CEP Senior Advisor Edmund Fitton-Brown statement: "THE sudden withdrawal of Western troops from Kabul has sparked a worrying resurgence of Islamic State in Afghanistan, as the Islamist organisation’s central command in Syria and Iraq smelled an opportunity."

"Hans-Jakob Schindler, Sr. Director of the Counter Extremism Project (former Coordinator of the U.N. Al Qaida, Taliban, ISIS monitoring team) discusses what happened."

CEP Advisory Board Member Nathan Sales quoted: "'Zawahiri’s presence in post-withdrawal Afghanistan suggests that, as feared, the Taliban is once more granting safe haven to the leaders of al-Qaeda — a group with which it has never broken,' said Nathan Sales, a former ambassador at large and counterterrorism coordinator for the State Department during the Trump administration.

While the CIA was able to track and kill Zawahiri in Kabul using remote surveillance, it’s not clear that the U.S. success 'can be replicated against other terrorist targets,' Sales added."

"Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Counter Extremism Project and former coordinator of the ISIL, al-Qaida, and Taliban Monitoring Team of the UN Security Council, told The Media Line that the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan last August has led to a significant change in al-Qaida’s approach to its operations.

He explained that since bin Laden’s death and with the rise of his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida became decentralized. At the same time, it has managed to expand through affiliates, stepping back from centralized, large-scale terrorist operations against the West, and concentrating on creating a broader base in Islamic countries."