If you put this article by Michael Totten, the man I most highly regard in reporting on the Middle East, together with this book by Max Boot, the greatest military historian, you can make an intelligent synthesis. We are in a long global war.
Totten points out that the recapture of Falluja by the Al Qaeda allied militants is a small part of an ongoing war that began some time in the early 1980s after the capture of Iran by Shia Islam. It is still a guerrilla war for the Sunni that will not be stopped by any form of bombing, Army or military action. It will have to wear itself out much like communism finally did after nearly a century of combat and aggression.
Max Boot points out that guerrilla warfare has often been a successful tactic. Sometimes it withers away when it loses the support of the indigenous population. But it is often a successful tactic in itself. The Maccabees defeated the Greeks using guerrilla warfare as their cause became more popular among the local Jewish population. The KKK was successful in its guerrilla tactics as the local population came to accept its ethnic cleansing ideas.
Sometimes the guerrilla tactic evolves into traditional battlefront warfare as it did for Mao in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
The success of guerrilla tactics requires its acceptance by the larger population it is aimed at. The generic Al Qaeda is aimed at defeating modernity. The Left in the United States and Europe already has a strong dislike of modernity and the success of neo Al Qaeda will depend on its own strength and endurance as well as its ability to continue expanding its number of supporters on the Left in the United States and Europe.
Communism and anti-anti-communism were widely supported in the West right up until it's last days as the Berlin Wall fell and Mao died.
Looking back on history, religious wars often take a century or more to play themselves out. That was true for the Protestant-Catholic wars over several centuries, the Catholic-Moslem wars as well as the communism-modernity war. We also see it in active battlefront war between Iran and Iraq, In all these cases including the current neo-Al Qaeda we are dealing with a tyrannical religious view that finds fanatic supporters as cannon fodder and young Leftist followers as allies.
It will take decades before most of us come to realize that we are in a long-term war of fanatic Islam versus modernity. It is my hope that this will strengthen the pro-modernity pro-commerce side of the war.