Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian Doctor Who Succeeded Bin Laden in Al-Qaeda and Terrified America for Decades

"Al-Qaeda theorist, a man of thought, a controversial surgeon." This is how Western websites described al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose death was announced by US President Joe Biden.

Al-Zawahiri was killed by a US drone strike in his house, where he lived with his family in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

US President Joe Biden said in televised remarks from the White House on Monday: "Now justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more. No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out."

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Taliban movement that rules Afghanistan, Zabihullah Mujahid, reported that a raid had taken place in a residential area in Kabul, describing it as a clear violation of international principles.

Mujahid said in a statement on August 2, 2022, that such actions are a repetition of failed experiences during the past twenty years and are contrary to the interests of the United States of America, Afghanistan, and the region, without mentioning al-Zawahiri's name, and al-Qaeda did not immediately comment on the matter.

 

The End of al-Zawahiri

A senior official in the Biden administration said that al-Zawahiri had been in hiding for years and that locating and killing him resulted from meticulous and diligent work by counter-terrorism and intelligence teams.

US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said al-Zawahiri was killed when he came out on the balcony of his safe house in the Afghan capital at 6:18 a.m. (0148 GMT) on Sunday and was hit by Hellfire missiles from a US drone.

During several months, the officials asserted, intelligence officials had grown more confident that they had correctly identified al-Zawahiri at the Kabul safe house.

They said they were able to have an idea about al-Zawahiri's daily life through multiple independent sources of information to guide the operation, stressing that as soon as al-Zawahiri arrived at the safe house in Kabul, officials did not know that he had left and spotted him in his balcony on several occasions, in which he was eventually targeted.

Officials investigated the manner and nature of the safe house's construction and vetted its occupants to ensure that the United States could confidently carry out an operation to kill al-Zawahiri without threatening the safety of the building and minimizing the risks to civilians and al-Zawahiri's family.

In the past few weeks, President Biden has held meetings with senior advisers and members of the administration to examine intelligence information and assess the best way to action.

On July 1, members of the administration, including the CIA Director, briefed Biden on a proposed operation in the White House Situation Room.

According to the officials, Biden asked detailed questions about what they knew and closely examined a model of the safe house that intelligence teams had prepared and brought to the meeting.

The officials said he asked about lighting, weather, building materials, and other factors that might affect the success of the operation. The president also asked to analyze the possible repercussions of a strike in Kabul.

On July 25, the president invited key members of his administration and his advisors to receive a final briefing and discuss how, among other things, al-Zawahiri's killing would affect America's relationship with the Taliban, among other things.

A number of news websites and social networking pages published pictures of the house that al-Zawahiri lived in after the American operation.

 

A Great Surgeon

Al-Zawahiri was from a middle-class Egyptian family that enjoyed a great reputation in several fields. His father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, was a prominent physician and professor at Cairo University, and one of his grandfathers, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, was the 34th Grand Imam of al-Azhar.

Ayman al-Zawahiri's mother is Omaima Azzam, who comes from a politically active family in Egypt. She is the daughter of Abdel Wahab Azzam, who served as President of Cairo University, and his brother Azzam Pasha, the first secretary general of the Arab League.

Al-Zawahiri was born in 1951 in Cairo; he had a twin sister, Heba Muhammad al-Zawahiri, and a younger brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri. His sister works as a professor of oncology at the National Cancer Institute at Cairo University.

As for his brother, he worked for the International Islamic Relief Organization in Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania. He was arrested in 2000 in the UAE and extradited to Egypt, where he was sentenced to death for working for the Jihad group in Egypt.

However, after the January 2011 revolution that toppled the rule of the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, al-Zawahiri was released and rearrested in August 2013 after the military coup against the late President Mohamed Morsi.

Al-Zawahiri lived his childhood and youth in Egypt. He was "quiet" and diligent in his studies and loved reading and poetry. He studied medicine at Cairo University and graduated in 1974 with a very good grade, as well as a master's degree in surgery.

Al-Zawahiri married four times. The first (Azza) gave birth to five daughters and a son, but his wife and two of his sons were killed in an air raid on Afghanistan launched by US forces in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and no information are available about the rest of his wives.

 

Al-Qaeda Leadership

Under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966, al-Zawahiri and four students helped form an armed cell, and following the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, al-Zawahiri was arrested with hundreds.

During his detention, al-Zawahiri, according to his lawyer, Montasser el-Zayat, was tortured in Egyptian prisons, and his name was also linked to a suicide bombing attempt to assassinate Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi. He was also accused of planning the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Atef Sedky.

After his release, al-Zawahiri moved to Saudi Arabia in 1985 to work as a doctor in Jeddah and then met with Osama bin Laden in 1986, where he became his advisor concurrently with the founding of al-Qaeda.

In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States, where he delivered many religious sermons in mosques in California under the pseudonym "Abdul Mu'iz."

In 1995, al-Zawahiri was accused of plotting an attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in Pakistan. Then, he was included in the indictment in the United States in 1998 for his role in the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The FBI has allocated a $25 million reward for information leading to al-Zawahiri.

In 2001, after the September 11 bombings in the United States, al-Zawahiri's name appeared on the American list of the 22 most wanted terrorists of the FBI under former President George W. Bush.

His name was also mentioned among the suspects in the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Al-Zawahiri assumed the leadership of al-Qaeda following the killing of its leader, Osama bin Laden, on May 2, 2011, in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, in a storming operation supervised by the CIA and carried out by a force of the American army.

After that, the organization's star faded, but al-Zawahiri continued to appear from time to time in video recordings criticizing the West and Arab regimes, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, which took power in a number of countries after the Arab Spring revolutions erupted in 2011.

Then The Islamic State Organization, split from al-Qaeda, emerged and refused to submit to the leadership of al-Zawahiri, and began to compete for recruitment and attract fighters from different countries of the world, which prompted al-Zawahiri to criticize the organization and its former leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

 

The Ideology of al-Qaeda

Forbes described al-Zawahiri, in a 2016 report, as having great symbolic power despite his controversial relationship with other terrorist leaders. This symbolic strength largely stems from the long relationship that al-Zawahiri had with Osama bin Laden.

The magazine pointed out that al-Zawahiri has a black history in the manufacture of global terrorism, as his name is linked to the planning of the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.

Al-Zawahiri—despite his lack of appearance—remained connected to the events, as in 2017, he called on Sunnis living in Iraq to wage a long guerrilla war against Iraqi Shiite forces after they regained territory controlled by the Islamic State, according to Forbes.

In the same context, the Washington Post said in a report on August 1, 2022, that al-Zawahiri had the idea of ​​defeating the "far enemy," that is, the United States, before defeating the "near enemy" represented by the regimes and governments in Arab and Islamic countries.

The American newspaper adds that al-Zawahiri's brain and hands are the two faces of al-Qaeda over the past years.

Former CIA counter-terrorism expert Bruce Riedel said that al-Zawahiri is the "al-Qaeda ideologist," a man of thought, not a man of action.

According to Riedel, after the end of the second decade after the September attacks, al-Zawahiri's ability to shape events or exercise leadership within the widely spread jihadist movement appeared increasingly questionable.

Al-Zawahiri was often referred to as bin Laden's right-hand man and the main theoretician of al-Qaeda, as the Egyptian Jihad organization took control of the al-Qaeda when they allied themselves at the end of the nineties of the twentieth century.