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These extreme rules got Al-Qaeda run out of town by Sunni tribal militias.It has planted landmines and bombs across Yemen that have killed hundreds, held journalists hostage and, Plastic Pallet Manufacturers in 2015, orchestrated the massacre at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. In 2000, it bombed the USS Cole, a military ship refueling in a Yemen harbor, killing 17 sailors. Rather, it allowed a local council to govern according their own norms and customs.How Al-Qaeda grewIslamic groups and individual extremists flocked to Bin Laden’s cause after 9/11. They began building credibility, establishing alliances and recruiting fighters.For years, bin Laden tried to merge with such extremist groups as Egypt’s Ibn al-Khattab and the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, hoping to create a global Islamist movement.For decades, it was a small, weak and uninspiring movement.By 2015, when bin Laden was killed, Al-Qaeda was a network of regional caliphates. These disparate groups lacked a common enemy that could unite them in Al-Qaeda’s fight for an Islamic caliphate.9 trillion, killed an estimated 480,000 to 507,000 people and assassinated bin Laden, Al-Qaeda has grown and spread since 9/11, expanding from rural Afghanistan into North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, the Gulf States, the Middle East and Central Asia.Nonetheless, Al-Qaeda – a Sunni terror group – saw political opportunity in Yemen’s civil war.So bin Laden shifted his strategy.(This story has been taken from The Conversation/Global).Bin Laden hoped the US would respond with a military invasion into Muslim majority territory, triggering a holy war that would put Al-Qaeda at the forefront of the fight against these unholy invaders. It now has about 7,000 fighters in Yemen, most of them Sunnis recruited from territory the Houthis have attempted to take over. And the "war on terror" has helped, not hurt it.Although this conflict appears sectarian in nature, the Yemen scholar Marieke Brandt argues it is largely about political power – namely, the Yemeni government’s longstanding neglect of the Houthi minority, who come from northern Yemen.But newly minted regional Al-Qaeda leaders – people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Ahmed Abdi Godane in Somalia and Nasir al-Wuhayshi in Yemen – enjoyed enough autonomy to pursue their own agendas in these unstable places. That, in turn, ensured Al-Qaeda could keep using Yemen as a regional headquarters.

He decided to make the United States – a country most Islamic extremist groups see as the enemy of Islam – his main target.Bin Laden expected Al-Qaeda affiliates to adhere to certain core values, strategies and, of course, pursue the objective of establishing an Islamic caliphate.In adapting its methods to Yemeni culture, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has made some missteps.To evade US detection, Al-Qaeda had to limit communication between its newly decentralized fronts. But as late as 1996 he had just 30 fighters willing to die for the cause.After Al-Qaeda operatives flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing 2,977 people, Bin Laden got his wish.Al-Qaeda Iraq, Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as their groups came to be known, embedded themselves in the local political scene.These organizations rejected bin Laden’s overtures.The group has played up religious divisions in the civil war.Al-Qaeda also paid for long-neglected public services like schools, water and electricity – effectively becoming the state.In 2011, the group attempted to impose extremely strict Islamic rule over two areas it controlled in south Yemen. Bin Laden sought to raise an Islamic coalition of forces to establish a caliphate – an Islamic state governed with strict Islamic law – across the Muslim world.A similar shift from global to local has occurred in Al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. It has also ingratiated itself to Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed government and fought alongside Sunni tribal militias to battle the Houthi incursion. Eighteen months later, it invaded Iraq.Yemen has been in civil war since 2015 when a Houthi Shiite armed group declared war against the country’s Sunni Muslim government.So how does a religious extremist group with fewer than a hundred members in September 2001 become a transnational terror organization, even as the world’s biggest military has targeted it for elimination?According to my dissertation, research on the resiliency of Al-Qaeda and the work of other scholars, the US "war on terror" was the catalyst for Al-Qaeda’s growth.The United States invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.Leaders were killed by drone strikes or driven into hiding.Despite a United States-led global "war on terror" that has cost US USD 5.At the same time, the war in Afghanistan was decimating Al-Qaeda’s core operations.The strategy has been remarkably effective for Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda instituted rigid punishments of the sort common in Afghanistan, such as cutting off the hands of a thief and banning the chewed stimulant plant called khat.Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had hundreds of fighters at its founding in 2009.Al-Qaeda is no longer a hierarchical organization taking orders from its famous, charismatic leader, as it was on 9/11.In 1998, Al-Qaeda waged successful attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Al-Qaeda became the nucleus of a global violent Islamist movement, with affiliates across the Middle East and Africa swearing their allegiance.The US government considers Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be the most sophisticated and threatening branch of Al-Qaeda.According to the International Crisis Group, a humanitarian organization, this softer stance helped garner the acceptance of the local population.Manipulation of a sectarian divideAl-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, headquartered in Yemen, is a case study in how the group now wields its power more locally. The Bush administration claimed killing 75% of Al-Qaeda leadership.But it is stronger and more resilient than it was under bin Laden.United States: Al-Qaeda has recruited an estimated 40,000 fighters since September 11, 2001, when the Osama bin Laden-led extremist group attacked the United States, according to the not-for-profit Council on Foreign Relations. Using its Arabic magazine, martyrdom videos, poetry and popular songs, Al-Qaeda has endeared itself to the local Sunni people and Yemen’s powerful Sunni tribal leaders.In those places, Al-Qaeda has developed new political influence – in some areas even supplanting the local government.The next time Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula asserted its political power over parts of Yemen left ungoverned in the chaos of civil war, in 2015, it did not rule directly over these territories. Today its territory spans from Afghanistan and Pakistan to North Africa, the Middle East and beyond. That meant the group’s global leadership had to have autonomy to operate relatively independently.Bin Laden and the ‘war on terror’Al-Qaeda was founded in Pakistan in 1988 in response to the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan. Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders sought refuge in places like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan and Yemen – remote areas outside the easy reach of US ground forces. And it kept the khat market open