if you think about it the terrorist relationships have really defined our counterterrorism approach since 2001. If you think about how we counter and the resources that we put into countering groups like al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb the fact that these are al-Qaeda affiliates has fundamentally shaped how much resources and how much concern we have about these organizations. Even if you think about Afghanistan the role of terrorist alliances is pretty prominent. One of the reasons we remain so committed to the mission in Afghanistan is in part because the Taliban has not been able or willing to relinquish al-Qaeda as a partner and we see this repeating itself with the Islamic State today. If you think about there being even a particularly brutal insurgent group in Afghanistan that was Uzbek, Pakistani and Afghan and that was basically trying to challenge the Taliban and counter Kabul. Would we be concerned enough about that organization to use the mother of all bombs if it wasn't one of the Islamic State's allies? The answer is probably not. So these relationships are still very much shaping how we think about the threat today. And the US response is not without basis. There's a lot of reasons to be concerned about terrorist groups that have allies. There's a body of work that shows that terrorist groups that have partners tend to be more lethal. They tend to be more resilient. They tend to be able to survive longer and recover from major setbacks. They're more likely to seek weapons of mass destruction. So terrorist groups with partners are indeed a significant threat and it's in part because groups can get really important things through these relationships. They can get, of course, centrally, especially in contemporary times, they can get improved cachet. They can get improved reputation. And that can translate into very tangible resources like money and recruits. They can acquire new operational skills. They can even become more efficient or more effective at things that they're already doing. They can get tangible resources or access to specialized resources. And one thing that is also sort of intangible and is hard to necessarily quantify is that they can realign themselves, especially when their original cause begins to wane in terms of his resonance. They can share best practices and lessons learned. In the bin Laden documents that have been declassified, we see them trying to do this with drone attacks. We see Al Qaeda Central trying to give guidance to his partners about how to avoid the same fate, for example. They can withstand, better withstand counterterrorism pressure, especially if they can offer each other things like safe haven. And they can also improve their position vis-a-vis their rivals, which of course has been a central part of what we see in terms of the Islamic State's alliances. And when you map out terrorist alliances, which some of my colleagues at the University of Albany did, I think maybe four or five years ago, so this doesn't include the Islamic State. What you do see though is there is a pattern that emerges. Yes, you have various nodes of alliances, but in within some of these, you have groups that operate at the epicenter of these networks. You have the groups that are very tightly connected to other organizations. These are the groups that are disproportionately involved in alliances and are obviously disproportionately desirable allies. And interestingly, while this is from four or five years ago, and we clearly see this today with Al Qaeda in the Islamic State, it also has historical precedent, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But before I go any further, I want to clarify what I mean by alliances, because I have found when I talk about this topic that can sort of trip people up sometimes, because they're thinking about NATO. And admittedly, a terrorism NATO would be sort of concerning, but that's not the kind of relationship I'm talking about. But I am trying to go past ad hoc cooperation, which is the majority of the kind of cooperation we see between terrorist groups is basically sort of cooperation as needed. I'm talking about cooperation. In addition to that, an expectation that there's going to be consultation and coordination in the future. So there's this additional element of expectations that goes on in these relationships. And it's important that they have this because this means that they have reliable sources of assistance. They have places they can seek help when they need it. And it's clear that this is also important to terrorist groups as well, because this has been a central part in how Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have constructed their relationships. They want a degree of formality that involves them anointing certain groups as their terrorist partners. The other important caveat that I want to raise is that I'm looking at a subset of these relationships between groups that are not rivals. And I think this is actually a really important distinction that maybe hasn't gotten enough attention. And that is to say when you look within an insurgency, you look within a complex, you look at the relationships between the Afghan and Mujahideen groups when they were fighting against the Soviet Union. You look at the relationships between the Syrian insurgent groups. Those are groups that are vying for the same resources. They're vying for the same recruits. They're competing with each other. And that competition has a lot of ramifications for conflicts at large. But one of the things that it does is it has ramifications for their relationships with each other. And what the existing work has shown is those relationships tend to be about calculations about improving their position vis-a-vis one another, smallest winning coalitions, trying to manage exploitation by other rivals. They have a number of very parochial reasons within the conflict that they engage in these relationships. But even more importantly, they're very temporary. These are tactical relationships. They tend to be pretty shallow relationships and they're fluid relationships. Your ally today can be your enemy tomorrow. This is sort of the dynamic that these organizations face. But when you're talking about non-rivals, those are groups that are not in direct competition with one another. It's groups that are not using essentially the same political markets where they're trying to get the same recruits. They're trying to get resources from the same pots of money. They're not facing each other directly in that kind of competition. And sometimes that's pretty obvious, right? When we hear about the IRA and FARC cooperating, we're like, yeah, they're not rivals. But sometimes it can get a little bit more murky. And admittedly, in some of these cases, there's some competition. But what I'm trying to look at is when competition defines the relationship between two organizations. And that doesn't necessarily correspond with being co-located or not being co-located. We have actually seen al-Qaeda being able to abstain from cooperation with a number of the Pakistani groups in FATA in the federally administered tribal areas, for example. It's operating in the same places, but it's not actually directly competing with those organizations. And there was a time when al-Qaeda and then al-Qaeda and Iraq were not competitors. But now, of course, we see in this current environment that al-Qaeda and ISIS are operating as competitors. So it is even something that can change over time. And sometimes when I feel like this concept gets a little bit murky, I like to go back to the basics. And that is a sort of business analogy. If you want ice cream, you might go to Baskin Robbins or you might go to Dairy Queen. And if the two of them were to merge in some way, those are two very clearly businesses that are rivals, that are seeking the same market. But when you think, I want something sweet, but I don't know what it is, you might go to one of those Dunkin Donuts and Ben Baskin Robbins places. And there would be a lot of delightful things that you could select from there, but they would be different commodities that they're offering. So those are not rivals, they're complementary. So those are the kinds of relationships that I'm the most interested in. And I think they're particularly important not only to specify them, but because these are the relationships that dominate in the current threat environment. And these relationships, unlike the rival relationships, have proven to be quite resilient. These relationships are persisting over time and have not proven easy to break. So that raised the question in my mind about what causes them. And there were times when I was working on this project, especially in the early years, where people would say it's obvious these groups should ally, there's a ton of reasons that they should. And I'm not denying that that's true, but what I would say is there are a lot more hurdles to these relationships than we sometimes recognize. Terrace groups are not particularly well positioned to be allies. These are not organizations that are particularly transparent, so they're not good at making the kind of commitments in the indefinite future that they're going to cooperate or they're going to help one another indefinitely in some kind of unspecified future. They're also not necessarily very transparent with information about themselves. They don't have an annual earning sheet, right? They don't have a GDP. So it's hard for groups to assess partners. And one of the things that I've seen is what they do instead is they look at these very highly visible indicators of strength, like an attack like 9-11, like ISIS being able to take over major amounts of territory. It has to be something very visible like that. And the other thing that alliances can do is they can provoke new enemies. Essentially what groups are doing when they form alliances is they're taking on board to some degree the enemies of their partners. Also alliances can tend to be pretty internally divisive. In a lot of the cases that I looked at, elements within the group had a lot of doubts about the