Ayman al-zawahiri
Surgeon who became the guiding force in al-qaeda and took over after the death of Osama bin Laden
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, who has been reported killed in a US airstrike aged 71, was the Egyptian-born surgeon who emerged into the public eye as “deputy” to Osama bin Laden; but many in the West believed him to be the real evil genius behind the al-qaeda terrorist network.
After the atrocities of September 11 2001 the name on everyone’s lips was Osama bin Laden, the tall, charismatic Saudi billionaire whose “jihad” against America made him the prime target in the war against terror. Yet many intelligence analysts argued that without Zawahiri, bin Laden would probably have confined himself to Saudi issues.
Initially Zawahiri’s ambition had been to challenge the Islamic world order – particularly the secular Egyptian state. But in the 1990s he developed the apocalyptic vision of pulling together disparate Islamic terrorist groups into a sophisticated global enterprise.
The two men probably first met in 1986 in Peshawar, Pakistan, then the main staging area for the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan. A surgeon from a notable Egyptian family, Zawahiri had been a member of the underground Egyptian Islamic Jihad for more than half his life.
Following the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri had spent several years in jail, from which he emerged pious, embittered – and short of cash. By contrast, the 28-year-old Saudi bin Laden, scion of one of the largest companies in the Middle East, had led a life of wealth and pleasure.
He had no experience of underground activities and, apart from being radicalised by the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was politically naive. Each man filled a need in the other. The main obstacle to Zawahiri’s ambitions was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian theologian who had become the leading Arab Afghan fighter – and bin Laden’s mentor. In the early 1980s Azzam and bin Laden had become partners, setting up a bureau to recruit and train resistance fighters.
Unlike the other leaders of the Mujahideen, Zawahiri did not pledge himself to Azzam when he arrived in Afghanistan. From the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden. He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions in bin Laden’s entourage while making himself indispensable to the man himself; bin Laden suffered from low blood pressure and Zawahiri provided him with personal medical care.
Bin Laden’s final break with Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Under Zawahiri’s influence bin Laden envisioned an all-arab legion, which would eventually wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; Azzam strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.
Zawahiri is said to have undermined Azzam’s position by spreading rumours that he was working for the CIA. When, on November 24 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed in a car bomb, there were suspicions that either bin Laden or Zawahiri had ordered the attack.
In 1988, with the Soviets in full retreat, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at which it was agreed to establish a new organisation that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. The organisation came to be called al-qaeda – “the Base” – and was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual Mujahideen and jihadist groups dominated by Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad. The ultimate leader, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the purse strings.
During the 1990s Zawahiri followed bin Laden to Sudan, where he set about reorganising Islamic Jihad for a renewed terror campaign in Egypt. In Sudan, however, bin Laden concentrated on farming and business projects, and there was reportedly some friction between the two men over priorities. Money for Islamic Jihad was always short and some of Zawahiri’s followers turned to crime to support themselves. Events, however, would eventually force a reconciliation.
In August 1993 Islamic Jihad used suicide bombing in an attempt on the life of the Egyptian interior minister. It failed, as did an attempt to assassinate the Egyptian prime minister Atef Sedky three months later.
The bombing of Sedky’s car, however, injured 21 Egyptians and killed a schoolgirl. Her funeral became a public demonstration, with her coffin carried through the streets of Cairo and crowds shouting: “Terrorism is the enemy of God!” The police arrested 280 Islamic Jihad members and executed six. As a result the organisation lost most of its Egyptian base and was driven to focus on targets outside Egypt.
The 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad which killed 17 people and wounded 60 others was Islamic Jihad’s first “success” under Zawahiri’s leadership. Bin Laden, reportedly, did not approve of the attack, fearing the political consequences.
He was right to be worried. The atrocity caused outrage throughout the Muslim world and eventually the Sudanese authorities yielded to Saudi and American pressure to expel the two men and their followers.
In May 1996 bin Laden chartered a private jet and returned to Afghanistan, where Zawahiri rejoined him the following year. Their reconciliation was signalled in February 1998 in a joint “fatwa” ordering Muslims to kill US civilians anywhere in the world. From then on, Zawahiri’s hunched bespectacled figure was to be seen standing alongside bin Laden during numerous video broadcasts. The CIA called him “the warm-up man” because he was usually the one to speak first.
