Who was Ayman Al Zawahri – From a doctor in Cairo to the leader of Al Qaeda

Ayman al-Zawahri succeeded Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida’s leader after years as the group’s key strategist, but a lack of charisma and competition from rival Islamic State fighters diminished his ability to inspire. large-scale attacks against Western targets.

The 71-year-old Zawahri was killed by an American drone attack, as US President Joe Biden announced yesterday afternoon in a live television broadcast.

US officials said the attack took place on Sunday in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

In the years since bin Laden’s death in 2011, US airstrikes have killed Zawahri’s deputy commanders, undermining the veteran Egyptian fighter’s ability to coordinate the group’s international action.

He watched as al-Qaeda was effectively sidelined by the 2011 revolutions in the Arab world, which were carried out mainly by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to years of authoritarian rule in their country.

Although he had a reputation for being rigid and aggressive, Zawahri was able to mobilize international armed organizations, which went on to stage mass uprisings, some of which had their roots in the unrest that stemmed from the Arab Spring.

The violence has destabilized a number of countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

But al-Qaeda’s days as a centralized and hierarchical network that attacked the US on September 11, 2001 were over.

Instead, the group’s armed action has returned to its roots in local-level conflicts, fueled by a combination of local tensions and transnational jihadist networks using social media.

Zawahri’s militant Islamist activism dates back decades.

The first time the international community heard his name was when he stood in a cage in a courtroom after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981.

“We have sacrificed and we are ready for more sacrifices until the victory of Islam,” shouted Zawahri, wearing a white kelabiya, as his co-defendants, angered by the peace deal Sadat had signed with Israel, shouted slogans.

Zawahri served a three-year prison sentence for illegal weapons possession, but was acquitted of the main charges.

Trained as a surgeon — one of his nicknames was ‘The Doctor’ — Zawahri went to Pakistan when he was released, where he worked for the Red Crescent treating Islamic Mujahideen who had been wounded while the Afghans were fighting Soviet forces.

During that period he met bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance.

Taking over the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahri became a leading figure in the campaign in the mid-1990s to overthrow the government and establish a purely Islamic state.

More than 1,200 Egyptians were killed.

Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on Islamic jihad following the June 1995 assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa.

The now grizzled, white-turbaned Zawahri responded by ordering an attack in 1995 on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

Two cars loaded with explosives crashed into the gates of the complex, killing 16 people.

In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia.

Until then he lived the spartan life of a gunman having helped bin Laden set up al-Qaeda.

A video aired by Al Jazeera in 2003 showed the two men walking on a mountainside, an image which Western intelligence agencies hoped would reveal the location of their hideout.

Threats of global jihad

For years Zawahri was believed to be hiding along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This year U.S. officials discovered that Zawahri’s family — his wife, daughter and children — had taken up residence in a hideout in Kabul and later located Zawahri himself at the same location, a senior U.S. official said.

He was killed by the drone attack when he stepped out onto the balcony of this home on Sunday morning, the same source said. There was no other injury.

Zawahri assumed leadership of al-Qaeda in 2011 after US Marines killed bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan.

Since then he has not stopped calling for global jihad, always with a Kalashnikov at his side in his video messages.

In bin Laden’s memory, Zawahri vowed to continue attacks against the West, recalling bin Laden’s threat that “you will not dream of security until we experience it as a reality and until you leave Muslim lands.”

As it turned out, the emergence of the even more hard-line Islamic State in 2014-2019 in Iraq and Syria garnered equal, if not greater, interest from Western counterterrorism agencies.

Zawahri often attempted to inspire passion among Muslims by commenting online on sensitive topics such as US policy in the Middle East or Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, but his speech was seen as lacking the resonance of bin Laden’s.

On a practical level Zawahri is believed to have been involved in some of al Qaeda’s largest scale operations having helped organize the 2001 attacks when al Qaeda terrorist hijackers were used to kill around 3,000 people in the US.

He was indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The FBI had a $25 million bounty on him and was on its most wanted list.

Prominent family

Zawahri did not emerge from the slums of Cairo, like others who were drawn to armed groups espousing a holy cause.

Born in 1951 into a prominent Cairo family, he was the grandson of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, the highest spiritual center of Sunni Islam.

He grew up in the leafy Maadi suburb of Cairo and was the son of a Pharmacology professor.

He embraced Islamic fundamentalism at the age of 15 and was inspired by the revolutionary ideas of the Egyptian writer Said Qutb, an Islamist who was executed in 1966 on charges of trying to overthrow the regime.

Zawahri’s fellow students at Cairo University Medical School in the 1970s describe him as a young man full of life who went to the movies, listened to music and joked with friends.

“When he got out of prison he was a completely different person,” said a doctor who studied with Zawahri, who declined to be identified.

From the courtroom cage after Sadat was killed during a military parade, Zawahri spoke to the international press, saying the militants were subjected to horrific torture in prisons, including whippings and attacks by wild dogs.

“They arrested the wives, mothers, fathers, sisters and sons during the trial to put psychological pressure on these innocent prisoners,” he had said.

His fellow prisoners believe that these conditions further radicalized Zawahri and led him down the path of the pursuit of global jihad.

Source: AMPE