In the past 13 years, Al-Qaeda has never managed to produce anything close to the spectacular strikes of Sept. 11, 2001 that triggered President George W. Bush's war on terrorism. Years of relentless targeting by the U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have relegated it to the sidelines of history and reduced the movement's core to a shadow of its once menacing image. So it came to be that as Barack Obama's administration launched its own war on terrorism in a speech on Wednesday night, its target was not the network created by Osama bin Laden, but the upstart Islamic State movement that now controls huge swaths of Syria and Iraq.

Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) are not the same thing, even if they share the same roots. The Islamic State's indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Sunni Muslims prompted Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to formally cut it loose earlier this year, but the IS is also pursuing a different strategy from Al-Qaeda, targeting enemies in its immediate neighborhood rather than the U.S., seizing and holding territory instead of confining itself to hit-and-run tactics. Spurning Zawahiri's claims to leadership, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has declared himself the one true caliph and demanded that Al-Qaeda’s own followers yield to his authority.

If Western and allied pummeling had left it on the ropes, the knockout blow to Al-Qaeda — perhaps ironically — just might come from like-minded extremists. But that is far from certain.

Through its astonishing surge this summer, analysts say the Islamic State has created a center of gravity for a new generation of radicalized young men across the globe, who have swarmed in record numbers to join the fight in Syria and Iraq. Many of those fighters were children when the 9/11 attacks took place. In their eyes, Al-Qaeda is little more than a shadowy conspiracy; the Islamic State is a virile army with an address and a track record of success.

Optimists in the West perceive a silver lining in all this: the Islamic State's ability to channel funds and recruits towards a project quite different from Al-Qaeda's. Whereas Bin Laden focused on conspiracies to attack "the far enemy" in the West, the Islamic State seeks regional conquest, building a proto-state in the power vacuums left by the crumbling states of Syria and Iraq.

Better yet, analysts say Al-Qaeda now faces a splintering of its core supporters. Writing in Foreign Policy, Intelwire founder J.M. Berger said the very coherence of the Al-Qaeda network was in jeopardy: "This kind of dynamic has the potential to seriously weaken the global jihadi movement, moving it from a state of relative cohesion into factions that increasingly compete for resources and support and maybe spend a significant time killing each other instead of attacking their ostensible enemies."

That hasn't begun just yet, however. Researchers say Al-Qaeda's leaders, wherever they're hiding, half-expect the challenge of the Islamic State to run its course. They are betting the breakaway group will buckle under a new U.S.-led offensive, suffocate under economic blockade from its hostile neighbors, or even succumb to popular uprising from local Sunnis chafing under its brutal approach to governance.

The nature of the Islamic State–Qaeda rivalry has also been misunderstood, analysts say. For all its new foreign recruits, the IS has had limited success in luring fighters away from the main Al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, Yemen, or Somalia. Many of them have praised the group’s audacity, but few big names have pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, fearing their mutiny might cause splintering within their own cells.

The competition for funding might also be overstated, said Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum in Washington, D.C. Al-Qaeda relies heavily on foreign donors in the Gulf, but the Islamic State is largely self-sufficient on its black-market oil exports, racketeering and taxation. Any donations from abroad are a bonus.

“There’s a tendency to characterize the global trend as firmly in favor of the Islamic State, but I don’t think it quite points either way yet,” Tamimi said.