Don’t call it a come back, they’ve been here for years…. Ok so that’s bad use of a song lyrics but it’s the truth. We never completed the job against al Qaeda, especially in Afghanistan, but hey no one truly cares until something happens (again) and pundits can sit back and blame POTUS George 43 or POTUS Barry and get their meme generators running – PB/TK
Hamza bin Laden, Osama’s Son, Is Helping Al-Qaeda Stage a Deadly Comeback – By Ali Soufan / June 19 2017
The foothills of the Spin Ghar mountain range, two dozen miles south of Jalalabad in the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, were once home to hundreds of olive plantations. For tens of thousands of acres, there used to be farms clustered along the banks of the Nangarhar Canal, a monumental hydroelectric irrigation project completed in the 1960s, when Afghanistan was safe and liberal enough to form a regular stop on the hippie trail from Europe to India and the Far East. By the turn of the new millennium, however, more than 20 years of continuous warfare had almost destroyed the canal’s capacity to pump water to the groves, all but killing what had once been a flourishing business.
One day in the fall of 2001, with yet another foreign invasion brewing, a father sat with three of his young sons in the shade of one of the few remaining olive trees. Together, they performed a simple farewell ceremony. To each of the three boys, the father gave a misbaha—a set of prayer beads symbolizing the 99 names of God in classical Arabic. Then the father took his leave and disappeared into the mountains, heading for a familiar redoubt known as the Black Cave—or, in the local Pashto language, Tora Bora. “It was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there,” one of the sons recalled in a letter in 2009.
The boy who wrote that letter was Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, who was then the leader of Al-Qaeda. Hamza was to spend most of the next decade in captivity. He grew up behind bars, missing his father deeply. “How many times, from the depths of my heart, I wished to be beside you,” Hamza wrote to him in the letter. “I remember every smile that you smiled at me, every word that you spoke to me and every look that you gave me.”
Hamza grew up with a fervor for jihad and a determination to follow in the footsteps of his notorious father. And toward the end of his life, the older bin Laden began grooming Hamza for a leadership role. He even made plans for Hamza to join him in his secret compound in Abbottabad—the place where Navy SEALs ultimately shot him dead. But 16 years after their farewell under that olive tree, Hamza’s emergence as a jihadi leader, along with several of his father’s most trusted and competent lieutenants, portends an Al-Qaeda resurgence.
Today, it might seem like the Islamic State group is strong, as its followers attack and kill innocents in London and Manchester. But its power is dwindling, as it loses men and territory in Iraq and Syria thanks to an assault by Iraqi, Kurdish and American forces. Meanwhile, Hamza’s story—based on books, court documents, open-source intelligence, Al-Qaeda videos and records seized from his father’s compound after his death in 2011, among other things—shows how ISIS’s parent organization, Al-Qaeda, is making a comeback—one with potentially deadly consequences for the West and the rest of the world.
Continue to newsweek.com article: http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/30/bin-laden-osama-son-helping-al-qaeda-stage-deadly-comeback-627207.html
