When you want to take over the family business, it’s good to have name recognition.
And if the family business is terrorism, there are few better brands than Osama bin Laden, who was America’s most wanted terrorist until he died at the hands of Navy SEALs in 2011.
Osama bin Laden was known to have three sons: one who disavowed him, one who died with him, and one who disappeared after the commando raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
That third son, Hamza, is said to be bin Laden’s favorite child from his favorite wife, and has now resurfaced and appears to be aspiring to lead a resonant al Qaeda, according to experts who track the terrorist group.
Al Qaeda’s current leader is Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor turned terrorist, who has been driven underground by a relentless U.S. campaign to capture or kill him. He’s believed to be hiding out in Pakistan, and has been largely sidelined as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has eclipsed al Qaeda as the preeminent terrorist threat to West.
But that may be about to change, writes Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent who now heads his own international security consulting group.
In an academic treatise published in CTC Sentinel, the flagship publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Soufan argues that Zawahiri is an uncharismatic leader who, as an Egyptian, was always struggling to inspire loyalty among other Arabs, especially those from the Arabian Peninsula.
“Hamza, by contrast, suffers from none of these handicaps,” Soufan wrote. “His family pedigree, not to mention his dynastic marriage to the daughter of an al Qaeda charter member, automatically entitles him to respect from every jihadi who follows bin Laden’s ideology.”
After apparently escaping from the Abbottabad compound just before the raid that killed his father and brother, and resulted in the capture of his mother, Hamza was not seen or heard from for four years.
Then in an August 2015 audio recording, Zawahiri introduced the purported voice of Hamza as “a lion from the den of al-Qaeda,” a play on the name Osama, which means “lion” in Arabic. Hamza was then heard hailing the “martyrdom” of his father and his brother, and praising the attacks on Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon.
In subsequent audio recordings in 2015 and 2016, Hamza warned Americans they would be targeted in the U.S. and abroad, and called for lone offender attacks against U.S., French, and Israeli interests in Washington, Paris, and Tel Aviv.
Hamza appears to have al Qaeda’s senior leadership behind him, and has been featured in al Qaeda propaganda videos from a very young age.
In fact, there are no recent pictures of Hamza, who was not yet a teenager at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and is now in his late 20s.
All available images of him show a fresh-faced youth, with a strong family resemblance to his infamous father.
When the State Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists in January, it listed his year of birth as 1989.
That Hamza is afraid to show his face is one thing working against him, says Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“It’s very hard to get young jihadis to support him if no one knows what he looks like, and if he only puts out boring audios and videos,” Stalinsky said. “The same with Zawahiri. It’s very lackluster, and it’s going to be hard to inspire a new generation of people.”
But both Stalinsky and Soufan agree that, while Hamza is somewhat of an unknown, he has the potential to reinvigorate al Qaeda and turn its attention once again to attacking the U.S.
“Many factors suggest that Hamza could be a highly effective leader,” Soufan wrote, “his family pedigree, his dynastic marriage, his longstanding jihadi fervor and obvious charisma, and his closeness to al Qaeda’s most senior operatives.”
It’s not like the U.S. is not paying attention. In addition to adding Hamza bin Laden to the State Department’s terrorist blacklist, the CIA is hunting both bin Laden and Zawahiri every day according to Mike Pompeo, the spy agency’s director
“If I were them, I would count my days,” Pompeo told Fox news last month.
