Who is Ayman al-Zawahri? | wfaa.com

CAIRO, Egypt — Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon who grew to become a mastermind of jihad in opposition to the West and who took over as al-Qaida chief after Osama bin Laden’s loss of life in a U.S. raid, has been killed. He was 71.

Five individuals conversant in the matter instructed The Associated Press {that a} CIA drone strike killed al-Zawahri over the weekend in Afghanistan. They spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate the matter.

His loss of life is prone to result in larger disarray inside the group than bin Laden’s loss of life in May 2011 did, because it is far much less clear who his successor on the head of the phobia community could be.

Al-Zawahri greater than anybody formed al-Qaida, first as bin Laden’s deputy since 1998, then as his successor. Together, he and bin Laden turned the jihadi motion’s weapons to focus on the United States, finishing up the deadliest assault ever on American soil — the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.

The assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden America’s Enemy No. 1. But he seemingly might by no means have carried it out with out his deputy. Bin Laden supplied al-Qaida with charisma and cash, however al-Zawahri introduced ways and organizational abilities wanted to forge militants right into a community of cells in nations world wide.

Their bond was solid within the late Eighties, when al-Zawahri reportedly handled the Saudi millionaire bin Laden within the caves of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains round them.

“Al-Zawahri was always bin Laden’s mentor, bin Laden always looked up to him,” says terrorism knowledgeable Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. Al-Zawahri “spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi from the time he was a teenager.”

When the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan demolished al-Qaida’s secure haven and scattered, killed and captured its members, al-Zawahri ensured al-Qaida’s survival. He rebuilt its management within the Afghan-Pakistan border area and put in allies as lieutenants in key positions.

He additionally reshaped the group from a centralized planner of terror assaults into the pinnacle of a franchise chain. He led the assembling of a community of autonomous branches across the area, together with in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Somalia, Yemen and Asia. Over the following decade, al-Qaida impressed or had a direct hand in assaults in all these areas in addition to Europe, Pakistan and Turkey, together with the 2004 prepare bombings in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London. Twice, the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen tried to assault on U.S. soil with an tried 2009 bombing of an American passenger jet and an tried bundle bomb the next yr.

But even earlier than bin Laden’s loss of life, al-Zawahri was struggling to take care of al-Qaida’s relevance in a altering Middle East.

He tried with little success to coopt the wave of uprisings that unfold throughout the Arab world beginning in 2011, urging Islamic hard-liners to take over within the nations the place leaders had fallen. But whereas Islamists gained prominence in lots of locations, they’ve stark ideological variations with al-Qaida and reject its agenda and management.

As al-Qaida’s chief, al-Zawahri additionally confronted the problem of the explosive rise of the Islamic State group, an much more radical rival that drew away recruits with its dramatic seize of a lot of Syria and Iraq. IS’s “caliphate” was introduced down by a U.S.-led marketing campaign after years of preventing, however the jihadist motion was irrevocably splintered and al-Qaida misplaced a lot of its luster in radicals’ eyes.

Al-Zawahri was additionally a extra divisive determine than his predecessor. Many militants described the soft-spoken bin Laden in adoring and virtually non secular phrases.

In distinction, al-Zawahri was notoriously prickly and pedantic. He picked ideological fights with critics inside the jihadi camp, wagging his finger scoldingly in his movies. Even some key figures in al-Qaida’s central management had been delay, calling him overly controlling, secretive and divisive.

Some militants whose affiliation with bin Laden predated al-Zawahri’s at all times noticed him as an smug intruder.

“I have never taken orders from al-Zawahri,” Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of many community’s high figures in East Africa till his 2011 loss of life, sneered in a memoir posted on line in 2009. “We don’t take orders from anyone but our historical leadership.”

It was throughout his years main Egypt’s Islamic Jihad militant group within the Nineteen Nineties that al-Zawahri honed the talents he would carry to al-Qaida.