wisdom of forming these kinds of relationships. And that's in part because alliances divert resources to other causes. You are using some of your resources for your partner's cause, essentially, when you're cooperating with them and you're assisting them. They also, especially in the case of al-Qaeda and ISIS, they involve relinquishing some autonomy. That's part of these arrangements, right? That al-Qaeda and ISIS get some say into the operations. They get some say into leadership decisions. They get some say into those things. That isn't to say that they control them, though. And I think that's been a standard that has been sort of falsely applied. Alliances do not involve control. I think the United States knows that from its own alliances, but that's also very true in the case of these relationships. No one is controlling one another. This is about cooperation. The other thing that alliances can do that's problematic is they risk alienating groups from their constituencies. And we saw this concern, for example, with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda in Iraq. We saw al-Qaeda leader saying to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the things that you are doing are alienating our constituency. They are alienating Muslims when you're beheading people, when you're attacking Shia targets and we want you to stop doing that. And again, that shows that control is not part of the calculation and that there are these risks that are associated with it. We also see that sometimes alliances struggle because of very basic cultural and language differences, which will come up in one of the examples I'll talk about later. The other thing that's a problem in these relationships is that terrorist leadership tends to be very pivotal in alliance formation. It tends to be terrorist leaders who have to be willing to form these relationships and even seek these relationships. And they're not exactly people who necessarily play well with others. These are people with enormous egos who see themselves as sort of in a sort of hero status or sort of a martyr status. They don't necessarily do that well in their relationships with one another. And then finally, and I think most importantly, alliances really significantly increase an existential threat to terrorist organizations, which is infiltration, which is detection, which is betrayal. You are expanding the number of people who know about your operations. You are communicating more across long distances. You are sending couriers and brokers back and forth. You are increasing the likelihood that you are going to be infiltrated or detected. And that's not a minor risk for these organizations. So while, yes, these are relationships that groups can get a lot from and that may seem natural when they form, they're actually pretty problematic to form. And that's to suggest that the resilience of these relationships is at odds with how difficult they are for groups to form. And I think Al Qaeda and ISIS Alliance success can sometimes overshadow that. It can sort of make that less clear that that's the case. Because my finding was in almost every relationship I looked at, there were serious vulnerabilities, disagreements and points at which alliances didn't happen in the process of forming them. And that's what brought me to the core question of this book, which is what motivates these alliances? What motivates them to form? And so before I sort of talk more specifically about those reasons, I want to jump back in history for a moment, because I think that there's an interesting parallel. And that is to go back to a terrorism era, which now might even seem a little quaint. And that's the idea in the 1970s that terrorists wanted a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dead. That is not how we would describe contemporary terrorism, right? Of course, a lot of groups today want both of those things. But despite that major difference, I found that the some aspects of the terrorism landscape remained consistent. And one of them was the motive for alliances. And that was to address organizational shortfalls. That these groups are motivated when there was something missing, they were facing some kind of weakness within their organization. And alliances played a pivotal role in groups being able to address those weaknesses, to improve their capability, to enable them to recover and even survive in some cases. And the other constant was there were these central nodes that operated at the epicenter of alliance networks. So to illustrate this point, let's let's sort of go back to a historical story and talk about the late 1960s in West Germany. And it was one of those places like many others at the time that was facing a left wing protest movement that was largely about the Vietnam War, although not entirely, but it was a galvanizing cause. And the protestors there in particular linked themselves, linked West Germany to the Vietnam War, because there was such a large U.S. military presence. But there was also something more subtle at work, which ends up being consequential. And that's the idea that the U.S. had become sort of an informal model for how West Germany could recover from Nazism, the model that it could aspire to in order to be a country that was reentering normalcy. But for the people involved in this protest movement, the idea that the U.S. was a model was shattered by the Vietnam War. And so they've started to see the entire system as being suspect, in part because there were still prominent Nazi, former Nazis who were in power and in part because of this war. And because of the prevalence of the Holocaust, you might think that this movement would be pro-Israel. But what happened was after the decisive victory in 1967, they decided that the Palestinian cause was a cause on par with the Vietnam War. It was a national liberation cause. There was a lot of affinity for the Palestinian cause within the movement. So after several years, this movement does not have much to show for its efforts. And there were a number of incidents that made sort of a radical fringe within the movement get frustrated and get restless. And one of the key ones was when an unarmed protester was shot in the back by a police officer during a protest of the anti-Shaw, a protest against the Shaw's visit to West Germany. And that radical fringe became very interested in escalating their activities. But they didn't have a lot of experience. They didn't have a lot of training. So what do they do? They fire bomb a department store after hours. And it causes some damage. It's expensive. It's not, you know, it damages capitalism, right? It's consistent with their goals, but it's amateurish. And it really has no major implications. And not surprisingly, shortly thereafter, they're all arrested. They're not, they don't have the skills. So they're arrested, but they're allowed out on bail. And then they're a leader who's probably someone many of you are familiar with, Andreas Potter, gets re-arrested. And he is detained while the rest of them are free. His girlfriend is an enterprising sort, and she decides that they're going to break him out of prison. And so she enlists her journalist friend, Ulrich Meinhof, to pretend to arrange an interview in a third location that's less secure. And then they go in and they break out Andreas Potter. And then this unit that's called Potter Meinhof is born, but they call themselves, of course, the Red Army faction. And they're ready to now that they're all free escalate their activities. But what happens? They realize, okay, we fire bombed a department store and we're immediately arrested. We don't have what it takes to undertake the kind of campaign we're seeking to take. So they don't have weapons. They don't have training. And there's a manhunt already underway because of the breakout of prison. So they turn to the FATA representative in West Germany, and they say, can you help us? Can you help us get weapons? Can you help us get training? And he offers them to come to Jordan, which is at that time where FATA, of course, had its basis. So they arrive in Jordan in 1970. And the Palestinians don't really take them very seriously because they don't really have any skills. They don't really have much to offer. And so they show them some orphanages. They show them some refugee camps. It's revolutionary tourism, right? It's not real training. And the West Germans get frustrated and they insist that they really want training. So FATA agrees and they bring them to one of their real training facilities. And what happens next if it weren't so dangerous and didn't involve terrorism would be a little bit entertaining because the West Germans are sort of ridiculous when they get there. They complain that there's no soda and that there's not enough food. And Andreas Bader decides he's going to wear his leather pants during training, which in Jordan is just doesn't seem like a good idea because it's so hot. But besides that, it also doesn't help them to be taken seriously by their counterparts. And in the training that they're undertaking, they're frustrated. They don't need to learn to run long distances and slit a camel's belly back in West Germany. And those are the kind of skills that they're getting. So there's this mismatch between what FATA can offer and what the Red Army faction needs. And so they start to act out. And one of the things that they do is they fire their ammunition endlessly. And for the rest of the trainees at the camp, they have theirs rationed. So the trainer decides enough, enough with this silliness, we are rationing the West German trainees as well. So they go on strike at a terrorist training camp. And while they're on strike, the women decide it's a good time to sunbathe, with not a lot of clothes on. Again, a very clear sort of cultural clash here for their much more conservative Arab hosts. And also probably, again, not a great idea in Jordan given the heat and the sun and the possibility of sunburn. So shortly thereafter, someone who is quite serious shows up at the camp. And he's a FATA commander who would go on to mastermind the Munich Olympic attacks in 