Zawahiri, 71, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul over the weekend, according to officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. In an address to the nation, President Biden confirmed the death and called the attack a “precision strike” that caused no civilian casualties. President Biden on August 1 announced that the United States had killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, in a drone strike on July 30. (Video: The Washington Post) Zawahiri had led his own militant group and pioneered a brand of terrorism that valued spectacular attacks and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. When he formally merged his group with al Qaeda in the 1990s, he brought with him these tactics as well as an expanded vision for attacking the West. US drone strike kills al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri It was Zawahiri who argued that the defeat of the “distant enemy” – the United States – was an essential precursor to dealing with al-Qaeda’s “near enemy”, the pro-Western Arab regimes that stood in the way of the group’s dream of uniting all Muslims under from a global caliphate. “Killing Americans and their allies – political and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto. Three years later, he would he put words into action by helping to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although he lacked the personal charisma of bin Laden, Zawahiri became the intellectual force behind many of al-Qaeda’s greatest ambitions, including its apparently unsuccessful efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons. And after the group’s forced retreat from its base in Afghanistan in early 2002, it was largely Zawahiri who led al-Qaeda’s resurgence in the lawless tribal region across the border in Pakistan, according to longtime terror observers. group. In his final years, Zawahiri presided over al-Qaeda in a period of decline, with most of the organization’s founding members dead or in hiding and the organization’s leadership challenged by aggressive upstarts such as the Islamic State. He remained the face of the terror group, but failed to prevent the Islamist movement from splintering in Syria and other conflict zones after 2011. Rumored to be in poor health, he became known for his long, intermittent disappearances from public view. at times by releasing essays, books, and video sermons that featured a characteristically dry, didactic style that seemed unsuited to the age of social media. “Zawahiri is the ideologue of al-Qaeda, a man of thought and not a man of action,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA counterterrorism expert and adviser to four US presidents, said in an interview in September. “His writing is ponderous and sometimes incredibly boring.” As the second decade after 9/11 drew to a close, Zawahiri’s ability to shape events or exercise leadership within the widely dispersed jihadist movement looked increasingly in doubt, Riedel said. “He’s not the charismatic figure that al Qaeda needs,” he said, “and I don’t see anyone else on the horizon who would be.” Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, was killed in a US drone strike on July 30. (Video: The Washington Post) Zawahiri’s path to becoming one of the world’s most recognized terrorists had an unlikely beginning in an upper-middle-class Cairo suburb, a religiously diverse suburb that was home to many of Egypt’s most successful families. Zawahiri’s father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, was a professor of pharmacology and his maternal grandfather was president of Cairo University. At the time of Zawahiri’s birth on June 19, 1951, his hometown of Maadi had a large Jewish population and more churches than mosques. An earnest, academically gifted youth, he was influenced early in life by one of his uncles, Mahfouz Azzam, a passionate critic of Egypt’s secular government, and by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer and intellectual who became one of founders of 20th century Islamic extremism. According to an account by Lawrence Wright in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower,” it was the execution of Qutb by the Egyptian government in 1966 that inspired Zawahiri, then 15, to organize a group of young friends in an underground cell dedicated to. in overthrowing the government of Egypt and establishing an Islamic theocracy. Zawahiri’s small group of followers eventually evolved into an organization known as Jamaat al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. Even as his political views hardened, Zawahiri pursued a career in the healing arts, earning a medical degree from Cairo University and briefly serving as a military surgeon. He eventually opened a practice in a two-story apartment owned by his parents and occasionally treated patients at a Cairo clinic funded by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic political opposition. He married Azza Nowair, the daughter of a wealthy, politically connected Egyptian family, and the couple would eventually have one son and five daughters. While working at the Muslim Brotherhood clinic, Zawahiri was invited to make the first of numerous visits to refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, he bandaged the wounds of mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and crossed paths with a charismatic young Saudi, Bin Laden. At the time, however, Zawahiri was busy managing his own revolutionary movement. His Jihad group launched a series of plots in the early 1980s to assassinate Egyptian leaders and played a role in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981. The massive government crackdown that followed landed Zawahiri in prison, along with hundreds of his followers. Zawahiri was released after serving a three-year sentence, but would later claim in a memoir that he was tortured during his imprisonment, an experience he said left him more determined to destroy Egypt’s government by force. During his nomadic years after prison, Zawahiri traveled frequently to South Asia and increasingly found common cause with the mujahideen and with bin Laden himself, who relied on the Egyptian as his personal physician. The Saudi suffered from low blood pressure and other chronic conditions and required frequent glucose infusions. Zawahiri’s steadfastness in providing aid in the face of the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan cemented the doctor’s reputation among the mujahideen, as well as a lifelong friendship with bin Laden. Zawahiri made at least one visit to the United States in the 1990s, a brief tour of California mosques under an assumed name to raise money for Muslim charities that provide support to Afghan refugees. At the same time, he continued to press his Egyptian followers for larger and more spectacular attacks at home, believing that such shockingly brutal tactics would attract media attention and drown out more moderate voices in favor of negotiation and compromise. While living in Afghanistan in 1997, Zawahiri helped plan a savage attack on foreign tourists at Egypt’s famed Luxor ruins, a 45-minute rampage that killed 62 people, including Japanese tourists, a 5-year-old British girl and four Egyptians travel guides. Ordinary Egyptians were repulsed by the carnage, and support for Zawahiri and his Jihad Group evaporated. Soon after, Zawahiri told his followers that operations in Egypt were no longer possible and that the battle was shifting to Israel and its main ally, the United States. The Jihad Group officially merged with the larger and better funded Al Qaeda or Bin Laden’s “Base.” Zawahiri was a senior adviser to bin Laden at the time of al Qaeda’s first high-profile terrorist attacks, the 1998 bombings of US embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds of people. Three years later, working from al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan, he helped oversee the planning of what would become one of the most daring terrorist attacks in history: the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. As the 9/11 hijackers were sent to begin training in US cities, Zawahiri was put in charge of planning subsequent waves of terrorist attacks designed to further weaken America’s economy and resolve. He launched an ambitious biological weapons program, establishing a laboratory in Afghanistan and sending students to search for sympathetic scientists as well as deadly strains of anthrax bacteria. US intelligence officials believe Zawahiri’s efforts may well have succeeded had he not run out of time. Within weeks of the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center towers, a US-backed military campaign drove the Taliban’s allies al-Qaeda from power in Afghanistan and forced Zawahiri to abandon his bioweapons lab. US bombers targeted offices and homes of al Qaeda leaders, including the compound where Zawahiri lived. His wife was trapped in the rubble after the roof collapsed, but reportedly refused to be rescued for fear the men would see her without her veil. She was later found dead from hypothermia. Zawahiri fled with bin Laden to Pakistan’s tribal region, where both men — now with $25 million in bounties on their heads — went into hiding to avoid capture. Although there were no confirmed sightings of either man over the next decade, the CIA launched at least two missile attacks inside Pakistan, in 2006 and 2008, allegedly targeting buildings recently occupied by…
