WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan this weekend killed Ayman al-Zawahri, who helped Osama bin Laden plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and helped al Qaeda survive and spread in the years since. this. By finding and striking al-Zawahiri, President Joe Biden said, the US ensured that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never again become a base for attacks on the rest of the world, as it did in 2001.
A look at the al Qaeda leader who eluded US capture for 21 years after the suicide plane attacks that in many ways changed America and its relationship with the rest of the world.
WHO WAS AYMAN AL-ZAWAHRI?
Americans who lived through the 9/11 attacks may not remember al-Zawahri’s name, but many recognize his face, more than two decades later: a bespectacled man with a slight smile, invariably shown in pictures next to bin Laden as the two orchestrated the strike across the United States.
The Egyptian Al-Zawahri was born on June 19, 1951, into a comfortable family in a leafy, sleepy suburb of Cairo. Religiously observant since childhood, he immersed himself in the violent branch of Sunni Islamic revivalism, which sought to replace the governments of Egypt and other Arab nations with a harsh interpretation of Islamic rule.
Al-Zawahri worked as an eye surgeon as a young man, but also roamed Central Asia and the Middle East, witnessing the war of the Afghans against the Soviet occupiers in that country and meeting the young Saudi Osama bin Laden and other Arab fighters uniting, to help Afghanistan expel Soviet troops.
He was one of hundreds of militants captured and tortured in an Egyptian prison after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Islamic fundamentalists in 1981. Biographers say the experience further radicalized him. Seven years later, al-Zawahri was present when bin Laden founded al-Qaeda.
Al-Zawahri merged his own Egyptian armed group with al-Qaeda. He brought organizational skills and experience to Al Qaeda—honed underground in Egypt, avoiding Egyptian intelligence—that allowed Al Qaeda to organize cells of followers and carry out strikes around the world.
WHY WAS AL-ZAWAHRI IMPORTANT?
After years of quietly collecting the suicide bombers, the funds and the plans for the 9/11 attack, Zawahri and the lieutenants ensured that al Qaeda survived the global manhunt that followed to strike again.
While on the run after 9/11, al-Zawahri reestablished al-Qaeda’s leadership in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and was the supreme leader of branches in Iraq, Asia, Yemen and beyond. With a credo of targeting enemies near and far, al Qaeda has carried out years of relentless attacks since 9/11: in Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Jakarta, Istanbul, Madrid, London and beyond. The attacks, which killed 52 people in London in 2005, were among the latest devastating attacks by al-Qaeda in the West, as drone strikes, counter-terrorist strikes and missiles fired by the US and others killed al-Qaeda-linked fighters. and broke parts of the net.
HOW WAS HE KILLED?
Around sunrise on Sunday, al-Zawahri stepped out onto the balcony of a house in Kabul, Afghanistan. He apparently lingered outside on the balcony, as US intelligence noted he often did. On that day, a U.S. drone fired two Hellfire missiles at the al Qaeda leader as he stood, according to U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the strike.
His presence in Afghanistan had been widely suspected for some time, analysts said. U.S. officials learned this year that Zawahri’s wife and other family members had recently moved to safe housing in Kabul. Zawahri soon followed, senior administration officials said.
American officials, joined by senior leaders all the way up to, eventually, Biden, spent careful months confirming his identity — and his fateful practice of standing alone on that same balcony — and planning the strike.
WHAT DOES HIS ASSASSINATION MEAN FOR AL Qaeda?
It depends on which al Qaeda lieutenant succeeds him. And after decades of American and other strikes, it’s a pretty weak bunch. Al Qaeda expert Ali Soufan points to Egyptian Seif al-Adl as one of the candidates the West should fear, given al-Adl’s revered status within al-Qaeda, his experience and the potential of his charisma to lure back defectors from al-Qaeda Kaida who have moved on to other groups.
But overall, Al Qaeda now faces a succession crisis and an unstable future. This includes rivalries against aggressive emerging extremist groups that emerged after 9/11 and are also present in Afghanistan.
Charles Lister, another expert on violent extremist networks, wrote after the assassination that the nature and spread of conflicts around the Middle East, Africa and South Asia today favored locally focused jihadist organizations over globally focused ones.
Al Qaeda’s next leader will have to prove his worth to “self-confident affiliates who have been more inclined to oppose a central leadership perceived as out of touch with the realities of conflicts thousands of miles away,” Lister wrote.
DID THE TALIBAN KNOW AL-ZAWAHRI WAS IN AFGHANISTAN?
Undoubtedly, US officials said. It was unclear Monday how long al-Zawahri had been in Afghanistan, but his presence there had been widely rumored for some time, said Asfandiar Mir, a Central Asia expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Not only that: the house where al-Zawahri lives with his family was owned by a top aide to senior Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, according to a senior US intelligence official.
It is possible that one of the Taliban sold al-Zawahri and his family to American or other foreign interests. But the Taliban government took in al-Qaeda leaders in the mid-1990s and allowed them to plan the 9/11 attacks, sparking the 20-year US-led war there. Concerns after al-Zawahri’s death in the Afghan capital were that the Taliban were allowing militant extremist organizations to re-enter Afghanistan after the US withdrawal, as the West had feared.
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