By Emma Schubart, The Critic
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 This outdated separation ignores what has evolved since 9/11: these jihadist organizations have become blood relatives, bound not just by ideology but by marriage, shared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.