For years, Osama bin Laden's charisma kept al-Qaida's ranks filled with
zealous recruits.
But it was the strategic thinking and the organizational skills of his
Egyptian right hand man that kept the terror network together after the United
States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and pushed al-Qaida out.
With Bin Laden killed, Ayman al-Zawahri becomes the top candidate for the
world's top terror job.
It's too early to tell how exactly al-Qaida would change with its founder and
supreme mentor gone, but the group under al-Zawahri would likely be further
radicalized, unleashing a new wave of attacks to avenge bib Laden's killing by
U.S. troops in Pakistan on Monday to send a message that it's business as
usual.
Al-Zawahri's extremist views and his readiness to use deadly violence are
beyond doubt.
In a 2001 treatise, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," he set down the
longterm strategy for the jihadi movement — to inflict "as many casualties as
possible" on the Americans, while trying to establish control in a nation as a
base "to launch the battle to restore the holy caliphate" of Islamic rule across
the Muslim world.
Unlike bin Laden who found his Jihadist calling as an adult, al-Zawahri's
activism began when he was in his mid-teens, establishing his first secret cell
of high school students to oppose the Egyptian government of then President
Anwar Sadat he viewed as infidel for not following the rule of God.
The doors of jihad opened for him when, as a young doctor, a visitor came to
him with an offer to travel to Afghanistan to treat Islamic fighters battling
Soviet forces. His 1980 trip to the Afghan war zone — only a few months long but
the first of many — opened his eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.
What he saw there, he was to write 20 years later, was "the training course
preparing Muslim mujahideen youth to launch their upcoming battle with the great
power that would rule the world: America."
The bond between al-Zawahri and bin Laden began in the late 1980s, when
al-Zawahri reportedly treated the Saudi millionaire-turned-jihadist in the caves
of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains around them. The
friendship laid the foundation for the al-Qaida terror network, which carried
out the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide airplane hijackings that sparked the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan later that year.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden Enemy No. 1
to the United States. But he likely could never have carried it out without
al-Zawahri. Bin Laden provided al-Qaida with the charisma and money, but
al-Zawahri brought the ideological fire, tactics and organizational skills
needed to forge disparate militants into a network of cells in countries around
the world.
"Al-Zawahri was always bin Laden's mentor, bin Laden always looked up to
him," says terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University.
While bin Laden came from a privileged background in a prominent Saudi family
of Yemeni descent, al-Zawahri had the experience of a revolutionary in the
trenches. "He spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi
from the time he was a teenager, he has been fighting his whole life and that
has shaped his world view," Hoffman says.
Perhaps even more significant than al-Zawahri's role before the 9/11 attacks
was his task afterward, when the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan demolished
al-Qaida's safe haven and scattered, killed and captured its fighters and
leaders. The blow was personal as well — al-Zawahri's wife and at least two of
their six children were killed in a U.S. airstrike in the southern Afghan city
of Kandahar.
Al-Zawahri ensured al-Qaida's survival, rebuilding al-Qaida's leadership in
the Afghan-Pakistan border region and installing his allies as new lieutenants
in key positions. Since then, the network inspired or had a direct hand in
attacks in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, the 2004 train bombings
in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London.
Meanwhile, al-Zawahri — with his thick beard, heavy-rimmed glasses and the
prominent mark on his forehead from prostration in prayer — became the new face
of al-Qaida, churning out Web videos and audiotapes while bin Laden faded from
public view for long stretches.
In his videos, he lay down strategy, mocked the failures of former President
George W. Bush and urged unity among jihadi ranks — wagging his finger to make
his points, often with an automatic rifle visible by his side, the ideologue and
the fighter at the same time.
"Bush, do you know where I am?" he sneered in a January 2006 video weeks
after a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that targeted him but missed. "I am among the
Muslim masses ... and I'm participating in their jihad until we defeat you." A
similar strike in October that year would also miss him.
It was the 2008 election of Obama to the U.S. presidency, however, that would
present al-Zawahri with his greatest propaganda challenge as he sought to
maintain Muslim anger against a U.S. leader of African origins with "Hussein" as
middle name.
In one of his most infamous video messages issued two weeks after the
election, al-Zawahri described Obama as "house negro," a slur for blacks
subservient to whites — even bin Laden was more sparing of Obama in his
criticism of the new U.S. president.
But before al-Qaida — and before al-Zawahri focused his wrath on the "far
enemy," United States — his goal was to bring down the "near enemy," the
U.S.-allied government of then President Hosni Mubarak in his native Egypt.
He was born June 19, 1951, the son of an upper middle class family of doctors
and scholars in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His father was a pharmacology
professor at Cairo University's medical school and his grandfather, Rabia
al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a premier center of
religious study.
From an early age, al-Zawahri was enflamed by the radical writings of
Egyptian Islamist Sayed Qutb, who taught that Arab regimes were "infidel" and
should be replaced by Islamic rule.
In the 1970s, even as he earned his medical degree as a surgeon, he was
active in militant circles. He merged his own militant cell with others to form
Islamic Jihad and began trying to infiltrate the military — at one point even
storing weapons in his private medical clinic.
Then came the 1981 assassination of Sadat by militants from Islamic Jihad.
The slaying was carried out by a different cell in the group — and al-Zawahri
has written that he learned of the plot only hours before the assassination took
place.
But he was arrested along with hundreds of other militants and served three
years in prison. During his imprisonment, he was reportedly tortured heavily —
one factor some have cited as pushing him into a more violent radicalism.
After his release in 1984, al-Zawahri returned to Afghanistan and joined the
Arab militants from around the Middle East who were fighting alongside the
Afghans against the Soviets. He began courting bin Laden, who was becoming a
heroic figure among radicals for his financial support of the mujahideen, as
well as fighting alongside them.
At the same time, al-Zawahri began reassembling Islamic Jihad and surrounded
bin Laden with Egyptian members of Jihad such as Mohammed Atef and Saif al-Adel,
who would one day play key roles in putting together the Sept. 11 attacks.
The alliance established al-Zawahri as bin Laden's deputy and soon after came
the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, followed by the 2000 suicide
bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, an attack al-Zawahri is believed
to have helped organize. AP
