With that offer in 1980, Zawahiri began a life that for more than three decades would elevate him to the top of the world’s most terrorist group, al-Qaeda, after the death of Osama bin Laden. Already a seasoned campaigner who had sought to overthrow Egypt’s “infidel” regime since the age of 15, Zawahiri spent just a few weeks in Afghanistan’s war zone, but it opened his eyes to new possibilities. What he saw was “the training course preparing the Muslim mujahideen youth to begin their coming battle with the great power that would rule the world: America,” he wrote in a 2001 biography-cum-manifesto. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri together in 2001. Photo: AP Zawahiri, 71, was killed over the weekend by a US drone strike in Afghanistan. US President Joe Biden announced the death on Monday night in an address to the nation. The strike is likely to lead to more turmoil within the organization than bin Laden’s death in 2011, since it is much less clear who will succeed him. Zawahiri was instrumental in turning the jihadist movement in the US as the right-hand man to bin Laden, the young Saudi millionaire he met in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Under their leadership, the Al Qaeda terrorist network carried out the deadliest attack ever on American soil, the suicide bombings of September 11, 2001. The attacks made bin Laden America’s No. 1 enemy. But it’s possible that he could never have made it happen without his deputy. While bin Laden came from a privileged background in a prominent Saudi family, Zawahiri had the experience of an underground rebel. Bin Laden provided al Qaeda with charisma and money, but Zawahiri brought the tactical and organizational skills needed to forge the fighters into a network of cores in countries around the world. “Bin Laden always looked up to him,” said terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. Zawahiri “spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadist from the time he was a teenager.” When the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan destroyed al-Qaeda’s safe haven, Zawahiri ensured its survival. He rebuilt his leadership in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and installed allies as lieutenants in key positions. He also became the public face of the movement, sending a steady stream of video messages while bin Laden was largely in hiding. Ayman al-Zawahiri in Khost, Afghanistan in 1998. Photo: Mazhar Ali Khan/AP With his bushy beard, heavy-rimmed glasses and the obvious bruise on his forehead from bowing in prayer, he was notoriously prickly and meticulous. He picked ideological battles with critics within the jihadist camp, wagging his finger imperiously in his videos. Even some key figures in al-Qaeda’s central leadership were put off, calling him too controlling, secretive and divisive – unlike bin Laden, whose soft-spoken presence many fighters described in cultish, almost spiritual terms. However, he transformed the organization from a centralized planner of terrorist attacks to the head of a network. He led the creation of autonomous branches across the region, and in the decade after 9/11, al-Qaeda inspired or had a direct hand in attacks across the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Europe, including the train bombings in 2004 Madrid and the 2005 7/7 London bombings. When bin Laden was killed in a US raid on his compound in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, al-Qaeda declared Zawahiri its top leader. The jihad against America “does not stop with the death of a commander or leader,” he said three months after bin Laden’s death. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 dealt a major blow to al-Qaeda, showing that jihad was not the only way to get rid of Arab autocrats. But Zawahiri tried to join the uprisings and urged Islamist hardliners to take power in nations where leaders had fallen. Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951, the son of an upper-middle-class family of doctors and scholars in Cairo. His father was a professor of pharmacology and his grandfather, Rabia al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a leading center of religious studies. From a young age, Zawahiri was inflamed by the radical writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who taught that Arab regimes were “infidels” and should be replaced by Islamic rule. An undated image of a younger al-Zawahiri, released after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Photo: EPA In the 1970s, as he earned his medical degree as a surgeon, he became active in militant circles, merging his own militant cell with others to form the Islamic Jihad group. After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamic Jihad fighters, which was carried out by a different cell of the group, he was arrested along with hundreds of other fighters and served three years in prison. During his imprisonment, he was reportedly severely tortured, a factor that some say made him a more violent radical. After his release in 1984, Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan. He approached bin Laden and followed him to his new base in Sudan, from where he led the Islamic Jihad group on a brutal bombing campaign aimed at toppling the allied government of Egypt. A failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995 led to a crackdown that crushed the militant movement in Egypt, but Zawahiri would bring to al-Qaeda the tactics he learned from Islamic Jihad. He promoted the suicide bombings that would later become Al Qaeda’s trademark, including the devastating 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 and saw Zawahiri indicted in the US. In 1996, Sudan expelled bin Laden, who took his fighters back to Afghanistan, where they found a safe haven under the radical Taliban regime. Once again, Zawahiri followed. Two years later, their bond was sealed when bin Laden, Zawahiri and other militant leaders issued the Declaration of Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders. He announced that the US was the foremost enemy of Islam and instructed Muslims that it was their religious duty to “kill the Americans and their allies”. Ayman al-Zawahiri in a 2022 video praising Muskan Khan, an Indian Muslim woman who in February defied the hijab ban. Photo: AP The alliance was soon followed by the bombings of US embassies in Africa, followed by the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, an attack that Zawahiri is believed to have helped orchestrate. When the US invaded Afghanistan, Zawahiri and bin Laden fled to Pakistan as a US airstrike killed Zawahiri’s wife and at least two of their six children in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The CIA came close to capturing Zawahiri in 2003 and killing him in 2004, and thought it finally had him in its sights in 2009, only to be outwitted by a double agent who blew himself up, killing seven CIA agents and wounding six others in Khost . , Afghanistan. After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan last year, al Qaeda members, including Zawahiri, who was believed to be very ill, were reported to be living in Kabul’s former diplomatic quarter. A sudden wave of statements and communications from Zawahiri showed he was “able to lead more effectively than was possible before the Taliban took over Afghanistan.” Not all campaigns were successful. Al-Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia was crushed in 2006. Zawahiri himself had to write to the head of Al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to rein in his brutal attacks on Iraqi Shiites, which it was hurting the network’s image among Muslims. This underscored Zawahiri’s ultimate failure. By focusing on a “Muslim vanguard” that carries out dramatic attacks, it never won widespread popular support for al-Qaeda in the Islamic world beyond a fringe of radical sympathizers.
