The death of the youngest son of al-Qaeda’s founder, Hamza bin Laden (30 years old), announced at the end of July and officially confirmed by the Pentagon on August 22, is one of the hardest blows that the mother house of global jihadism has suffered since the death of its founder in May 2011.
After having disappeared from the radar for years, particularly since the overthrow in October 2014 of the former Burkinabe dictator, Blaise Compaoré, of whom he was the “shadow adviser”, the Mauritanian Mustapha Oueld Limam Chaffi resurfaced as Qatar’s secret envoy.
Can you openly finance the ‘brain’ of the most spectacular and lethal terrorist attack in History, one that shook the foundations of the first world power and caused nearly 3,000 victims, and manage to avoid any prosecution or indictment?Even worse, can you be on the blacklists of the UN and the US Treasury and continue surreptitiously accessing your supposedly frozen assets to take out the tidy sum of 120 million dollars per year, i.e. $10,000 per month?
Eclipsed for a long time by the rise of its rival ISIS, al-Qaeda is weorking towards carrying out a momentous return to the forefront of the international terrorist stage.