1972. And he's not amused by the West Germans. And he sort of makes a deal with them, you can stay as long as you start to behave like real trainees. And so the next time they create drama at the camp, they tell them it's time to go home and they send them back to West Germany. And so the West Germans return and they take a couple of years where they get a lot of attention. They're stealing BMWs, they're robbing banks, but eventually they start a campaign in 1972 of bombings. And they bomb a US military mess hall at a base in Frankfurt, they bomb the car of federal judge who had signed a warrant for their arrest, they bomb a conservative media outlet and they bomb another US military facility. And within weeks, maybe at most a month, they're all arrested. The entire organization is arrested. And this could have been the end of the story, right? But instead when they're in prison, they become a cause. They become a cause onto themselves. They're kept in cells that have all white walls, quite cold temperatures, lights are on 24 hours a day, sound proof rooms. And the accusation is this is sensory deprivation and it's akin to torture. And it actually begins to get quite a bit of sympathy. And the prisoners use it to show that the West German government is exactly what they said it was. It's the kind of government that will torture its own people. They go on hunger strikes and one of their members dies of a hunger strike. And so there's this fuel, there's this, they're adding fuel to the idea that they're being tortured and mistreated. And this is not inconsequential because it gets a significant following outside of the prison. And there's several attempts to form new organizations to break the prisoners out that the West Germans pretty quickly detect. But then there's one that starts to gain traction. And that's because they have help from the prisoners' lawyers. They have help from people who got out of prison who were in there for lower level sentences. And they start to coalesce around the idea that they need to get the prisoners out of the jail. But they have the exact same dilemma that the organization did in 1970. They don't have the skills to do it. They don't have the weapons to do it. And they don't know how to plot hostage-taking operations. So they did exactly what their colleagues did in 1970. They approached FATA and they asked them to help. But by now, FATA is not interested in this kind of relationship anymore. It is getting international legitimacy and it's stepping away from the terrorism and relationships with terrorist organizations. But it does broker an organization, an introduction to an organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP, specifically its Special Operations Group. And its Special Operations Group is important because it's both willing and able to help. It's an organization that, even though it's shadowy, it's small, it's covert, it's not a massive organization like the PFLP. It's a semi-autonomous wing of the organization dedicated to international terrorism, primarily dedicated to hostage-taking attacks. So it is, in other words, an ideal partner for the RAF at this point. And they invite the West Germans to come to Yemen, South Yemen, and get the training that they need to engage in hostage-taking operations. And this time, it goes much, much better than last time. And the West Germans create a number of potential plots that would be hostage-taking so that they can get the prisoners out. They can compel their release. And so they return after several months of training and they launch what becomes known as the German autumn. And this involves several operations. Some of them didn't go well. They were kidnapping operations where they end up killing the potential hostage by accident. But the other problem that they face is that the West German government is not willing to compromise in this way anymore. It's not willing to engage in hostage-taking, hostage releases for these kinds of operations. And so there's repeated failures. And the prisoners are getting pretty frustrated. So what does the RAF do? They return to the PFLP Special Operations Group. And they get more guidance and more assistance in order to launch one final operation. And that's the kidnapping of Hans Martin Schlaer, which is sort of notorious in terrorism circles. And Stefan Aust wrote a book where he describes him as the man who was positively destined for this role. He was a major business man. He was a friend of the prime minister. And he was a former SS officer. So he had a lot of the symbolic power they needed. They thought to get the prisoners out. But instead, the West German government brings the full force down on the group and engages in a massive manhunt and is unwilling to negotiate. So what does the RAF do? They turn again to the PFLP Special Operations Group. And they agree to host them in some of the camps and facilities they have then in Iraq, because they have a relationship with the Saddam Hussein regime. And so they're able to get out of some of the counter terrorism pressure, except for those who are guarding the large layer. But then the PFLP Special Operations Group takes it a step further. And they say we'll conduct a hostage-taking operation to add to the pressure. And that's exactly what they do a month later. They conduct a hijacking of a plane going from Mallorca to Frankfurt. It has about 86 passengers on board. And they issue demands for the release of those prisoners and a few Palestinians that they'd like to see released from Turkey. They have some trouble finding a place to land. But even though they land in Somalia, the Seahad Bari regime was very susceptible to international pressure. And he allows the Western government to launch a rescue mission. And they succeed in rescuing all of the remaining hostages and killing several of the attackers. With that, the Red Army faction leaders decide they've had enough. And they stage their own suicide in prison. And they make it look like murders. And there are undoubtedly questions about why they had guns in their cells and knives in their cells. But most accounts suggest that this was indeed a suicide. And when the news of this reaches their followers, they're, of course, desolate. This was their primary objective. Some of them leave. But the rest of them are able to stay under the PFLP Special Operations Group's protection in Iraq. And several years go by, they haven't basically done anything. But they are able to regenerate several years later. And they learn some significant lessons from these relationships. Of course, they got the operational capability. They got the operational guidance. They got the cache of being associated with the Palestinian cause. They got safe haven at some critical points. They didn't succeed in getting their aims. There's no doubt about that. But one thing they did learn with how to forge these relationships and how valuable they would be. And they go on in the 1980s to forge their own alliance network with left-wing groups in Europe. And they rebuild themselves, essentially. And they're able to attack US military targets and businesses. And even the collapse of the Berlin Wall they survive, although they are weakened. And this organization does not disband until 1998. From the origins that I told you about to 1998 is actually sort of an extraordinary thing. So why do I tell you this historical case? It's even in a time when terrorists wanted a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dead. This shows how dangerous these alliances were. And they can be. They allowed the group to survive at several points when it may not have been able to survive on its own. And it also improved their capability and allowed them to last for decades. And it also shows that alliances are not easy to form. One of their efforts doesn't succeed, essentially, when a lot of things suggested that they should in terms of their shared ideology and their shared enemies. One of them succeeds and one of them does not. And it's in part because there are these barriers. And the other thing is that it exemplifies the pattern that I talked about, where you have these central nodes within the terrorist landscape that are very well positioned to help other organizations, which of course we are very aware of now. And they can provide training, resources, and association with a revered cause. And it's a pretty powerful combination. And then, of course, it illuminates the point of the book, of what motivates these relationships. Yes, these groups shared an ideology. Yes, they shared enemies. And that's our conventional wisdom about why these relationships form. Those things were important to help support alliance formation. But they weren't the cause. They weren't what motivated it. They stemmed from the Red Army Factions organizational shortfalls. They stemmed from the organization needing to gain capability that it couldn't acquire on its own. And so this case, I think, brings into focus that dual component, the threat that these alliances compose, but actually the weakness that motivates them. And admittedly, in contemporary times, we don't have a ton of terrorists wearing leather pants, and you can get soda anywhere, and all those things are different. These alliances are still pretty important in terms of the terrorist landscape. And this is what I found in 2005 when I was an analyst at the US Data Permit. We had seen that there were negotiations under way between al-Qaeda and a group that was then known as the Salafist group for preaching and combat. And they were trying to determine whether they were going to form an alliance. And the negotiations were protracted. They seemed to be going on a long time. And it just wasn't clear if these alliances were going to come to fruition. And I was asked whether what I thought was going to happen. So I undertook research to see what had done this in the past, what had been the motives in the past. And I found people consistently citing, after the fact, a shared ideology and shared enemies. And that clearly couldn't explain this case, especially the difficulties they were having. They'd had shared ideology for