Ayman al-Zawahiri: Who was the al-Qaeda commander assassinated by the US?
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was murdered by a US drone attack in Afghanistan, was widely regarded as al-main Qaeda’s ideologue.
He was an eye surgeon who helped form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist group before taking over al-Qaeda leadership after Osama Bin Laden was killed by US troops in May 2011.
Prior to it, Zawahiri was regarded Bin Laden’s right-hand man, and some analysts think he was the “operational brains” behind the September 11, 2001, strikes in the United States.
Zawahiri was ranked second only to Bin Laden on the US government’s list of the 22 “most wanted terrorists” in 2001, with a $25 million (£16 million) bounty on his head.
Zawahiri became as al-most Qaeda’s visible speaker in the years following the 9/11, appearing in 16 films and audiotapes in 2007 – four times as many as Bin Laden – as the organisation attempted to radicalise and recruit Muslims throughout the world.
His assassination in last weekend’s Kabul bombing was not the first time the US intended to assassinate Zawahiri.
He was the target of a US missile attack near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in January 2006.
Four al-Qaeda members were killed in the attack, but Zawahiri survived and appeared on video two weeks later, telling US President George W Bush that neither he nor “all the powers on earth” could bring his death “any closer.”
illustrious family
Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951, in Cairo, Egypt, to a respected middle-class family of physicians and professors.
His grandfather, Rabia al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of al-Azhar, the Middle East’s centre of Sunni Islamic scholarship, and one of his uncles was the Arab League’s first secretary-general.
While still in school, Zawahiri became interested in political Islam and was detained at the age of 15 for belonging to the illegal Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest and largest Islamist organisation.
His political activities, however, did not prevent him from studying medicine at Cairo University’s medical school, from which he graduated in 1974 and four years later received a master’s degree in surgery.
His father, Mohammed, was a pharmacology professor at the same university when he died in 1995.
Young radicals
Zawahiri first carried on the family history by establishing a medical practise in a Cairo neighbourhood, but he was quickly drawn to extreme Islamist groups seeking for the Egyptian government’s downfall.
Zawahiri has become a distant and insignificant figure in recent years, only sporadically releasing messages.
He joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad when it was created in 1973.
In 1981, he was arrested along with hundreds of other accused members of the gang after many of them killed President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo while dressed as soldiers. Sadat had enraged Islamist radicals by negotiating a peace treaty with Israel and previously detaining hundreds of his critics in a security sweep.
During the mass trial, Zawahiri emerged as a defendants’ leader and was recorded telling the court: “We are Muslims who follow our faith. We are attempting to construct an Islamic state and civilization.”
Despite being absolved of involvement in Sadat’s killing, Zawahiri was convicted of unlawful possession of weaponry and sentenced to three years in prison.
According to other Islamist detainees, Zawahiri was tortured and beaten on a daily basis by Egyptian authorities during his time in prison, an experience that is supposed to have converted him into a fanatical and violent extremist.
Zawahiri fled to Saudi Arabia after his release in 1985.
Soon after, he travelled to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then to neighbouring Afghanistan, where he founded an Egyptian Islamic Jihad faction while working as a doctor during the Soviet occupation.
After Egyptian Islamic Jihad re-emerged in 1993, Zawahiri assumed leadership and was a prominent player in a series of attacks by the organisation against Egyptian government politicians, including Prime Minister Atif Sidqi.
During the mid-1990s, the group’s drive to destabilise the government and establish an Islamic state in Egypt resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Egyptians.
The US State Department designated him commander of the Vanguards of Conquest organisation in 1997, a branch of Islamic Jihad suspected of being behind the slaughter of Western tourists in Luxor the previous year.
He was convicted to death in absentia by an Egyptian military court two years later for his participation in the group’s numerous attacks.
During the 1990s, Zawahiri is reported to have travelled around the world in quest of refuge and finance.
He is reported to have resided in Bulgaria, Denmark, and Switzerland in the years following the Soviet departure from Afghanistan, and to have used a phoney passport to travel to the Balkans, Austria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and the Philippines.
He reportedly spent six months in Russian detention in December 1996 after being arrested in Chechnya without a proper visa.
According to a statement supposedly prepared by Zawahiri, the Russian authorities neglected to have the Arabic texts discovered on his computer translated, allowing him to remain anonymous.
Zawahiri is thought to have relocated to the Afghan city of Jalalabad in 1997, where Osama Bin Laden was stationed.
A year later, Egyptian Islamic Jihad formed the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders with five other extreme Islamist terrorist groups, including Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
The first proclamation issued by the front was a fatwa, or Islamic decree, authorising the death of US citizens. Six months later, two simultaneous assaults on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania resulted in the deaths of 223 individuals.
Zawahiri was one of the individuals whose satellite phone conversations were claimed as evidence that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the plot.
The US targeted the group’s training centres in Afghanistan two weeks after the assaults. The following day, Zawahiri called a Pakistani journalist and said: “Inform America that its bombings, threats, and aggressiveness do not fear us. The conflict has barely recently begun.”
In the years after Bin Laden’s murder, US air strikes killed a slew of Zawahiri’s deputies, undermining his capacity to coordinate internationally.
In recent years, Zawahiri has become a distant and insignificant figure, only releasing messages on occasion.
The US will celebrate his death as a success, especially after the messy pullout from Afghanistan last year, but Zawahiri wielded little weight as new groups and movements such as the Islamic State have grown in power.
Undoubtedly, a new al-Qaeda commander will emerge, but he will have even less power than his predecessor.