Zawahiri, 71, was killed in a US drone strike, US President Joe Biden said on live television on Monday night. US officials said the attack took place on Sunday in the Afghan capital of Kabul. read more In the years since bin Laden’s death in 2011, US airstrikes have killed a number of Zawahiri’s MPs, weakening the veteran Egyptian fighter’s ability to coordinate globally. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register He had watched al Qaeda effectively sidelined since the 2011 Arab uprisings, started mostly by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to decades of empire. Despite a reputation as a rigid and combative personality, Zawahiri managed to cultivate loosely-knit groups around the world that grew into destructive uprisings, some of which had their roots in the unrest that arose from the Arab Spring. The violence destabilized several countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But al-Qaeda’s days as the centrally directed, hierarchical network of conspirators who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, were long gone. Instead, militancy has returned to its roots in local conflicts, driven by a mix of local grievances and incitement by transnational jihadist networks using social media. Zawahiri’s origins in Islamist militancy go back decades. The first time the world heard him was when he stood in a courtroom cage after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. “We have sacrificed and we are still ready for more sacrifices until the victory of Islam,” shouted Zawahiri, wearing a white robe, as other defendants angered by Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel shouted slogans. Zawahiri served a three-year prison sentence for illegal weapons possession, but was acquitted of the main charges. A trained surgeon – one of his nicknames was The Doctor – Zawahiri went to Pakistan after his release, where he worked with the Red Crescent to treat Islamic Mujahideen insurgents wounded in Afghanistan fighting Soviet forces. During this time, he met bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance. Taking over the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahiri was a leading figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to overthrow the government and establish a pure Islamic state. Over 1,200 Egyptians were killed. Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on Islamic Jihad following an assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak in June 1995 in Addis Ababa. The grizzled, white-turbaned Zawahiri responded by ordering an attack in 1995 on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. Two cars packed with explosives drove through the compound’s gates, killing 16 people. In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahiri to death in absentia. Until then he was living the spartan life of a fighter after helping bin Laden form al-Qaeda. A videotape shown by Al Jazeera in 2003 showed the two men walking on a rocky slope – an image that Western intelligence had hoped would provide clues to their whereabouts.
THREATS OF GLOBAL JIHAD
For years, Zawahiri was believed to be hiding along the forbidden border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This year, US officials acknowledged that Zawahiri’s family – his wife, daughter and children – had moved to a safe house in Kabul and subsequently identified Zawahiri at the same location, a senior administration official said. He was killed in a drone strike when he stepped out onto the home’s balcony on Sunday morning, the official said. No one else was injured. Zawahiri assumed leadership of al-Qaeda in 2011 after US Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan. Since then he has repeatedly called for global jihad, an Ak-47 at his side during video messages. In a eulogy for bin Laden, Zawahiri vowed to continue attacks in the West, recalling the Saudi-born militant’s threat that “you will not dream of security until we experience it as a reality and until you leave Muslim lands.” . As it turned out, the emergence of the even more hardline Islamic State in 2014-2019 in Iraq and Syria drew just as much, if not more, attention from Western counterterrorism authorities. Zawahiri often tried to inflame passions among Muslims by commenting online on sensitive issues such as US policies in the Middle East or Israeli actions against the Palestinians, but his delivery was seen as lacking the magnetism of bin Laden. On a practical level, Zawahiri is believed to have been involved in some of al-Qaeda’s biggest operations, helping to organize the 2001 attacks, when hijacked aircraft hijacked by al-Qaeda were used to kill 3,000 people in the United States. He was indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The FBI placed a $25 million bounty on his head on its most wanted list.
BUSINESS FAMILY
Zawahiri did not emerge from the slums of Cairo like others who were drawn to militant groups that promised a noble cause. Born in 1951 into a prominent Cairo family, Zawahiri was the grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of Islam’s most important mosques. Zawahiri grew up in Cairo’s leafy suburb of Maadi, a place favored by expatriates over the Western nations they railed against. The son of a pharmacology professor, Zawahiri first embraced Islamic fundamentalism at the age of 15. It was inspired by the revolutionary ideas of the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist who was executed in 1966 on charges of trying to overthrow the state. People who studied with Zawahiri at Cairo University Medical School in the 1970s describe a lively young man who went to the movies, listened to music and joked with friends. “When he got out of prison he was a completely different person,” said a doctor who studied with Zawahiri, who declined to be identified. In the courtroom after Sadat was killed in a military parade, Zawahiri spoke to the international press, saying the militants had suffered severe torture, including whippings and attacks by wild dogs in prison. “They arrested the wives, mothers, fathers, sisters and sons in a trial to put psychological pressure on these innocent prisoners,” he said. People in custody said these conditions further radicalized Zawahiri and set him on his path to global jihad. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Editing by Howard Goller, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Stephen Coates Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.