years. They'd had shared enemies to some degree for quite a bit of time, too. So it just couldn't explain what we were seeing. It couldn't explain why some alliances succeed and others fail. It couldn't explain the terrorist landscape that we were seeing with the concentration of groups around al-Qaeda. And yes, there's clearly a shared correlation between alliances and these factors, but it didn't have sufficient explanatory power. Instead, it was these organizational shortfalls. And in the GSPC case, it had experienced significant losses to an amnesty. It was under major military pressure. It had essentially lost a leader to the amnesty and had a new leader come in. And it couldn't recruit anymore because people didn't want to join the cause in Algeria. They wanted to go to Iraq. Even people who were motivated by Jihad were not willing to join the organization anymore. It was in sort of this existential crisis. So it needed a partner who could provide some of these very things, who could provide it the cachet that would allow people to join it again and to bring in the resources so it could recover. And yes, ideology mattered. It didn't ally with Hezbollah. It allied with al-Qaeda. It allied with a partner with the shared ideology. But it did so. The timing of it was explained by its organizational weakness. And these organizational shortfalls, in particular, appear to occur when a group is young, shortly after it's formed, after it's experienced significant losses, like the case of the GSPC, or when its adversaries have gained a major advantage, which was also the case with the GSPC. The Algerian government, after sort of being disreputable throughout the 1990s for the way it handled the insurgency, was now all of a sudden brought into the international fold post-911. And the US was giving it significant assistance. So I'm sure I wrote a very insightful piece on what was going to happen at the time. But it wasn't based on this. It wasn't based on knowledge of what was going to happen. So when I joined the program at Georgetown several years later, this was the topic that I decided I wanted to pursue. And it's still of central relevance when we think about the terrorist landscape. It's been years since Al-Qaeda has conducted a major attack. Its continued relevance is in significant part attributable to its alliance accomplishments. If you think about it, it's actually remarkable the group has survived at all in the almost 17 years since 9-11. And even in February, the DNI called it a major actor in global terrorism. But it's when you account for its allies and its affiliates, you can see that it is indeed that kind of major player in the terrorist threat environment. And even when you strip away Al-Qaeda's allies and just leave its affiliates, those who have sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda leaders and been recognized by it, the group's reach still discernibly reduces, but it's still formidable. And in fact, the DNI attributed the persistence of Al-Qaeda to the staying power of its affiliates. And you can see when looking that that's a significant part of it. But if you strip away both the allies and the affiliates, there's a much more manageable threat from Al-Qaeda, even in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been central to the group's ability to survive. But the important part of this is this is entirely theoretical because we haven't demonstrated that stripping away Al-Qaeda's alliances is possible. Even the Islamic State hasn't really been able to do that. Even when it was at its peak and had a lot to offer, a lot of people speculated that the affiliates would defect, but they didn't. Al-Qaeda's alliances have remained resilient even when it has much less capability and much less to offer its partners. There has been a stickiness to Al-Qaeda's relationships, but this is, as I say, much different than the difficulty they have actually forming these relationships. And then last, but not least, certainly is ISIS. And as all of us know, proclaiming itself to be the, after proclaiming itself to be the Caliphate, it formed alliances with groups in dozens of countries. It followed Al-Qaeda's model of publicly anointing its allies. And this helped to bolster their stature and their resources, and it allowed ISIS to verify its claims that it was leading this movement and it indeed had brought the return of the Caliphate. But a closer look at these partners suggests that a lot of them were new organizations. They were organizations that had broken away from much more established groups that were seeking to establish themselves. A few of them were one strong organization that were undergoing significant losses and were at a pivotal point in their ability to survive. And now, just as Al-Qaeda did after 9-11, ISIS can turn to these allies to project strength and relevance even as it sustains all of the losses that it has. And so that's to say, to conclude that I think the most significant terrorist threat we face today emanates not from individual organizations but from basically two major organizations that have developed these extensive alliance networks. And again, I don't want to suggest that alliance networks mean that these groups are all in lockstep with each other. These relationships are complicated and they are difficult. But simultaneously, they provide resources that organizations can turn to and they provide resources for each other when they experience losses. And importantly, neither one of these organizations has lost any of their partners due to counterterrorism efforts. Counterterrorism has not damaged these alliance networks in any way. Yet in every case I've looked at, there were serious obstacles to forming these relationships. So I think it's important to recognize the vulnerabilities of the alliance formation stage and the weakness that causes these relationships because it suggests that there are more can be done to disrupt these partnerships before they form. And I hope by examining these specific types of relationships because they're so important to the terrorist landscape that this book can be a contribution to that end. So with that, I will welcome David back up and any questions you all have except ones that are related to my weight. Those are still not allowed. Thanks. Okay, is that with you? So one of the, I think core sort of insights and points that you described is the alliance formation really comes from the sense of weakness and seeking something the terrorist group doesn't have. Is it your sense that that provides the policy lessons that because shared ideology is not driving of the alliance reaching out, but sort of a shaper that actually applying strong counterterrorism pressure in cases of jihadists but not connected or loosely connected to these alliance structure can actually be counterproductive? My sense would be that it can be counterproductive to prematurely claim that groups are allies because in so doing you're essentially allowing the groups to get the benefit of the alliance without actually undertaking it. So I think we have to, from a counterterrorism perspective you have to be pretty cautious about declaring groups as allies before the alliances are solidified because up until that point there are all these vulnerabilities that can be exploited. And so I think that there is a window of important time to exert pressure when the alliance efforts are underway. And I mentioned in the case that I looked at back in 2005 that yes, there was intelligence indications that these relationships, this relationship formation was underway, but oftentimes it's not a secret. This is part of what they're doing. They publicly make statements towards each other. They publicly claim affiliation. They publicly declare the importance of one another's cause. These don't tend to be covert, although they can be. In contemporary times they've often been pretty overt. And so there is that window, especially that's especially valuable in part because it's before either the groups have gotten the main benefits of the relationship at which point both of the organizations are stronger and they are more formidable at that point. So I think that's what it suggests is the need to concentrate counterterrorism pressure at that point of alliance formation. It seems that you described how weakness drives us reaching out. What drives the acceptance or the hub to accept allies or seek allies? Is that also sort of a mirror weakness that they're getting something or are they motivated by other explanations? It's interesting because it's also weakness, but I would say it's a different kind of weakness. And it's in part in the case of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. In both cases these were very organizationally ambitious groups. They thought to not just be strong organizations, they wanted to be the vanguard of the movement. And in order to have that role, they needed allies. So there was essentially an organizational weakness, but not the same kind that the satellite groups were experiencing. In the case of the PFLP, because its sole mission was international terrorist attacks, when it became more and more difficult for the group to execute attacks because their operatives were being detected, these alliances allowed them to expand their operational reach because they were able to use these organizations to conduct operations. So these groups too have a vulnerability that they're seeking to address with these relationships, but they're coming at it from a position of greater strength than the satellite organizations. And in a way I think of the hubs as akin to state sponsors without sort of all the baggage that comes with allying with the state. And all the coercion that a state can put on an organization is sort of the compelling and the punishing. It's sort of a state sponsor light. In all of these cases, the groups for at least periods had significant territory they could use to host other organizations, to hide other organizations. So they had a lot of the same qualities as a state without necessarily some of the drawbacks that come with the state sponsor relationship. So I