As the Middle East edges closer to another round of US-Israeli military confrontation with Iran, Afghanistan has become more important than ever for transnational militant groups like Al-Qaeda. Even as Al-Qaeda exploits Middle Eastern conflicts to incite lone-actor violence in the West, it is staying on the sidelines of the region’s wars to regroup, rebuild and conserve its energy for the day after. Its praise for Hamam Al-Hammami, the flydubai pilot who tried to hijack a Tel Aviv-bound plane and crash it into Ben Gurion Airport, shows both sides of this approach.

Al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and South Asian affiliates, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), glorified the pilot and called for more such attacks. AQIS went further, putting the failed hijacking on the cover of its Urdu-language propaganda magazine, Nawa-i-Ghazwa-i-Hind, with a caption from its founder Osama bin Laden: “if our message does not reach you through words, we will send it through hijacked planes.”

The aftermath of the Middle East’s devastating conflicts will leave plenty of fault lines for Al-Qaeda to exploit.

—Abdul Basit Khan

These two parallel trends reveal Al-Qaeda’s current paradox and strategic dilemma. On the one hand, the group wants to preserve its organizational capacity while it rebuilds its operational strength. It is investing in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and commercial quadcopters, seeking financial self-sufficiency through decentralized digital currencies, and professionalizing its training and propaganda operations. To this end, it has turned its focus inward. On the other hand, it continues to latch onto regional conflicts to incite lone-actor attacks in the West. Al-Qaeda’s current leadership believes a series of lone-actor attacks abroad can achieve the same strategic objectives that high-profile attacks like 9/11 once did. Yet its opportunism has not ended its failure to mount attacks overseas, and its rebuilding has faced challenges from rivals like Daesh.

Either way, the Middle East’s volatile security environment has renewed Afghanistan’s importance as a haven for Al-Qaeda. Despite decades of war, the group has maintained a presence there for strategic and logistical reasons. Strategically, the Taliban’s victory matters for Al-Qaeda’s brand of global militancy. It undermines Daesh’s claim to a self-styled global Sunni caliphate, and the narrative of the Taliban restoring their theocratic rule by defeating the United States boosts Al-Qaeda’s ideological appeal among its followers. Logistically, by renewing its oath of allegiance to Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, Al-Qaeda secures its sanctuary.

As tensions rise in the Middle East, small numbers of militants from Syria and Somalia have reportedly moved to Afghanistan. If tensions escalate further, volatility along the Iran-Afghanistan border, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ focus on fighting the US and Israel, could open the door for more Al-Qaeda militants to enter Afghanistan.

Successive reports by the UN Monitoring Team indicate that Al-Qaeda maintains close ties with the Taliban government and advises it on strategic issues, including its rivalry with Pakistan. Earlier this year in April, breaking with its longstanding approach of lying low, Al-Qaeda openly endorsed the Taliban against Pakistan. AQIS has also been training Pakistani militant networks such as Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan (IMP), and Al-Qaeda is the intellectual architect of IMP’s drone and suicide attack campaigns in Pakistan.

Critically, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda continue to coordinate their positions on issues of strategic importance, such as the rivalry with Daesh-Khorasan, leadership succession within Al-Qaeda and its presence in Afghanistan. At the Taliban’s insistence, Al-Qaeda has not officially acknowledged the killing of its leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri in a US drone strike in Kabul in 2022. Nor has it officially confirmed Saif Al-Adl as Zawahiri’s successor. Both steps are meant to avoid embarrassing the Taliban and creating diplomatic problems for the clerical regime. The Taliban, for their part, continue to deny Al-Qaeda’s presence on Afghan soil.

A renewed inflow of Al-Qaeda militants from the Middle East would spell trouble for the Taliban. On the one hand, it would draw international attention back to Afghanistan as a hub of international terrorism under Taliban protection. On the other, it would test Taliban-Al-Qaeda ties, which, despite their strategic nature, have not been free of friction. The Taliban have placed restrictions on Al-Qaeda’s operational freedom in Afghanistan to ensure that the group does not use Afghan soil for attacks abroad, and to protect Al-Qaeda’s fighters and leaders.

According to UN estimates, Al-Qaeda currently has 100 to 150 militants and AQIS 450 to 500 fighters in Afghanistan. If this footprint grows, it will become harder for the Taliban to maintain plausible deniability, and harder still to restrict the group’s operations. History offers a warning. When Al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban reportedly did not believe it could mastermind and carry out attacks in the US from remote Kandahar. Likewise, the Taliban were apparently unaware of Al-Qaeda’s plot to assassinate Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud during a staged media interview. A growing Al-Qaeda presence will also strain the Taliban’s internal cohesion. While the movement’s hard-liners support the alliance, its more pragmatic elements see Al-Qaeda as a liability that undermines the Taliban’s chances of winning international recognition.

With global attention and resources diverted to regional conflicts, ignoring Al-Qaeda’s evolution in Afghanistan carries multiple risks. The group has stayed under the radar of international security agencies without compromising its core goals. It has changed only its operational strategy, keeping a low profile to buy time and create a strategic buffer to recover and regroup. The aftermath of the Middle East’s devastating conflicts will leave plenty of fault lines for Al-Qaeda to exploit.

Abdul Basit Khan is a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. X: @basitresearcher