One senior official told the daily that Al-Qaeda now has an estimated 3,000 members — far fewer than in the 1990s, when some 20,000 people are believed to have trained at Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

But there has been a spike in recruitment since the US invaded Iraq in March, the report said. And the network is reorganizing into “smaller, more disciplined units,” with new leaders accustomed to operating on the run.

“Definitely, their capability has been eroded,” a senior government official was quoted as saying. “But they are still a threat, they are still sophisticated, they are still fighting and they are still trying to strike in the United States,” the official said.

Authorities believe Al-Qaeda has opened new training camps in Sudan and established “a strong foothold” in Kenya and other parts of East Africa.

Pakistan and Chechnya are also sites of “reorganized bases of operations,” the report said.

Al-Qaeda has even sent new scouts to the United States to look for targets, it said.

In the last two months US officials secretly arrested two Arab men suspected of scouting targets for attacks in the United States. A total of six suspected Al-Qaeda members were arrested on US soil “in recent months,” the report said.

Based on intelligence and interviews with detained terrorists, officials believe Al-Qaeda is still interested in mounting an attack with an aircraft. They have been studying possible targets including gasoline trucks, suspension bridges and landmarks, the report said.

The report appeared to flesh out a spate of terror warnings by Western countries, and followed deadly attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.

Numerous Western countries, including the United States, issued terror and travel warnings for Kenya. Britain suspended all commercial flights to Kenya and further cited “a clear terrorist threat” in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda. Alarmed by a huge increase in intercepted communications indicating that terrorist attacks linked to Al-Qaeda may be imminent, Western countries also put their citizens on alert in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.