actually was about to ask you about that. Do you find in sort of the state sponsorship, there's a lot of discussion not just the sort of alliances which are often put on the high end of sort of cooperation, but of sort of a lower end or perhaps less equal interaction sort of proxy groups. Do you see the terrorist organizations and hubs are also either establishing or trying to develop what might in sort of the state context be described as a proxy rather than an alliance partner? I think that's probably been more prevalent in the case of ISIS because some of his partners have been so much weaker. They've been at least at the time of alliance formation and ISIS also seems to have demanded that groups relinquish more autonomy than Al-Qaeda did. So it has a little bit more of that power dimension to its relationship. And though there was a little bit of a hierarchy between Al-Qaeda and its partners, in a lot of cases they were closer to alliances of equals than in the case of ISIS and most of its partners. So there is more of a sort of a proxy, but the trouble with the term proxy is I think it invokes the idea of control. It invokes the idea that you can sort of get a state or another entity can get an organization to do something. And maybe that's just sort of an association with proxy that in reality is rarely the case, but I think that's the part of it that makes me sort of hesitate. And interestingly, the state relationships have been problematic in the terrorist landscape. Terrorist groups tend to have been reluctant in a lot of cases to ally with groups that are proxies for a state unless they have the same proxy. And we saw this probably the most clearly in Pakistan, which meant that after 9-11, the groups that were closest to the Pakistani state were considered sort of problematic partners. And most prevalent, if you look in the bin Laden documents, there's discussion about whether to ally with Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which was an organization that could have brought Al-Qaeda a lot of resources. It had the safe haven Al-Qaeda needed in Pakistan. It's an incredibly powerful organization, but it wasn't an organization that Al-Qaeda thought it could trust. And so that component of it, even though they attempted more cooperation post 9-11, ended up syncing the relationship in large part because of Lashkar's closeness to the Pakistani intelligence services. So the state relationships can be a little bit of a mixed bag, especially if the allies are not sort of associated with the state as well. So how much do states themselves structure these alliance structures? I know in the sort of case you presented the left-wing terrorism of the 70s. And there were a lot of accusations that the reason they all have an alliance structure is the Soviet Union or Cuba or other groups are crafting it. Is there a conclusion that that's not correct? They sort of formed it themselves? I didn't see instances where states were crafting these relationships. What I saw was that states were enabling them. And that was in South Yemen, the PFLP was able to host these organizations and train them. In Iraq, it was able to bring in the Red Army faction operatives when they needed it. For al-Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan, it was able to host these organizations. And what those periods do as much of anything is they allow for instances of cooperation that can build into an alliance. They provide that foundation of interactions that allow groups to trust one another and to build relationships. So essentially, the states were enabling, the state sponsors were enabling these relationships by allowing that kind of autonomy to terrorist organizations, less so in the ISIS case, but in those other cases, but they weren't crafting them. They weren't dictating them and they often had less control and say over them than they would wish. Do you need territory to be a terrorist alliance sub or are there alliance subs that operated without a meaningful territorial base? The territorial base, I think, was the difference between major hubs and what I would almost call minor hubs. You could have several relationships like the Red Army faction did without that kind of territorial control, but to build these massive alliance networks, their territory did tend to be a big part of it, in part because of the ability to engage in that kind of cooperation. Though interestingly, it was post-911 that al-Qaeda was able to get organizations to take on its name. It wanted that to happen pre-911. It wasn't able to persuade many groups to do that. So it wasn't until after it lost territory that it was able to form some of those relationships. But having said that, I think it's pre-911 ability to cooperate with other groups helped underpin those subsequent relationships. So they're not entirely independent. We're based on your sort of findings of alliance formation. Do you fall onto debate over whether al-Qaeda and ISIS can ever come back together in any form? That, I think, is a really interesting question and it's one of the reasons I wanted to emphasize the issue of rivalry at the beginning. Because when al-Qaeda formed the alliance with Zarkawi's group, they made a deliberate decision they weren't gonna be rivals. Zarkawi sort of abdicated that and said he wasn't gonna compete with al-Qaeda. And so they were able to form that alliance as troublesome as it was, right? It was definitely a flawed alliance, but it lasted 10 years, despite how flawed it was, because they weren't competitors. If al-Qaeda and ISIS were to seriously consider allying again, they would be doing so from a position of rivalry. And that is a different calculation than what I talked about in terms of these non-rival relationships. So they would be once again sort of in that situation where they're looking at what their relative power dynamics are and what their smallest winning coalition, sort of all those rivalry components and also they would have to be factoring in the consequences of betrayal and the consequences of the alliance being over tomorrow. It being a much more shallow, a much more tactical alliance than it was the first time around. So what I would say is that they're not well positioned to ally in the way that they previously did as non-rivals. Now they would have to consider an alliance based on rivalry. And that's, even if it forms, not necessarily a particularly resilient relationship in comparison. So we're about to go to your questions. But first, so how poor are these ideological barriers to the alliance formation? You mentioned they're not the cause, but they sort of shape who people align with. Were you seeing cases of one ideology ditching the ideological motivation to pick up a competitive advantage through alliance with a ideological competitor or one that's not a competitor but just doesn't fit into the ideology or also criminal and other non-ideological groupings? With the non-ideological groupings, what I tended to find is those relationships didn't reach the threshold of an alliance. Those were cooperate, they would engage in cooperation, it would be ad hoc, I'd give you weapons, you would pay for the weapons today when I gave you the weapons. Not I'm gonna give you weapons and then when I need something later, you'll give me what I need later. They tend to be more transactional whereas the alliance relationships don't necessarily have the immediate transactions associated with them. In terms of the rigidity or the flexibility of alliances, that was one of the interesting things that I found which was it tended to correspond with how flexible or rigid groups were about their ideology in general. There were groups like the Shining Path that didn't ally with anybody because there was this ideological rigidity. We don't see the Lord's Resistance Army allying with other organizations. There's an ideological rigidity there and of course some of that's the availability of partners. Sunni-Jihadist groups and Shia-Jihadist groups have some selection of partners right now whereas there are other groups that there aren't as many ideological options. I think that there was a secondary potential partner selection and potential sort of binding of partners and that was common enemies. I would say that it was not to the same degree as ideology that there was a clear preference for ideological partners but there were instances of course when we look at groups like Hezbollah and Hamas where there was a crossing of ideology just although when they made that crossing the Shia-Sunni sort of divide was not as intense as it is now. I mean even Al-Qaeda cooperated with Hezbollah in the 90s right. There was a period where that wasn't necessarily as salient as it is now but in that instance they cooperated and then they sort of decided like oh this is ideologically too uncomfortable for us. So common enemies were very much a secondary potential partner selection criteria but ideology was by far the more preferred one. Thanks so we're going to take your questions we're live streaming and it's on the record obviously so please introduce yourself and your affiliation wait for the mic to come to you otherwise the live stream won't pick you up. Let's start in the front with these. My name is Andrew Iva with the Freedom for Sudan Committee and so I'm interested primarily in that particular state sponsor of terrorism. In a few years ago it was known according to my sources in Sudan that there were a number of training camps for people like Boko Haram, AQIM, people along the whole Sahel strip of Africa used to have camps around the Khartoum area. In recent years I've been able to get no confirmation that that still continues and there does seem to be an administration trend right now to take Khartoum or off the state sponsor of Terrorist. So do you have any insights on Sudan's in particular since you're looking quizzically like I don't know how much you may not have a deep case on that there is a technological university in one of the suburbs of Khartoum where people throughout the Islamic world get courses and being webmasters and operating that type of skill. So anything you have on