Abu Khayr al-Masri (3 November 1957-26 February 2017), born Abdullah Muhammad Rajab Abd al-Rahman, was the deputy leader of al-Qaeda under Ayman al-Zawahiri. A former Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader and a veteran of jihadist conflicts in Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Afghanistan, al-Masri was killed in a United States airstrike in Idlib Governorate, Syria on 26 February 2017, a major blow to the group.
Biography[]
Abdullah Muhammad Rajab Abd al-Rahman was born in Kafr el-Sheikh, Egypt on 3 November 1957, and he was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad alongside Ayman al-Zawahiri, using the nom de guerre of "Abu Khayr al-Masri". During the mid-1980s, he fled from Egypt alongside several other Islamist militants, and he fought in the Bosnian War alongside several other Arab volunteers. During the 1990s, he was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in Egyptian towns, and he was sentenced to death in absentia during the Returnees from Albania trials. Abu Khayr would become a member of al-Qaeda's shura council, and he married a daughter of Osama bin Laden. al-Masri was responsible for taking part in the bombings of the United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and he fled to Iran during the Afghanistan War, leading to his arrest. He was released by Iran in September 2015 alongside Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah and Saif al-Adel in a prisoner exchange, and al-Masri and three other men headed to Syria to join the al-Nusra Front during the Syrian Civil War. On 28 July 2016, he claimed that al-Nusra had cut all connections with al-Qaeda to form Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and he later became a Tahrir al-Sham leader. On 26 February 2017, al-Masri and another Tahrir al-Sham member were killed in a United States airstrike on their car in the Idlib Governorate of Syria.