A colleague emailed the other day to say in part:

Great article. I really liked the bit about the importance of leadership for jihadis. Cannot be said enough. For the past year, I have been asking ____________ and _____________ to consider the ramifications of the death of UBL, Zawahiri, and Libi, but most people buy the now common wisdom that killing leaders doesn't matter. Oddly, they do agree that it will matter a great deal to US public opinion but somehow this doesn't transfer to jihadis. I'm worried that these three will be killed all of a sudden and we will have done nothing to prepare for it because we didn't believe it would matter (Berlin Wall all over again). We need to be ready to salt the earth.

I responded:

I think it's because people think of leadership in terms of command and control - as a mechanism - and fail to appreciate the importance of leaders as symbols, icons, as an idealized self, something to aspire to, etc. Also having a leader, even if only in the nominal sense of a guy saying "I follow Sheikh Osama" satisfies some of the requirements for killing - legitimacy ("OBL is a Great Man and so I follow him") and diffusion of responsibility ("OBL is my leader and I'm just doing his bidding") to name two.

This all is in reference to my study of jihadi and cholo videos on YouTube. I selected 100 of each class of video randomly and then analyzed them according to the occurrence of thirteen distinct visual themes or motifs. The Leaders category was defined as

Images of recognized leaders - gang chiefs, clerics, leaders of terrorist organizations.

From the article:

...representations of prominent salafist/jihadist clerics or leaders of Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations were present in 60 percent of jihadi videos. This suggests that despite the clear intent of some leading jihadists to promote a leaderless resistance model, the foot soldiers of the global jihad continue to turn to recognized leaders for inspiration, if not for authority, direction, and resources. This analysis is based on the observation that YouTube is a secondary channel for the distribution of official messages from the jihadi leadership. The leaders and their media organizations enjoy a degree of control regarding the original distribution of their product through discussion forums, but it is individual followers who select from among those offerings the files they upload to YouTube. Examples of jihadi videos in this category can be a direct attempt by the leader to reach out to the followers, to communicate a specific message, as is the case in j001, which features both the living leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and the deceased Abdullah Azzam. In other cases the videos focus on the leader as a person, rather than as the source of an explicit message. Representative of this are videos j064, which is dedicated to the period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Emir Khattab, leader of the Chechen mujahedin, fought in Afghanistan, and video j009, featuring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the field—a man of action, leading his soldiers into battle.

The importance of leaders and of leadership to jihadis generally - and particularly as relates to their ability to at least attempt a terrorist attack - should not be underestimated, and the role these leaders play needs to be understood in more than purely mechanistic terms. This is so regardless of whether we are speaking about al-Qaida Core, al-Qaida Affiliated, or al-Qaida Inspired jihadis - to use Marc Sageman's terminology - though it is the spiritual bond or affinity between AQ Core leaders on the one side and AQ Inspired jihadis on the other that I am trying to address here. For more on the role that leadership plays in enabling killing see "Why Ahmed Can't Kill."