those two ideas. Oh, one comment I would like to make sure to say that first. I do appreciate your attitude of beating these people. That's an attitude that's more of needed in the city. You know, I looked at Sudan as a state sponsor in terms of what organizations were present there and what they were doing the last time when I was in the government. So I'm not aware of what you talked about with Boko Haram and AQIM having a camp presence there, which isn't to say that they don't, in both cases AQIM had enough territory in the Sahel that I'm not sure they really would need much presence in Sudan. They had plenty of operating room there and as Boko Haram extended into the neighboring countries, it also did. So if they had a training presence there, I don't imagine they relied on it. I don't imagine it was sort of central for either organization. My understanding of Sudan's remaining on the state sponsors list that was more of an issue of the designated Palestinian groups was that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad still had some degree of presence there and that that was one of the major stumbling blocks to them getting off the list. I'm not aware of Sudan sponsoring sort of the other Sunni extremist groups, so you may have better sources on that than I do. I think Sudan's most pivotal role in terms of terrorist alliances, of course, was during the 1990s. And it wasn't in crafting, it was in providing the location for these relationships for them to meet and for al-Qaeda to disperse the funds and provide training for other organizations. So that, again, like the time in Afghanistan, was pivotal not only to those relationships but to subsequent relationships because there were the personal relationships in the history of cooperation. So that's sort of what my sense of the Sudan picture has been, but clearly you followed it more closely. So you may have a better sense of some of those things. Other questions? Stay on the side. In the middle. Thanks very much. Your book fits in a real niche, or absence of current literature in the subject. I'm Mike Kraft. I spent many years in the counterterrorism office before you were there and author of a recent book on U.S. counterterrorism from Nixon to Trump. And out of that comes both an observation and a question. Back in the so-called old days, there's some technical cooperation. For example, the remote-controlled bomb that the IRA used to kill Lord Monbatten. Supposedly the technology came from the Palestinians, maybe through the Germans to the IRA. And so there's that kind of technical cooperation that goes way back, even all the groups were geographically disparate. Is there something equivalent going on now, for example, in the use of the internet for recruiting, et cetera, or advice on how to handle financial flows? Maybe as a case study, could you describe the relationship between Boko Haram or one of the Philippine groups, all that worked with the so-called major groups? How it developed in the history of it? I think that's exactly right when you talk about the historical cases. There's not only just the direct relationships between two organizations, but then the relationships that the other groups have that they can exploit. And so I also heard a lot. I think in their time, in the period of the 70s, some of the Palestinian groups like PFLP, like FATA, were essentially the equivalents of al-Qaeda and ISIS in terms of their alliance networks. I mean, there are obviously differences, but in terms of their relationship forging capability, that they had a lot of those same, the cache of the cause, their ability to provide that kind of technology. I think there's a lot of really interesting parallels there. They were sort of the pioneers of a lot of these relationships. And I get the question about the internet, in particular when it comes to terrorist group relationships, quite a bit. And I guess my reaction to it is, yes, that that's a source of important information and maybe it negates the need for the same level of cooperation, like maybe the RAF, if had there been the internet back in the day, would have been able to create some of their own devices and they wouldn't have needed a partnership. But having said that, the relationship that relies on the internet really falls into that category of creating risks of infiltration and detection. And that's sort of the flip side of it that they're constantly having to grapple with. And it was interesting in sort of an old school way in the documents from the Bidlan compound, he was really reluctant to use the internet to communicate with the affiliates. He specifically said, let's use couriers, they are much more reliable. Now, again, there's obviously, ISIS has been able to overcome some of that, but there was that concern about detection that is so central to the internet. Excuse me, I was thinking more of the advice on how to put out propaganda, recruiting messages, that type of thing. I'm sorry, can you say that again? Whether they were sharing some of their expertise on developing recruiting propaganda. And I think ISIS has invested more in that than even Al Qaeda has. And what we saw is when groups would become allied with the Islamic State, we'd see that improvement in their propaganda. We'd see that it sort of escalated a level of sophistication and a level of savvy and it was distributed more. And some of it is that it provided that assistance and some of it is that now it was associated with you, now that a group is associated with the Islamic State, propaganda got even more attention. So there were sort of two components to it. So yes, I think that is a part of it. And that's sort of in modern times, that's just another one of the, it used to be okay, they wanted training on how do you use certain kind of devices, et cetera. Now I think that propaganda piece of it is almost as important in terms of what a group can get from these partnerships from a group like ISIS. Following up on this question about the internet, you discussed sort of this issue of will the internet further aligns creation? On the other hand, does the internet and its growth destabilize these alliances? I'm thinking particularly, you mentioned, ISIS didn't actually have much success pulling off al-Qaeda affiliates, but when we look a bit broader, it's not an affiliate, but ISIS did just seem to sweep away to sort of European jihadi movement in total from sort of an al-Qaeda-ish alliance. Is that, do you think that's sort of a reasonable interpretation of that? And does that have to do with the internet breaking apart the old, more sort of established group connections we used to see? Yeah, and I think that raises the interesting point that especially in places where it's hard to form an organization, like where the security service capabilities and penetration make forming a full organization, particularly problematic, like in the United States, like in Europe, we're not, the focus isn't on these kinds of organizational alliances. They're on more individual recruitment from the internet or elsewhere and on sort of the networks. They're not necessarily these organizational relationships. And I wouldn't say that focusing on alliances, by focusing on alliances, I'm saying that those aren't important because I definitely think they are. I think they're a separate category. I think I have a colleague, Asaf Mogadam, who's done a lot of work on sort of the overall relationships, including at those more individual levels and a more cellular level. And I think those are an important part of the threat environment, especially in the West. Where the relationships I'm looking at are much more rooted in established organizations forming alliances with other established organizations. And so I think that they're two pieces of the threat picture that are complementary, but they are different. Further questions? Let's do behind there. Yep. On the right side of the, right behind. Do you believe that the rise of social media recruiting has actually made groups in different theaters of conflict less likely to cooperate because they're now globally competing for recruits? That's a really interesting question. I think that recruitments in conflict environments in particular does still tend to follow local lines. You still, individuals tend to still join local organizations, especially now that it's much more difficult to go to Syria or somewhere like that as a foreign fighter. I thought some of those dynamics were particularly interesting to look at, like when we saw Somalis who were becoming foreign fighters in Syria, like calculus of becoming a foreign fighter in Syria versus joining al-Shabaab, I thought was a really interesting one that merited more examination, but still overwhelmingly Somalis were joining al-Shabaab or even the Islamic State's affiliate in Somalia. And that's what these alliances do, is they allow individuals to join that perhaps more attractive cause by joining a local organization. You could still be part of ISIS in Somalia, in Niger, in Libya, but so you were able to join that cause but you were able to do so locally. So in a way I think that it actually helps these local organizations to recruit. So I would say that almost to a degree the opposite. But of course you do have instances of people choosing to go to join these organizations in a way that might produce some competition, but I think overall, it doesn't cause competition to dominate in the relationship, it just creates sort of an element of, it's almost a spectrum, and ISIS still keeps them on the non-competitive side of the spectrum. Let's do over here. Let's catch on right down here. Jeremiah Young, New America, Muslim Diaspora Initiative. You mentioned briefly that it might be useful to look into breaking apart these alliances. However, usually these types of alliances in the past have broken apart due to internal disagreements over ideology or tactics. So can you think of an instance in which more of an external intervention splintered an alliance and what about that intervention made it successful? In fact, I would argue quite similarly to you that we don't have success disrupting those