Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of al Qaeda after serving for years as the orga...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of al Qaeda after serving for years as the organization's primary organiser and strategist, but his lack of charm and rivalry from other militants made him unpopular. His ability to incite sizable assaults against the West was hindered by Islamic State.
On live television on Monday night, U.S. President Joe Biden said that Zawahiri, 71, had been assassinated by a drone strike. According to American sources, the assault happened on Sunday in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
U.S. airstrikes killed a slew of Zawahiri's lieutenants in the years after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, reducing the seasoned Egyptian militant's capacity for international coordination.
The 2011 Arab uprisings, which were primarily started by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to decades of authoritarianism, effectively marginalised al Qaeda, as he had watched.
Despite having a reputation for being rigid and aggressive, Zawahiri was able to cultivate loosely connected units that eventually developed to wage devastating insurgencies, some of which had their roots in unrest brought on by the Arab Spring. The violence caused the destabilisation of several nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
But al Qaeda's days as the hierarchically organised, centrally controlled network of terrorists responsible for the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were over. Instead, as a result of a combination of local grievances and incitement by transnational Islamist networks using social media, militancy has returned to its roots in localised battles.
Zawahiri's involvement with Islamist extremism dates back many years.
When he was imprisoned in a courtroom cage following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, he became known to the world for the first time.
While other inmates yelled slogans indignant at Sadat's peace agreement with Israel, Zawahiri, dressed in a white robe, yelled, "We have sacrificed and we are still ready for additional sacrifices till the victory of Islam."
Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in prison for illegally possessing weapons but was cleared of the more serious accusations.
A skilled surgeon, Zawahiri travelled to Pakistan after his release and joined the Red Crescent to assist Islamist mujahideen fighters injured while battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan. One of his aliases was The Doctor.
He met bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance, during that time.
Zawahiri, who assumed control of Islamic Jihad in Egypt in 1993, played a key role in the movement to topple the government and establish a strict Islamic state in the middle of the 1990s. There were 1,200 or more Egyptian deaths.
After President Hosni Mubarak was the target of an assassination attempt in Addis Abeba in June 1995, Egyptian authorities launched a campaign against Islamic Jihad. As a response, the balding, white-turbaned Zawahiri gave the order to attack the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995. 16 persons were killed when two automobiles carrying explosives crashed through the gates of the facility.
Zawahiri was given an absentee death sentence by an Egyptian military court in 1999. After assisting Bin Laden in creating al Qaeda, he was by that point leading the austere life of a warrior.
Western intelligence thought that a footage published by Al Jazeera in 2003 showing the two men strolling on a rocky mountainside might lead to information about their whereabouts.
THE GLOBAL JIHAD THREATS
Zawahiri was thought to be hiding for several years near the dangerous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A senior administration official claimed that this year, U.S. authorities discovered that Zawahiri's family—his wife, his daughter, and her children—had moved to a safe home in Kabul and later spotted Zawahiri there.
He was murdered by a drone attack on Sunday morning as he left the residence and stood on the balcony, according to the official. Nobody else suffered harm. After bin Laden was assassinated by American Navy Seals in his Pakistani lair in 2011, Zawahiri became the leader of al Qaeda. Since then, he has made numerous calls for world jihad while holding an Ak-47 in his video communications.
Zawahiri pledged to continue strikes against the West in a tribute to bin Laden, remembering the militant's warning that "you will not dream of security until we live it as a reality and until you leave the lands of the Muslims."
In the end, Western counter-terrorism agencies paid just as much attention to the rise of the even more virulent Islamic State in 2014–2019 in Iraq and Syria.
Zawahiri frequently attempted to incite Muslim rage by making online comments on touchy subjects like American Middle East policy or Israeli treatment of Palestinians, but his style was perceived as lacking bin Laden's charisma.
Zawahiri is thought to have organised the 2001 assaults, when planes hijacked by al Qaeda were used to kill 3,000 people in the United States, and is thought to have been engaged in some of al Qaeda's largest operations.
He was charged with involvement in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. On its most wanted list, the FBI placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
IMPORTANT FAMILY
Zawahiri did not leave the Cairo slums like other people who were enticed to terrorist organisations by their claims of a just cause. Zawahiri was a famous Cairo family member and the grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of Islam's most significant mosques. He was born in 1951.
Zawahiri was up in the tranquil Maadi neighbourhood of Cairo, which is popular with foreigners from the Western countries he decried. Zawahiri, a pharmacology professor's son, first embraced Islamic fanaticism when he was 15 years old.
The revolutionary beliefs of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist who was executed in 1966 on allegations of attempting to topple the government, an Egyptian writer, served as inspiration for him.
Zawahiri is remembered by those who studied with him at Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine in the 1970s as a vivacious young man who enjoyed going to the movies, listening to music, and cracking jokes with friends.
A doctor who studied under Zawahiri and wished to remain anonymous claimed, "When he came out of prison, he was a completely different person."
After Sadat was killed during a military parade, Zawahiri spoke to the press in the courtroom cage. He said that militants had been subjected to terrible torture, including beatings and attacks by wild dogs while imprisoned.
He claimed that the purpose of the detention of the wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, and sons was to exert psychological pressure on the innocent captives.
According to his fellow inmates, these circumstances led Zawahiri to become even more radicalised and set him on the path to worldwide jihad.
