Bin Laden legacy overshadowed by IS

The Bin Laden legacy five years on is overshadowed by the Islamic State Yesterday it was five years ago that US special forces killed the Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden who appeared to be living in a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, right under the nose of the Pakistani military. Five years on, Al Qaeda seems to have lost some influence as it was overshadowed by the Islamic State.

US president Barack Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton follow the capture and killing of Bin Laden in May 2011 wikimédia

The killing of Bin Laden today five years ago caused a chill within the relationship between Islamabad and Washington. “Immediately after the incident itself, there was a huge outcry in the US against Pakistan,” says Imtiaz Gul, director of the Institute for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad.

“There were allegations flying between Islamabad and Washington with most of the American Congress was outraged, very annoyed for what they thought was a deliberate sheltering of Osama Bin Laden by the Pakistani Security Agencies," he said.

Since the rise of the Islamic State, they have drawn more and more attnetion, but admiration for Bin Laden is still exists in some parts of the world.

“Quite a large minority of the more radical Islamic youth still remember him and look up to him as a kind of figurehead, almost a martyr,” says Paul Rogers, head of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

"But he has largelydisappeared because of the way in which in many parts of the world Al Qaeda has been replaced by ISIS which does not go as much for figurehead leaders as happened with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda," he said.

"But I think he has receded a lot. There is some memory of him among those who supported the cause. And for them he is some kind of martyr for their cause.”

Bin Laden as figurehead

Apart from being said to be ultimately responsible for the attack on New York’s World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Bin Laden has become a personification of extremist Islam, or Wahabism, which has a long tradition in Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, himself is member of an influential family that runs Saudi’s biggest construction company the Bin Laden Group, but fell out with his siblings when he started to criticize the regime in Riyadh when they allowed US troops to be stationed there to fight the first Gulf war.

“It's sort of become part of the general Salafi-Jihadi belief system, which comes out of Saudi Wahabism and which is very regressive,” says Patric Cockburn, author of the book The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.

“Osama perhaps more than others saw the US as the main enemy. How far he saw attacks like 9-11 as a provocation to the US to send ground troops to Muslim countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is a different question.”

Bin Laden's legacy

But apparently Osama Bin Laden’s legacy was not enough to maintain Al Qaeda’s momentum and the much more aggressive recruitment methods by the Islamic State proved more successful.

“The Islamic state has been very effective at using the social media in many different ways,” says Paul Rogers.

“I think it is also true that it tends to appeal to younger people rather than Al Qaeda, primarily I think because of this question of actually taking territory," he said.

"If you actually control territory, that can become something of a magnet for the creation of this idealized, if in practice, very brutal Islamic Caliphate.

And I think this is part of the appeal which is attractive certainly for the best part of 30.000 people. From countries outside Syria and Iraq that in itself hass been a considerable achievement even if that recruitment has scaled off quite a lot in recent months,” he says.