Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, one of al-Qa`ida’s most durable assets may be a name rather than a commander, training camp or headquarters. Usama bin Ladin has been dead since 2011, and his son Hamza was declared killed by the United States in 2019. Yet the bin Ladin name continues to circulate in jihadist propaganda, retaining symbolic value even as al-Qa`ida’s central organisation has become weaker and more decentralised. The example captures a central argument in a new analysis published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point: militant organisations can be dismantled while the relationships, infrastructure and reputations that sustained them survive.
The article, featured in the latest issue of the CIC Sentinel, the Combating Terrorism Center’s flagship publication, introduces the concept of “militant social inheritance”. It describes how armed groups accumulate assets that can outlast their organisational structures and pass to allies, successors, rivals or later generations. These include family connections and personal relationships, financial networks and safe havens, as well as names, reputations and narratives of sacrifice or victory. The author argues that counterterrorism assessments have often concentrated on measurable operational outcomes, such as the killing of leaders and destruction of militant facilities, while paying less attention to what remains available for others to use.
The concept distinguishes three forms of inheritance. Relational assets include kinship, patronage and personal trust that enable individuals to establish connections across otherwise separate networks. Infrastructural assets comprise sanctuaries, financial channels, smuggling routes and the operational knowledge required to maintain them. Symbolic assets include names, reputations and historical narratives that can confer legitimacy on subsequent generations of militants. These resources do not necessarily disappear when an organisation loses its leadership or territory, and they operate on a longer timescale than individual military or intelligence operations.
Afghanistan provides several examples. The Haqqani network built its influence through relationships connecting Afghan insurgents, actors in Pakistan, Arab militants, religious institutions, financiers and cross-border sanctuaries. Its strength depended not only on fighters but also on its ability to connect people and institutions that might otherwise remain separate. Despite sustained United States pressure against the network, those connections proved difficult to dismantle. By 2021, Sirajuddin Haqqani had become acting interior minister under Taliban rule, bringing a brokerage system developed through insurgency into the institutions of the state.
The continuing relationship between al-Qa`ida and the Taliban illustrates a different form of persistence. Although al-Qa`ida’s central leadership and operational capacity have been substantially weakened, personal relationships, religious obligations and shared history have survived. Recent assessments cited in the article describe the organisation’s presence in Afghanistan as limited but enabled by a permissive environment under Taliban rule. The relationship has therefore retained significance even as the balance of strength between the two movements has changed.
The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) demonstrates how assets can become useful to a separate organisation after years of counterterrorism pressure. United States drone strikes killed its founder, Baitullah Mehsud, and his two successors, while a Pakistani military operation in 2014 destroyed sanctuaries in Waziristan and forced the group into Afghanistan. There, it survived by embedding itself within the Afghan Taliban’s insurgency.
The TTP remains distinct from the Afghan Taliban and pursues a different political objective. However, the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 changed the conditions in which the Pakistani group operated. Hundreds of TTP members, including founding deputy emir Maulawi Faqir Muhammad Bajauri, were released from Afghan prisons. Fighters and their families already living on the Afghan side of the border faced fewer of the strikes and arrests they had experienced while United States forces were present. Monthly attacks claimed by the TTP roughly tripled between 2020 and 2022. The Taliban’s victory did not make the two organisations identical; it changed the availability of the sanctuary, cross-border relationships and freedom of movement on which the TTP could draw.
Inheritance also involves competition over political symbolism. The Taliban’s return to power created a narrative of having outlasted and defeated a superpower, which other militant groups could seek to appropriate or challenge. Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), however, has attempted to undermine the Taliban’s claim to jihadist legitimacy, portraying the Doha agreement preceding the United States withdrawal as a surrender rather than a victory. Although ISKP has recruited defectors from other militant organisations and benefited from the globally recognisable Islamic State brand, it has not inherited the Taliban and Haqqani networks’ dominant local relationships. The distinction demonstrates that adopting a name or narrative does not automatically confer the trust, protection or connections embedded in a particular community.
Symbolic inheritance remains particularly relevant to al-Qa`ida. In September 2026, the organisation marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a video that repeatedly featured Hamza bin Ladin, despite the United States having declared him killed seven years earlier. The article cites researchers Sara Harmouch and Bruce Hoffman, who argue that renewed use of Hamza allows a decentralised al-Qa`ida to draw on the founding lineage’s authority and mythology while leaving its formal succession unresolved. Whether Hamza is alive is less important to this argument than the continued usefulness of his image and name.
The author cautions that inheritance is neither inevitable nor automatic. Networks can be destroyed when their members are killed, captured or dispersed, when sanctuaries disappear, or when local communities reject potential successors. Forced displacement can sever established relationships, although it can also carry them into new locations. An asset becomes consequential only when an actor has the access, credibility and relationships necessary to use it.
These findings have implications for counterterrorism after the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Washington increasingly relied on remote intelligence and precision strikes. Such capabilities can identify and remove individual commanders but are less suited to tracking relationships that quietly re-form, sanctuaries that change hands or extremist narratives adopted by new claimants. The article calls for post-operation assessments to examine not only whether an organisation has been degraded, but also which relationships, routes, financial connections and symbolic assets survived, and who might be positioned to inherit them.
