SALON

Monday, May 2, 2011 12:19 PM UTC

Egypt’s al-Zawahri likely to succeed bin Laden

Osama's deputy will likely lead Al-Qaida now

By and

Topics: Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaida,

Egypt's al-Zawahri likely to succeed bin LadenFILE - In this file image provided by Intel Center, Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, speaks during a new 106-minute long video released Sept. 22, 2009 predicting President Barack Obama's downfall at the hands of the Muslim world. Officials also said they believe the death of Osama bin Laden puts al-Qaida on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse, but there was no word on the whereabouts of al-Zawahri, bin Laden's second-in-command. (AP Photo/IntelCenter, File)(Credit: AP)

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.

More Lee Keath.

More Hamza Hendawi.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 2 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
378 points379 points | 395 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills -- radical cuts destroy economies and lives, and the honest numbers and economics keep proving it
164 points165 points | 26 comments
vote
Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain wants to send women to jail who don't report their miscarriages to the police
70 points71 points | 16 comments
vote
Corporate greed is poisoning America — literally
47 points48 points | 11 comments
vote
Facebook “like” on trial in Virginia
27 points28 points | 6 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations