Recently, The Sunday Times wrote that the “Islamic State is a growing global threat”. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. For two decades, Western counterterrorism strategies have treated ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups as separate entities. This outdated separation ignores what has evolved since 9/11: these jihadist organizations have become blood relatives, bound not just by ideology but by marriage, shared command structures, and interwoven operational networks.
Just look at the marriage alliances at the very top of the jihadist hierarchy. According to multiple intelligence reports, Hamza bin Laden, whom the US claimed was killed in 2019, could in fact be alive and well–married the daughter of Taliban founder Mullah Omar. He also married the daughter of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command who masterminded the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. Hamza added a daughter of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, to his collection of wives. Upon Zawahiri’s death in 2022 in a US drone strike, Hamza was formally named the emir (leader) of al-Qaeda. Hamza also married a daughter of Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the Haqqani Network, a Taliban-allied terrorist group known for its particularly lethal attacks against Americans.
This makes Hamza bin Laden brother-in-law to Mullah Yaqoob, the Taliban’s Minister of Defence, and to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s Minister of the Interior, who, incidentally, sits on al-Qaeda’s leadership council. The FBI still has a $10 million bounty on Sirajuddin’s head for attacks that killed Americans. Meanwhile, he runs Afghanistan’s passport system.
These marriages between jihadist families are strategic alliances that allow al-Qaeda leadership to reside securely in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, particularly in family compounds tied to the Haqqani Network. In fact, when Zawahiri was killed in Kabul in July 2022, he was living in a safe house in a Haqqani-controlled neighbourhood. This was not a coincidence.
The jihadist marriage web has operational consequences. Declassified US intelligence documents that Haqqani-affiliated camps in Pakistan trained fighters for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with family ties facilitating everything from logistics to safe passage. As former CIA targeter Sarah Adam has consistently highlighted, for over two decades, these jihadist family unions have produced a second generation of terrorists, now in their forties, whose children bear surnames like bin Laden, Omar, or Haqqani, erasing old divisions.
Consider the absurdity: Afghanistan’s government is run by men who we spent two decades and trillions of dollars fighting. The Afghan defence minister is the son of the man who sheltered bin Laden. The interior minister has an FBI bounty. The acting first deputy prime minister married the Taliban founder’s sister.
We need to pay attention to these jihadist unions because intelligence indicates that Hamza has revived an old plan his father had: creating a “unified resistance council” to set up relationships and collaborations with other terrorist groups. These groups share training, funding, and personnel. This means that al-Qaeda’s US homeland plot, for example, is supported by ISIS branches, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, the al-Qaeda affiliate that recently toppled the Assad regime in Syria), al-Shabaab in Somalia, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) in the Sahel, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and Ansar al-Sharia.
But these groups have been collaborating for some time already. Al-Qaeda played a crucial role in masterminding the October 7 Hamas-led attacks against Israel. In October 2024, meanwhile, Israeli forces rescued a Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq a decade earlier and then trafficked into Gaza.
It’s time to abandon the fiction of any kind of neat separation between these entities
Clearly, it hardly matters whether it’s al-Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, Haqqani or their cousins who are masterminding and carrying out terrorist attacks. They are all working together toward the same goal: the violent, bloody destruction of the West in the name of Islam.
So it’s time to abandon the fiction of any kind of neat separation between these entities. They are now one big family, and therefore one big threat. Treating them otherwise invites another 9/11-scale disaster. The jihadists thrive on our outdated intelligence; it’s time we stopped doing their work for them.
