Nearly seven years have passed since Al Qaeda issued a fatwa calling on Muslims worldwide to kill Americans and their allies. At the time, Al Qaeda was a hierarchical network with clear lines of authority leading to Osama bin Laden, who in turn provided funding and/or command and control over autonomous groups.

But all of that changed when the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan disrupted Al Qaeda’s training camps and lines of communication to its top leadership. These changes largely have been misunderstood, says Dr. Marc Sageman, a former CIA caseworker who left the agency in 1991 and is currently a clinical psychiatrist and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He argues that Al Qaeda has been subsumed into the larger Salafi jihad revivalist movement that predates it.