Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

November 22, 2017

Bin Laden’s Prescient View of Islamic State’s Weaknesses

What the Abbottabad documents reveal.

Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi branch renamed itself Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and began distancing itself from its parent organization in 2006. It severed ties completely in 2014, when it declared a caliphate, violating orders from Osama bin Laden and his successors. Thanks to the CIA’s release of the trove of captured documents from bin Laden’s Pakistan redoubt, the relationship between the two terrorist groups, and bin Laden’s insights into the rival group’s vulnerabilities, have become clearer. Thomas Joscelyn writes:

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