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TIME turns to Dartmouth’s Daniel Benjamin for comment on Osama bin Laden’s successor, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his recent message to the leader of al Qaeda’s affiliates in the Middle East and North Africa, including what the magazine calls the “fearsome” al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

“It would make sense that Zawahiri thinks he needs greater connectivity with AQAP,” Benjamin, the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, tells the magazine. “If he’s going to revive the global al Qaeda brand, he needs to show that these (affiliates) are not different bits that have blown apart, but are part of a unified whole.”

Read the full story, published 8/7/13 by TIME.