When Egyptian members of al-qaeda launched suicide bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and President Clinton responded with missile attacks on al-qaeda camps in Afghanistan, it was Zawahiri who declared: “The war has started. Now the Americans should wait for our answer.” In June 2001, three months before 9/11, Islamic Jihad and al-qaeda merged into a single entity.
On September 11 2001, Zawahiri, bin Laden and their followers evacuated their quarters in Kandahar and fled to the mountains, where they listened to an Arabic radio station’s news reports about the attacks on America. According to a CIA report, at 9.53am, between the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, a member of al-qaeda in Afghanistan was overheard saying that the attackers were following through on “the doctor’s programme”. According to a source in the CIA, American agents had come close to apprehending Zawahiri a month before September 11 when he travelled to Yemen for medical treatment. The Egyptian intelligence service informed the Americans that he was in a hospital in Sana’a. Agents were dispatched, but while they were conducting a surveillance of the hospital, the guards caught them with their video cameras. The plan was compromised, and Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan.
After the attacks it was Zawahiri who taunted the Americans by suggesting they ask themselves why they were so detested in the Muslim world, and who framed the conflict as a war of faith with the Israelipalestinian conflict at its core: “We cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish. This is a new battle, like the battle for Jerusalem.”
During the subsequent war in Afghanistan there were reports that Zawahiri had been wounded, even killed. All turned out to be false. On December 3 2001 American bombers struck a heavily fortified complex of caves near Jalalabad. When US troops arrived, they discovered more than a hundred bodies, and they were able to identify 18 of them as high-level al-qaeda operatives. But of Zawahiri and bin Laden there was no sign.
For some time it looked as if the core of al-qaeda had been destroyed. Yet by around 2005 it was clear that the terror network had been rebuilt into an organisation capable of launching attacks around the world. The July 7 bomb attacks in London that year, and the discovery of a plot in August 2006 to blow up 10 aircraft en route from Britain to the US, provided evidence that al-qaeda was back.
Zawahiri was the mastermind behind this process, and by 2006 was reported to have taken over operational command of al-qaeda, leaving bin Laden as the organisation’s charismatic poster boy. He reformed the group around a core of some 100 Arab experts in explosives, finances, communications, military training, urban warfare and propaganda. In 2006 Afghanistan saw 139 suicide bombings compared with 27 in 2005.
Zawahiri, who had a $25 million bounty on his head, stepped up the quality and number of propaganda videos produced each year to more than 60. In 2007 he threatened Britain over the knighthood of Salman Rushdie, derided the US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as the “house negro”, and called on Pakistanis to rise up against President Pervez Musharraf after Pakistan’s security forces stormed Islamic militants holed up in Islamabad’s Red Mosque. In 2008 he even conducted an online “chat” in which he answered questions posted on jihadist websites.
After bin Laden was killed by US troops in May 2011 Zawahiri became the leader of al-qaeda. But as US air strikes continued to take their toll on the al-qaeda leadership, weakening its ability to coordinate globally, Zawahiri became seen as a more marginal figure, as new groups such as Isil became increasingly influential among jihadists.
However a UN report published last month claimed that after the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan last year, al-qaeda was enjoying “increased freedom of action” under the Taliban with the potential of launching new long-distance attacks.
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-zawahiri was born in Giza, Egypt, on June 9 1951 into a prominent upper-middle-class Egyptian family. His grandfather was the Grand Imam at Al-azhar University in Cairo, the leading seat of learning for Sunni Islam.
A great-uncle was first secretary general of the Arab League, while his father was a professor of pharmacology. His mother, Umayma Azzam, came from a wealthy political family.
Ayman followed his father into the medical profession. After graduating from Cairo University in 1974, he spent three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian army and later began practising as a paediatrician.
His parents were religious but not particularly observant. As a boy, however, Ayman had come under the influence of his maternal uncle Mahfouz Azzam, a follower of the radical Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, who called for the restoration of true Islam by using “physical power and Jihad for abolishing the organisations and authorities of the Jahili [ungodly] system”, which he believed to include the governments of the entire Muslim world.
