"He helped build the group's operational capacity and trained some of the hijackers who took part in the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, according to the US Counter Extremism Project."

"'The presence of al-Qaida in Iran is a sort of a chip that the Iranians have,' said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior United Nations counterterrorism official who is now an adviser to the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project.

'They're not entirely sure how or when they might play it but … it was something that they considered to have potential value,' Fitton-Brown told VOA, adding that al-Adel running the terror group from Tehran is 'not that big a change from what the situation was before Zawahiri was killed.'

'Al-Qaida has always been a consultative organization,' he said. 'They have a Shura, a leadership, and Saif was already part of it. He was already a very important voice in that leadership. He's now a more important voice in that leadership.'"

"'It’s really rare. A network only works with one leader. You need one person around whom everything revolves,' Hans-Jacob Schindler, director of the independent Counter-Extremism Project think tank, told AFP."

«C'est vraiment bizarre. Un réseau ne fonctionne qu'avec un leader. Il faut une personne autour de laquelle tout s'articule», observe pour l'AFP Hans-Jakob Schindler, le directeur du centre de réflexion indépendant Counter-Extremism project (CEP). 

On this episode of “The Hunt with WTOP National Security Correspondent J.J. Green,” Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, says the warning issued by al-Qaida is unusual.

CEP Senior Director Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler interviewed: "Unfortunately, this is just the latest incident in a region that is really now a belt of insecurity stretching from the West African coast all the way to the East African coast. And Burkina Faso is unfortunately by now one of the hotspots of this region, which large-scale networks both of al-Qaeda as well as the Islamic operate. Now in Burkina Faso, the main operating network and very likely candidate responsible for this attack is JNIM, the coalition that al-Qaeda built of regional affiliates in 2017, which now controls large parts of the country."

"Former British ambassador to Yemen Edmund Fitton-Brown has said that ISIS could make more jailbreak attempts in Syria and that the country's detention camps are a 'ticking time bomb'.

In a webinar focused on the terror threat to Europe, hosted by the Counter Extremism Project think tank, Mr Fitton-Brown revealed the risk presently posed by ISIS."