The jihadist was key in various attacks between 1998 and 2001, including 9/11
Aug. 2 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Ayman al Zawahiri, leader of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda since 2011, died on Saturday in a drone bombardment carried out by the US Army against a house in the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, an act with which Washington assures that “it has been done justice” against the person considered to be the architect of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
Al Zawahiri, an ophthalmologist born in 1951 in the Egyptian city of Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, grew up in the capital in a wealthy family. Thus, his grandfather was an imam at al Azhar University in Cairo and one of his great-uncles, Abdelrahman Azam, was the first secretary of the Arab League.
The man joined the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist organization during his adolescence and was behind the formation of Egyptian Islamic Jihad after the execution in 1966 of Sayid Qutb, a senior member of the group, for a plot to assassinate the then president, Gamal Abdel Naser.
Later, he was one of the hundreds of people imprisoned after the assassination in 1981 of the then Egyptian president, Anwar el Sadat, after the signing of the peace agreement with Israel, an attack perpetrated by an Egyptian Islamic Jihad cell led by Khalid al Islambuli, subsequently executed.
Al Zawahiri left the country in 1984 –after his release from prison– to go to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he worked as a surgeon treating militiamen fighting in Afghanistan against Soviet Union troops, a conflict in which the leader of Al Qaeda, Usama bin Laden, managed to rise as a figure within international jihadism.
It would be in this country where Al Zawahiri met Bin Laden, erected as one of the leaders of the Afghan mujahideen, until he became one of his closest advisers and even one of the main ideologues of Al Qaeda, founded in 1988. Ten years later, both announced the formation of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.
The group emerged from the unification of Al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, after which both issued a ‘fatwa’ describing the killing of Americans and their allies as “an obligation” for Muslims, which was followed by a chain of attacks during the following three years that culminated in the 9/11 attacks.
Thus, shortly after the publication of the ‘fatwa’, the attacks were carried out in 1998 against the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left more than 220 dead, while in 2000 an attack was perpetrated against the ‘USS Cole’ in Yemen that killed about 20 US Marines.
Finally, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2011, in which Al Zawahiri played a key role, as recalled by the President of the United States, Joe Biden. The president has highlighted during the announcement of his death that he “was with Bin Laden all the time.” “She was ‘number two’ of his, his right arm when the 9/11 attack was executed,” he has said.
DECENTRALIZATION AND LOSS OF RELEVANCE
9/11 led to the US invasion of Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda had its main bases of operations, and the fall of the Taliban regime, which had given cover and support to the group. The situation caused both Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri to remain in hiding, although they continued to issue statements and organize the terrorist group’s operations and attacks in Afghanistan and other countries around the world.
The death of Bin Laden in an operation by US special forces in 2011 in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad elevated Al Zawahiri to leader of Al Qaeda, a position from which he oversaw a decentralization process that already began in the last years of Bin Laden and it has accelerated ever since.
Al Zawahiri has had under his aegis a terrorist organization with a less centralized structure and more dependent on the operations of its different branches, often more focused on local or national interests, although the group’s leader continued to ask its members to perpetrate attacks against US and Western interests around the world.
However, the relevance of Al Qaeda in the context of international jihadism suffered a severe setback in 2013, when there was a split within the branch of the group in Iraq in the midst of the civil war in Syria, which led to the emergence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which eclipsed the terrorist organization for its territorial advances in 2014, which led to the creation of a ‘caliphate’ led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The dazzling growth of Al Baghdadi led to a transfer of militiamen from Al Qaeda to the new group, with more presence on the ground and greater recruitment capacity under the command of Al Zawahiri — who even condemned the brutal methods of the State Islamic and called for greater moderation in the selection of targets–, a figure with much less charisma than Bin Laden in the scene of Islamist fundamentalism.
BOMBING IN KABUL
Over the past few years, US counterterrorism operations have been undermining al Qaeda’s leadership, although al Zawahiri had remained untouched until this weekend’s attack. Despite the fact that numerous speculations arose about his health condition and even his death, he would have finally moved to the Afghan capital, Kabul, with the cover of the Taliban.
The fundamentalists managed to regain control of the country in August 2021 after the then president, Ashraf Ghani, fled before the advance of the Taliban towards the capital amid a withdrawal of international troops that started as a result of the historic peace agreement signed on February 29, 2020 in the Qatari capital, Doha.
The agreement between the United States and the Taliban, in whose negotiations the Afghan authorities did not participate, contemplated the commitment of the Taliban to break their ties with Al Qaeda and work to prevent their territory from being used to carry out attacks against other countries, a promise that it has since been called into question from Washington.
In fact, the United Nations warned in February that Al Qaeda — which applauded the Taliban’s seizure of power — had a greater capacity to move in Afghanistan since August 2021, something denied by the group, which influenced that “Afghanistan is witnessing exemplary security since the Islamic Emirate regained full sovereignty over the country.”
Along these lines, the UN Sanctions Monitoring and Analytical Support Team said in May that “the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda remains close, with the latter celebrating the success of the former and renewing its commitment of loyalty (to Taliban leader Hebatullah Ahundzada),” before adding that al Qaeda “has a safe sanctuary under the Taliban.”
An example of this capacity for movement would have been the transfer of Al Zawahiri himself to Kabul at some point in 2022, where he was finally located by the US authorities, who on Saturday carried out a drone attack on the balcony of a residence of the capital. The Taliban, who initially denied the event, have now denounced that the operation is a violation of the Doha agreement by Washington.
For this reason Al Qaeda finds itself once again without a visible head, without it being clear on this occasion who could take over the reins of the terrorist group, which could fall to Saif al Adel, a veteran Algerian jihadist who has lived in Iran since 2003, much of it of time in the custody of the Iranian authorities.
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