Mentor in jihad Surgeon groomed Bin Laden into terror leader

Ayman alzawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s ideological mentor and a ruthless executive officer, but lacked his protégé’s charisma and ultimately presided over the decline of the terrorist group they built together.

He was born in 1951 into a comfortable upper-middleclass family, and graduated from medical school in 1974 then qualified as a surgeon in 1978.

In his 20s, he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which advocated overthrowing the government and establishing a caliphate.

The 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian dictator who had made peace with Israel, by members of the group was a turning point.

Although cleared of involvement in the murder, Zawahiri was held for three years and brutally tortured.

He emerged from prison with a violent thirst for revenge and a hard-line attitude to civilian deaths – including those of fellow Muslims – that alarmed other Islamists.

He began to develop a conviction that the real enemy of Islam was the United States.

It was those ideas he passed on to bin Laden when they met during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.