Was he retarded? I mean with the benefit of hindsight we know Al-qaeda would retake Afghanistan after the death of Osama but still makes no sense to me why he would just break off and isolate himself whilst still being at war what th most of the world and crucially having a direct border with the saudis, the economic backbone of all neighboring sunni salafists. Its like he was begging to be curbstomped by the UN

Post bin laden al qaeda was very weak and fragmented. Outside of AQAP and some african groups they were pretty much defunct.

Al qaeda wanted to fight the enemy abroad, and weren't exactly thrilled with zarqawis ideology of "kill the shia"

Baghdadi and his predecessors were focused solely on the enemy within.

Despite that zawahiri was so reluctant to cut him off despite accepting bayaa from jolani he still advised him to stay loyal to baghdadi as he is still the emir of the Muslims, this was as late as 2014.

Ultimately the move was the right one, he attracted the largest following of jihadis and at the peak of their territory was responsible for milliosn of people. Al qaeda will never know such "glory"

Even now in their withered states, daesh presents the far greater threat due its potent "us vs everyone" ideology. It is easy to fulfil vacuums when ideologically you can justify everyone else as bad.

Al qaeda now is totally buck broken, their prize trophy jolani is now a "secularist" and will hold onto the throne of syria like Assad (watch this space), their strong offshoot in Yemen got marginalised by UAE/saudi backed groups and are too scared to fight big houthi BVLLs

>>17826536 (OP)
He was hot

>>17826705
>Al qaeda now is totally buck broken,
Don't Fuck with America

>>17826536 (OP)
bin Laden really was a retarded rich kid playing around with his daddies money and I think by like 2003 at the latest, everyone kind of realized this.

His whole thing was LARPing as some sort of islamic mystical voice of global islamism, but no one ever cared. Like when conspiracytards point out that "OMG HE SAID HE DIDNT DO 9/11!" That was like his whole thing. He would make these public statements to the world, secretly carry out those attacks, and then claim he didnt do them, but hes so well respected by muslims globally that the moment he calls for an attack, they do it.

Towards the end of his life, he was actually planning to come back out into the public circle of muslims and try to ride the wave of the Arab spring. Thats literally why they found just for him hair dye in his complex, he wanted to look good for the cameras. They even found his scripts and test footage ect.

>>17826536 (OP)
Actually he was a Mossad agent