He was born June 19, 1951, the son of an upper-middle-class household of docs and students within the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His father was a pharmacology professor at Cairo University’s medical college and his grandfather, Rabia al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a premier heart of biblical studies.

From an early age, al-Zawahri was enflamed by the unconventional writings of Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who taught that Arab regimes had been “infidel” and needs to be changed by Islamic rule. He started his lifetime of militancy at age 15, when he created an underground cell of highschool college students to oppose the federal government.

In the Nineteen Seventies, as he earned his medical diploma as a surgeon, he was energetic in militant circles. He and others shaped Islamic Jihad and commenced making an attempt to infiltrate the navy. At one level, he even saved weapons in his personal medical clinic.

As he has instructed it in his writings, his first journey to Afghanistan in 1980 to deal with Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces opened his eyes to new potentialities.

He known as that Afghan battle “the training course preparing Muslim mujahedeen youth to launch their upcoming battle with the great power that would rule the world: America.”

Then got here the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Islamic Jihad militants. The slaying was carried out by a unique cell within the group — and al-Zawahri has written that he discovered of the plot solely hours earlier than the assassination.

But he was arrested together with a whole bunch of different militants and served three years in jail. During his imprisonment, he was reportedly tortured closely, an element some cite as turning him extra violently radical.

After his launch in 1984, al-Zawahri returned to Afghanistan and joined militants from throughout the Middle East preventing alongside the Afghans in opposition to the Soviets. He courted bin Laden, who grew to become a heroic determine for his monetary help of the mujahedeen.

Al-Zawahri adopted bin Laden to his new base in Sudan, and from there he led a reassembled Islamic Jihad in a violent marketing campaign of bombing assaults aimed toward toppling Egypt’s U.S.-allied authorities.

In essentially the most daring assault, Jihad and different militants tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak throughout a 1995 go to to Ethiopia. Mubarak escaped the hail of gunfire on his motorcade, and his safety forces all however crushed the militant motion in Egypt within the crackdown that adopted.

Although the Egyptian motion failed, its ways lived on in al-Zawahri.

He promoted using suicide bombings, to change into al-Qaida’s hallmark. He plotted a 1995 suicide automobile bombing of Egypt’s embassy in Islamabad that killed 16 individuals — presaging the extra devastating 1998 al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed greater than 200, an assault al-Zawahri was indicted for within the United States.

In 1996, Sudan expelled bin Laden, who took his fighters again to Afghanistan, the place they discovered a secure haven below the unconventional Taliban regime. Once extra, al-Zawahri adopted.

Their bond was sealed when bin Laden, al-Zawahri and different militant leaders issued the “Declaration of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” saying the United States was Islam’s high enemy and instructing Muslims it was their spiritual responsibility to “kill the Americans and their allies.”

A collection of spectacular assaults adopted: the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, and eventually the 9/11 assaults.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in retaliation, al-Zawahri and bin Laden fled into Pakistan. A U.S. airstrike killed al-Zawahri’s spouse and at the least two of their six youngsters within the southern Afghan metropolis of Kandahar. The CIA got here tantalizingly near probably capturing al-Zawahri in 2003 and killing him in 2004. The CIA thought it lastly had al-Zawahri in its sights in 2009, solely to be tricked by a double agent who blew himself up, killing seven company staff and wounding six extra in Khost, Afghanistan.

But in the end, al-Zawahri by no means reached his long-term objectives for jihad that he outlined in his writings — to harm the U.S. with “as many casualties as possible” whereas seizing management of a rustic from which to ascertain a “caliphate” throughout the Muslim world.

Al-Qaida assaults that killed Muslims turned off many within the Arab world, assaults that killed Americans by no means gained it deep reputation, and the group by no means gained widespread widespread help past a fringe of radical sympathizers.

Still, he vowed to proceed hitting Americans within the video eulogy to his slain boss.

Bin Laden “terrified America in his life,” he mentioned, and “will continue to terrify it after his death.”