Under his influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, formed in 1928 with the aim of ridding Egypt of the British, became the source of the extremist visions of Islam that root today’s jihadist movements. .
Zawahiri joined the Brotherhood while still a schoolboy, and in 1965, when Qutb was arrested for conspiracy, the 14-year-old Zawahiri was also arrested but released. Qutb was later executed and Zawahiri, along with four fellow students, formed an underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state. In the late 1970s the cell merged with others to form Egyptian Islamic Jihad (also known as Islamic Jihad).
Zawahiri’s connection with Afghanistan began in 1980. He was covering for another doctor at a Muslim Brothers’ clinic in Cairo when the director of the clinic asked if he would like to accompany him to Pakistan to help tend to Afghan refugees who were fleeing across the border following the Soviet invasion.
He travelled to Peshawar with an anaesthetist and a plastic surgeon. “We were the first three Arabs to arrive there to participate in relief work,” he said. He spent four months in Pakistan, working for the Red Crescent Society, the Islamic arm of the Red Cross, and returned for another stint in 1981.
In October 1981, however, Zawahiri was in Cairo when the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by soldiers belonging to Islamic Jihad. The organisation claimed responsibility on the grounds that Sadat had “betrayed” Islam by making peace with Israel.
Though some later identified Zawahiri as the mastermind behind the killing, at the time he was thought to be only an obscure member of the movement. He was picked up in a security sweep but acquitted on conspiracy charges. He served three years in prison, however, for unlicensed ownership of a gun.
His lawyer, Montasser el-zayat, later contended that, under torture in prison Zawahiri revealed the hiding place of Essam al-qamari, a key member of Islamic Jihad, which led to al-qamari’s arrest, imprisonment and eventual execution. Although al-qamari forgave Zawahiri, some speculated that his failure under torture hardened Zawahiri and made him vow to redouble his efforts to destroy those whom he blamed for his humiliation – the Egyptian state and its “allies”, the Americans and Jews.
In 1985, released from prison, Zawahiri went to Saudi Arabia on Hajj and stayed to practice medicine in Jeddah for a year. The following year he returned to Peshawar.
There, as well as cultivating bin Laden, he began reconstituting Islamic Jihad along with other exiled militants, moving the group in a more radical direction.
He embraced the idea of “takfir” (the excommunication of one Muslim by another), developing it as a justification for the killing in terror attacks of Muslims deemed to be heretic or apostate. Zawahiri became adept at disguises and often travelled on false passports, posing at various times as an Arab with Swiss, French or Dutch citizenship. Denmark offered him asylum in 1991, and there were reports that Switzerland granted him asylum in 1993.
In 1991 Egyptian intelligence chiefs were appalled to learn that Zawahiri had crisscrossed America on an extensive fundraising trip. The money he raised for Afghan “widows and orphans” is thought to have financed the suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995.
In late 1996, following his expulsion from Sudan, he was reportedly detained in Russia for six months after he was caught trying to cross the border into Chechnya without a visa, posing as a Sudanese merchant. In 1997, the US State Department named Zawahiri as leader of the Vanguards of Conquest group – a faction of Islamic Jihad thought to have been behind the massacre of 70 foreign tourists in Luxor the same year, and behind an assassination attempt on the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995.
In 1998 he was listed on the US government’s indictment sheet for the 1998 US embassy bombings, and the following year he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court for activities linked to Islamic Jihad. In response Zawahiri proclaimed that he would never return to Egypt except as a conqueror who would establish a true Islamic state.
Zawahiri was married at least four times. In 1978 he married, Azza Nowari, the daughter of an old family friend. Azza had become very religious as a student, adopting the niqab, and sometimes spending the whole night reading the Koran. The couple had four daughters and a son.
Azza and her son Mohammad and youngest daughter Aisha were reported to have died in December 2001 after an American bombing attack on a Taliban building at Gardez, Afghanistan. Zawahiri is believed to have children by his other wives.
In recent months Zawahiri had reportedly been spotted on several occasions on a balcony of a safe house in the central Sherpur district of Kabul. It was there that he was killed over the weekend by a CIA drone strike.