Twenty-five years after the attacks that defined an era, the organization behind them persists not as the centralized force it once was, but as a scattered constellation of regional insurgencies — each rooted in local soil, each sustained by local grievance. Al-Qaeda's original vision of a unified global uprising has been quietly buried alongside its founder, yet the name endures across the Sahel, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, where weak states and unresolved conflicts offer fertile ground. The story of al-Qaeda since 2001 is less one of defeat than of transformation — from a movement that