relationships once they're formed. And that's why I'm advocating for more disruption in the alliance formation process. When there is, when there are these disagreements, when there are these internal divisions, when there are these hurdles, I think once they're formed, it becomes pretty difficult to do so. And even in cases where we see that they were disrupted like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it took 10 years and a lot of other dynamics for that relationship to finally break despite all of the problems in it. So that's what I would say is in the alliance formation stage. And some of the things that I saw that helped prevent an alliance from forming was almost, almost dominantly when there were concerns that a partner was infiltrated that was enough to stymie some very promising alliance options. The PFLP wanted to ally with the Red Brigades but they weren't willing to do it because they thought it was infiltrated. When Al Qaeda and the GSPC were engaging in the alliance negotiations I talked about earlier, one of the concerns was that the GSPC was infiltrated and that's one of the reasons why it took so long to form the alliance. That's a big one because it means you can't essentially trust your partner and these alliances can't form if you can't trust each other to cooperate. And infiltration is just so dangerous that it's one of those things that can really stymie even the most potentially valuable relationship. So I would say in terms of those, the pre-alliance period, that was a big one. But I agree, I think we're in violent agreement that we're not having success disrupting these relationships. And even ones that are disrupting seemingly because of ideology or seemingly because of tactics I think often have to do more with individuals like the leaders not get it. Like Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually disliking each other and having this clash of egos may be just as important than some of their ideological and tactical differences. So I think from a counter-terrorism perspective that's the challenge is to get in front of these relationships. I want to answer that now. Is it that? Hi, my name is Peter Suryan from the Russian Embassy. I got the following question. Taking into account that ISIS is now almost defeated in Syria and Iraq and a lot of fighters are moving to the other regions and first of all to Afghanistan. So the ISIS is gaining ground especially on the north of Afghanistan. In this regard, what do you think about the possible relations between ISIS and Taliban? Will it be cooperation, some kind? Or they're going just to fight for control because from my perspective, as far as I understand ISIS is there first of all because of the drugs, opioids. They lost almost all the income in Syria and Iraq and they have to substitute it somehow. Considering the latest reports of UNDC, there is a significant rise of the drug production in Afghanistan. So that's one of the source of financing. So the possibility of cooperation or fighting. Thanks. And I think that this is one of the instances that gets at when do rivals agree to cooperate. And I think that's very much where these two organizations are. They're in a rivalry with one another and sort of their calculus about cooperation. It seems to me that the way it's broken down quite a bit differently in different parts of Afghanistan. In parts of Afghanistan, there's been local accommodations and even cooperation. In parts of Afghanistan, there's been violence directly between the two organizations. So I think it's interesting because in a way that rivalry breaks down the way that a lot of the conflict in Afghanistan does which is at the local level. I think there's been concern in particular that there's been operational cooperation in attacks in Kabul. That the Islamic State's penetration of Kabul is such that it suggests that maybe they have some cooperation with elements of the Taliban. I think that it's hard to corroborate those kinds of reports, but it gets at this much more complex dynamic between the two rivals. I think it's unlikely they're going to form two organizational alliances. And if they did, it would be, as I said, very tactical short term and it would probably fall apart pretty quickly. Instead, I think what we're gonna see is in the places where both operate, there's going to be these varying arrangements because ultimately the Taliban can't afford to be meaningfully challenged by the Islamic State. So there's going to be a limit to how much it's going to be willing to accommodate the Islamic State in most of Afghanistan unless there are areas where it feels that it's particularly advantageous to do so. So I think as organizations, it's unlikely that they're gonna ally, but I think we could see local accommodations. We've talked a lot about the current sort of Jihadist network alliance, networks of alliances. Where do you see either remnants of sort of old alliance networks from different ideologies, the sort of left wing Palestinian connection, similar ones, or future growing alliance structures that are now emerging that aren't Jihadist in nature, but we should be worried that there may be a burgeoning alliance. I mean, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to look historically at the left wing groups is I didn't want to just look at Jihadist groups and be able to explain those relationships. I wanted to see if there were sort of historical consistencies over time and was glad from understanding this relationship standpoint that I did see that there were these commonalities. And I think we started, we did see them periodically perk up in places like the IRA cooperation with FARC. That was sort of an old school left wing cooperation that we saw come up in contemporary times. It's interesting, I haven't looked as much at the right wing groups in my research, but my overarching sense is there aren't as many relationships within that ideology when you talk about non-rival relationships. And I'm not sure what the reasons for that are. And that sort of piqued my curiosity recently to look more closely at some of those relationships. During the 1970s, there was a lot of allegations of cooperation with Palestinian groups and right wing groups. And what I found when I looked more closely at those is they didn't never really reach the threshold of alliances. There would be this that kind of ad hoc cooperation, but it didn't really go as far as some people thought that it would. So it does, I think that these relationships tend to follow the ideological waves of the environment. And so whatever ideologies are dominant in the environment, you have a subset of groups that can work with each other. So I think that raises the question of what sort of the next wave of terrorism ideology might be, which is pretty hard to predict right now given how solidly we're in the phase that we're in. Do you have thoughts on the sort of group of arguments regarding emerging Shia terrorist networks in the Middle East and aligned structures? And I would say that when you look at the Shia structures, Hezbollah serves a pretty similar sort of alliance hub role. And in its case, it's doing so in collaboration with the state sponsor to a greater degree than any of the Sunni groups that we looked at. But Hezbollah too has been a resource for especially burgeoning Shia organizations, new organizations that are trying to establish itself. It's been able to help bolster the capability of other Shia groups. So it's essentially serving as that central node within the Shia ideological sphere. Any other questions? Let's do right next to you. Hi, Zach Todd, DODOIG and also an American alum. Do you make a meaningful distinction between insurgent groups and terrorist groups? And if so, are the strategies, tactics similar, the same for disrupting those alliances? What's interesting about that is when I looked at the relationships, I sort of looked at the relationships wherever they lie. In other words, if there were more specifically, I would say, classical terrorist organizations like the RAF, which were not insurgent groups, versus contemporary groups where you have a mixture of both. Groups didn't seem to make that many distinctions among them. The PFLP had sort of an insurgent component to it, but it was its terrorist wing that was forming relationships with other, often more narrowly terrorist organizations, but also broader groups like the Sandinistas, who before they took power had both terrorism and insurgency in their tactical toolkit. One distinction that I found, which I thought was interesting is that there did seem to be a tendency with groups that had political parties to want to ally with other groups with political parties. That seemed to be one of the sort of tendencies of like units gravitating towards one another, which I thought was interesting. And it may be it's a function of legitimacy, right? It provides when you ally with other groups that also political parties, you both have sort of legitimate and illegitimate components to the organization. So that was actually the more sort of common distinction that I saw that I thought might be meaningful for understanding these relationships than the terrorism insurgent question. And then there was one on the far corner. Hi, my name is Margaret. I'm an intern at CSPC. So you opened up by kind of clarifying what alliances are and that it's not like a NATO structure, right? And so I guess my question is if you could talk a little bit more about how attack coordinating or ownership kind of takes on, particularly with like non-rival groups. If we see, you know, I'm a, you referenced that Al Qaeda really hasn't launched a major attack in quite some time in how maybe affiliate groups or alliance groups take into consideration how they're owning up to attacks or how they're trying to coordinate with Al Qaeda. I don't know if that makes sense, but. Yeah, I think operational cooperation is both the hardest and the most important. And that was a consistent source of strife we saw, especially in the Al Qaeda relationships was which attacks to prioritize and against two. And you can see the back and