Who can succeed Al Qaeda leader killed in US operation

The United States killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri with a drone missile as he stood on the porch of his home in central Kabul, Afghanistan, officials in Washington said on Monday. Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks, was shot dead in 2011.

Here are some of the top candidates to take over the militant organization, according to experts.

Saif Al-Adel

The mysterious and discreet former Egyptian special forces officer is a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda.

The United States is offering a reward of up to $10 million (approximately R$50 million) for information leading to his arrest.

Al-Adel was suspected of involvement in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and he left the country in 1988 to join the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

One of al Qaeda’s top military chiefs, and often referred to as al Qaeda’s third officer, al-Adel helped plan the 1998 bomb attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam and set up training camps for the organization. in Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.

In 2004, al-Adel’s diary was recovered during a raid on Saudi Arabia. His role in the organization has been as a trainer, military leader and member of bin Laden’s security team.

Before joining Al Qaeda, he was a member of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad organization, which was bent on overthrowing the state.

Al-Adel was linked to the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, US investigators said in a report.

The findings of Project Pearl investigators revealed that al-Adel had discussed Pearl’s kidnapping with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, also known as KSM, the accused mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Al-Adel was named interim leader after bin Laden’s death.

Yezid Mebarek

Yezid Mebarek, known as Abu Ubaydah Yusuf al-Anabi, succeeded as al-Qaida’s emir in the Islamic Maghreb in 2020 when a French attack killed his predecessor, after heading one of the group’s leadership councils and sitting on another.

An Algerian citizen, Mebarek directed media operations for AQIM, using a 2013 video to call for global attacks against French interests after Paris sent troops to help quell a militant insurgency in Mali.

Mebarek, 53, pictured in a photograph with a graying beard and green turban, is a veteran of Algeria’s 1990s civil war between the government and Islamic forces, rising through the ranks of a militant splinter group, the GSPC.

AQIM took advantage of the chaos across the Sahel region to become one of the most active and valuable branches of the global network, kidnapping Westerners and carrying out attacks in various swathes of territory.

As a mark of AQIM’s importance to Al Qaeda, Mebarek’s predecessor as his boss Abdelmalek Droukdel served on the global movement’s leadership team under Zawahiri, before being killed by French forces in 2020.

However, analysts believe that AQIM has lost control to newer militant groups in the Sahel, one of the most important arenas of jihadist activity in the world, while Mebarek suffers from old wounds and lacks Droukdel’s charismatic appeal.

Abd Al Rahman Al-Maghrebi

Moroccan national Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi is wanted for questioning by the FBI in connection with his participation in Al Qaeda. He studied software programming in Germany before moving to Afghanistan, where he was selected to manage al Qaeda’s main media wing, the FBI said. Zawahiri’s son-in-law, he is a senior leader of Al Qaeda.

Documents recovered in the operation that killed bin Laden indicated that al-Maghrebi had been a rising star in the group for many years. He served as Al Qaeda’s general manager in Afghanistan and Pakistan.