It is hard to believe now, but in the spring of 2003 people were asking whether al-Qaeda was on the ropes. “Al-Qaeda’s credibility ‘on the line’,” ran the headline in a conservative newspaper in Washington on 24 April. For a while, Osama Bin Laden and his global jihad were eclipsed by the war in Iraq. And because al-Qaeda failed to carry out any major operation during the war, experts began to wonder whether its powers were fading. On 1 May, as he announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, President Bush was rash enough to say he could see the “turning of the tide” in the war on terror. As if to prove him wrong, that same month there were serious attacks against compounds housing foreigners in Riyadh and against Jewish and other targets in Casablanca. Full Story
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