Ayman al-Zawahri, the Al-Qaeda leader the United States liquidated in Afghanistan, in an image from a video of a terrorist threat in 2012. AFP photos
The Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, a leader without charisma leading Al Qaeda over his predecessor Osama Bin Laden, he theorized the ramification of jihadist cells, without controlling them until his death this weekend in a US attack, which Joe Biden confirmed in an extensive televised message this Monday.
an old doctor which his fellow students have described as shybecame one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. Although he was one of the architects of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers in New York, “Zawahri’s greatest achievement is to have kept Al Qaeda alive”, According to Barak Mendelsohn, a professor at Haverford University in Pennsylvania.
But had to multiply the “franchises”, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. And accept that they are emancipated slowly.
The bushy bearded theorist and large glasses – iconic difference with his predecessor Bin Laden-, easily recognizable by a lump on his forehead, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 15 and survived more than 40 years of jihadsomewhat unusual, before dying at the age of 71 in a drone attack.
He was given up for dead or dying on several occasions, but it recently showed signs of life, with a video that tripped the Biden administration. This Saturday, while visiting relatives in Kabul, he was killed in a calculated attack.
It also exhibits the apparition of Al Zawahri in the Afghan capital certain permissiveness of the Taliban regime which must respond to pre-existing agreements in this regard.
Despite his role in the 2001 attacks, which bear the signature of Al Qaeda, the assassinated terrorist never acquired the macabre aura of Osama Bin Laden.
Paradoxically, The United States offered $ 25 million for his capture., a record, and at the same time seemed almost uninterested in him. Until Monday, President Joe Biden himself announced his death as a “successful counter-terrorist operation” this weekend.
How a terrorist leader is born: childhood and decline of the last Al Qaeda leader
In 1998, Ayman al-Zawahri and Osama Bin Laden in, Afghanistan, in a message of terror. Both were US military targets. AP photo
Al Zawahri was born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi, near Cairo, the capital of Egypt, in one middle-class family (his father was a doctor and his grandfather a great theologian of the Al Azhar mosque in the Egyptian capital), and he was a surgeon.
His ideology was precocious. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was only 15 years old. He has been imprisoned for three years for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat.
He then traveled to Saudi Arabia, the United States and finally Pakistan in the mid-1980s, where he treated the jihadists like a doctor they were fighting against the Soviets. There he met Bin Laden. He has long been the head of the Egyptian and Islamic Jihad joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.
Washington put it on its “black list” for it supported the attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Biden also accused him of being the “strategist” in the 2002 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which resulted in about 20 deaths.
Was sentenced to death in absentia in his country for numerous attacks, in particular the one in Luxor in 1997 in which 62 people died, of which 58 were foreign tourists.
In 2002 and 2007, he was presumed dead but reappeared. has become the Bin Laden’s right-hand man and also his doctor.
He “doesn’t care about fighting in the mountains. Think more internationally, ”said Bin Laden’s biographer Hamid Mir of him. With the, “Al Qaeda has become increasingly decentralizedand the authority rested mainly with the heads of its branches ”, which however gives it a leading role in the reorganization of many jihadist groups.
Ayman al-Zawahri, to the right of Osama Bin Laden, the two terrorist minds who led Al-Qaeda and who were killed by the United States. AFP photo
Since 2011 he lived hidden between Pakistan and Afghanistanlimiting his appearances to videos with monotonous sermons. Upon his death, he leaves a group at the opposite end of the international jihadist war against the United States that Bin Laden dreamed of.
Al-Zawahri in love with something much more mundane: visiting relatives in the capital of Afghanistan.
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Didier Lauras
Source: Clarin
