Zawahri the ‘brain’ to bin Laden’s body
Zawahri has been the brains behind bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages.
In the latest monitored by the SITE Intelligence Group last month, he urged Muslims to fight NATO and American forces in Libya.
“I want to direct the attention of our Muslim brothers in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the rest of the Muslim countries, that if the Americans and the NATO forces enter Libya then their neighbours in Egypt and Tunisia and Algeria and the rest of the Muslim countries should rise up and fight both the mercenaries of Gaddafi and the rest of NATO,” Zawahri said.
Born into an upper-class family of scholars and doctors in Cairo, the cerebral Egyptian in his late-50s is second after bin Laden on the FBI “most wanted terrorists” list.
Both bin Laden and Zawahiri eluded capture when US-led forces toppled Afghanistan’s Taliban government in late 2001 after al-Qaida’s September 11 attacks on American cities.
But following the announcement of the killing of bin Laden, there was no word on the bespectacled and grey-haired Zawahri.
In a video in September 2009, Zawahri said Mr Obama was no different than George W Bush.
“America has come with a new deceptive face ... It plants the same dagger as Bush and his predecessors did. Obama has resorted to the policies of his predecessors in lying and selling illusions,” said Zawahri, clad in white robe and turban.
Like bin Laden, Zawahri has long been thought to be hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border. The last video of Zawahri and bin Laden together was broadcast by al Jazeera on September 10, 2003.
Analysts consider Zawahri al-Qaida’s chief organiser and bin Laden’s closest mentor.
“Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body,” said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who once represented Zawahri.
In a video after the September 11 attacks, Zawahri called them a “great victory” achieved “thanks to God”.
Zawahri and bin Laden met in the mid-1980s when both were in the Pakistani city of Peshawar to support guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and worked closely thereafter. But it was not Zawahri’s first foray into militancy.
Born in 1951, he was the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of the important Al Azhar mosque.
He graduated from Egypt’s most prestigious medical school in 1974 and did a second degree in surgery. By then he was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.
When the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1973, he joined. When members assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, he was among 301 people arrested
He was tried but cleared. He did, though, spend three years in jail for having an unlicensed pistol. On his release, Zawahri helped the Red Crescent in Pakistan treat fighters wounded in the Afghan war.
Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, he was a key figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state there, in which more than 1,200 Egyptians died.
In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. He has also been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Days after those bombings, he telephoned a Pakistani reporter, denying responsibility, but urging Muslims to “continue their jihad against the Americans and Jews”.
An hour later, US cruise missiles hit al-Qaida’s Afghan training camps. Both bin Laden and Zawahri escaped injury.
Zawahri’s wife, Azza, and three daughters were reported killed in a bombing strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, in December 2001.
Zawahri has appeared regularly in a series of video or audio messages since then, criticising the US war in Iraq, praising the Taliban and suicide bombers who attack London in 2005 and urging Muslims to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan.
In 2008, Zawahri held an unprecedented question and answer session online with al-Qaida sympathisers who repeatedly questioned him over the group’s killings of civilians in Iraq.
Zawahri denied killing innocents, and said that if any died in attacks it was through error or necessity, for example if they were being used as human shields
Zawahri has repeatedly called for al-Qaida to seize control of a state, a goal the group has never come close to despite its alliance with Afghanistan’s late 1990s Taliban rulers. In a 2001 essay, he wrote: “If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small-scale harassment.”
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