forth in some of the documents where Al Qaeda is saying, why don't you guys have a local truth so you can focus on the operations we would like you to focus on? And the allies were like, no, no, we're not gonna do that. So that's part of like the dynamics of these relationships is the hub can strongly suggest its preferences. But what was interesting is when Al Qaeda was suggesting that and sometimes even in the same letters, they would be asking those groups for money. They'd say like, we'd like you to attack the Americans, do you have $100,000? So it was also, it was interesting because some of that authority was like, it wasn't coming from the money they were giving them. Or their chastisings are cowy for his behavior in Iraq and asking him for cash. So there's actually a very interesting dynamic into how they undertake this kind of coordination. So they can't really issue edicts that are necessarily backed up in the same way with money in those relationships with Al Qaeda anyway. So I think in terms of the Islamic State, it's been more flexible than Al Qaeda about what's an acceptable target and what to prioritize. They're sort of you're with us or you're against us attitude towards everybody as it creates an expansive target set and operational set. So there's probably not the same level of dissension within those relationships about who is targeted. Too many civilians, you know, that was a big thing with Al Qaeda. Too many Muslim civilians were being killed by its affiliates and it wanted that to stop. I don't sense that Islamic State is going to have the same kind of consternation with its allies. So that's probably, the need for coordination is probably lessened by it's being more indiscriminate. Whereas with Al Qaeda, there were efforts to do that but it was a constant struggle for Al Qaeda. Especially as Al Qaeda had taken on this, I don't want to say moral authority because that almost sounds positive but like, you know, that it was the stronger in terms of its authority based on its reputation and its past than actually what it currently had. Any other? Milton Honig. I'm interested in the diagrams, the network diagrams you had at the beginning. Do you guys have any analytical value in analysis of groups? For instance, one was a very strong node. Looked like proxy groups around it. Is this, do these diagrams actually tell you something that's of value? I mean, when you want to analyze a group, let me know. Yeah, and I sort of deliberately didn't keep all the labels and stuff on it because I thought you guys would go blind trying to figure out what they all said. For my purposes it was more to understand the patterns but they were actually looking at additional elements such as lethality of attacks and what you saw is that some, the size of some of the groups nodes in terms of like the big red ones versus the smaller was how lethal their attacks are and what they were arguing, one of their findings was is that groups that had these alliances were more lethal and so that was one of the things that that diagram originally communicated before I did violence to it. That's the job here. Hi, my name is Jack Kropansky, unaffiliated. Question about two groups. First, a simpler one, HTS in Syria. Do they still deserve the Al Qaeda brand or are they off on their own? And then the second is KSM and Al Qaeda because that seems like an outlier. Is there any other historical comparison and is Al Qaeda, whatever's left of it, have any remnants of KSM's influence or is it just Al Qaeda as it was before him? Your question on HTS, you hit on a big fault line I think as you probably know in the analytic community. I believe just a couple of weeks ago, the State Department updated the designation to include that and designates it as an Al Qaeda, includes in that designation that it's an Al Qaeda affiliate is my understanding and that created quite a bit of backlash amongst some of the analytic community that argue that that relationship is not equivalent to the Al Shabaab, AQIM, AQAP, AQIS that is a much more complicated relationship than that. And one of the things I think that reflects is that Zawa Hiri is not bin Laden in terms of his ability to keep these relationships together. It does sort of suggest that Alliance leaders may matter quite a bit for their ability to forge these relationships and keep it together. Zawa Hiri's now lost, if indeed they have lost HTS and the Syria sort of wing, that's two relationships that under Zawa Hiri's watch, he's had trouble maintaining, which may suggest that he's not necessarily that capable. So my understanding is that it's not the equivalent of the other affiliates, but that there may be still some ties there. So that was the first, what was your second question? Ah, KSM. It's interesting because I often think of Wadi Haddad who is the head of the PFLP special operations group as a KSM type, that sort of operational mastermind that has an ideology, but is not interested in talking ideology, sort of solely operationally focused. And I think he is of an era of his remnants and his influence on Al-Qaeda are largely gone. He occupied a very important space for the organization and I'm not sure anyone ever really fully replaced him. We kept killing all these number threes in Al-Qaeda, which I'm not sure it would be correct to call him that, but that's certainly how he was thought of at the time. But in terms of being somebody who is as operationally ingenious as he was and as well networked as he was with multiple organizations and with Al-Qaeda and sort of the space he occupied, he was a really important sort of broker. And I think that those kinds of individuals can have a disproportionate impact, but nobody has quite stepped back into that role the way that he had. And most of the people that were associated with him are locked up or no longer with us. So yeah, I think you're right that that sort of his era has largely passed. No, and he didn't have an organization, right? He was a networked individual. He was actually sort of reluctant to be a member of an organization, right? It took Al-Qaeda a long time to get him to like do the correct paperwork, right, to become part of the organization. So he more fits the category, like in Abu Zubaydah as well, these were individuals who didn't join the organization the same way, but were invaluable to it anyway and were so well connected that they brought a lot of assets to it. So you're right, that's a different category than these organizational relationships. It falls under a different category, but again, I'm not saying necessarily less consequential because he was obviously so critical to a lot of plots. So yeah, I think that's another dimension. I want to give you a few minutes for any concluding points, but also want to ask you multiple times stress those points that we don't have a record of killing or destroying alliance networks once they emerge. But it seems that clearly some of these alliance networks aren't around or aren't around in sort of the same way they were before. Why do they disappear and is there any lessons to draw from that? And this is just the alliance networks an alliance network dies when the terrorist hub gets destroyed for whatever reason terrorist groups send or do alliance hubs. And when the terrorist hub does not end? I think this is where there were probably were some historical differences. In the case of the PFLP, there were a couple alliances that essentially the subordinate group grew out of them. They joined when they were, they allied when they were pretty young and when they got what they needed from the relationship they didn't end the relationship but the relationship sort of gradually petered out in what wasn't sort of operational anymore. They could still return to each other if they needed but there wasn't a lot of cooperation in between and so it sort of gradually occurred. And then of course when the PFLP special operations group leader Wadi Haddad was killed a lot of the relationships went with him. It was very centralized around him as an individual and his organization was centralized around him and the organization sort of fell apart. That has not been as much the case. As I say, I think Zauhiri is a significantly less capable leader than Bin Laden and that has actually damaged some of Al-Qaeda's relationships. But having said that, there I think is something about anointing a group with your name and anointing them as an ally in the very public ways that Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have done that it's an asset that's a heart once given has a more staying power. I mean when the relationship broke between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State it was sort of such a significant thing in part because of that, such a very public abdication of each other so acrimonious because of the nature of the relationship. So a lot of these groups they've become defined even though some of them call each other other names now or like Al-Shabaab they didn't take the Al-Qaeda name that very public sort of this is our ally and then publicly saying that we're part of this alliance seems to have a real binding quality to it. And I think that distinguishes contemporary relationships from some of the historical ones that I looked at and that it seems to be much harder for groups to sort of take that public posture of breaking once they've undertaken that. And some people argue it's because it's the equivalent of the pledge of loyalty that leaders ask their followers to take that that's what leaders are doing to Al-Qaeda and to ISIS and if they do that they're sort of breaking a bond, breaking an oath in a way that could be very damaging to their own credibility. And that even came up with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was he breaking an oath that he had made to Al-Qaeda because if so that would hurt his ideological credentials. So I think that component of alliances and contemporary times has contributed to how sticky they are. Well, thank you. The books are on sale outside. If you'd like to pick one up and thanks for this wonderful discussion. Thank you all very much for coming.