Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri (19 June 1951- 31 July 2022) was the leader of al-Qaeda from 2011 to 2022, succeeding Osama Bin Laden. al-Zawahiri was a former physician from Egypt, coming from a family of politicians and doctors, and he became a leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement after being inspired by Sayyid Qutb's writings. Zawahiri later joined the al-Qaeda jihadist group and became the leader after Osama's assassination in 2011. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2022.
Biography[]
Early life[]
A young al-Zawahiri, unknown date
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born on 19 June 1951 in Maadi, Egypt to an upper-middle class family, and he was the brother of Muhammad al-Zawahiri. He came from a family of doctors and politicians, and his family lived across the train tracks from a secular, upper-class, resort area; the people on his side of town resented the Western influences in Egypt, as well as thet carefree lifestyle of Egyptians there. At the age of fourteen, al-Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood and made it his goal to put Sayyid Qutb's ideas into motion, seeking to establish sharia law within a worldwide caliphate. al-Zawahiri formed an underground group of secondary school students devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state at the young age of 15, and in 1986 he met Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia while studying to become a surgeon.
Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader[]
Zawahiri in prison, aged 31 after his arrest in 1982.
Zawahiri worked as Osama's personal phyisician, and he was involved in the activities of his al-Qaeda jihadist group. In 1981, he planned the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and he was one of the 1,500 Egyptians of his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group (which had grown from a student group to a terrorist group) that Sadat imprisoned for attempting to assassinate him; he was imprisoned and tortured at the same time as Sadat's murder by Khaled Islambouli. al-Zawahiri was involved with several underground Islamist activities in the country as an EIJ leader, including attacks on tourists and assassinations of politicians and policemen. One of his most famous acts of terror was the Luxor massacre. In 1995, EIJ took part in the attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, alienating the country, which had provided a route into Afghanistan. al-Zawahiri befriended Ahmed Khadr while on a Red Crescent mission to Pakistan at the time of the Soviet-Afghan War, and he raised $2,000 from California mosques to help Afghan children who were injured by Soviet Union landmines; he made connections in the United States.
al-Qaeda[]
Ayman al-Zawahiri in a 2016 video
In 1998, he merged EIJ with al-Qaeda, and he became its deputy leader with Bin Laden. That same year, he was one of the men responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 USS Cole attack, the 2007 Lal Masjid siege, and the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December. On 1 May 2011, he became the leader of al-Qaeda after Osama Bin Laden's assassination, and he ordeded Muslims to kidnap foreign tourists in their countries. During his tenure as Emir of al-Qaeda, the Syrian Civil War and Arab Spring reached their heights, and the al-Nusra Front and other al-Qaeda-linked groups grew powerful in Syria and Libya. However, the Iraqi branch of the group, the Islamic State of Iraq, later declared itself a caliphate, the "Islamic State", and al-Qaeda was reduced to only around 30,000 fighters while the Islamic State had as many as 200,000 fighters. al-Zawahiri continued to have the allegiance of the al-Nusra Front, Jemaah Islamiyah, and the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), and he renewed his pledge of allegiance to the Taliban after Haibatullah Akhunzada became its leader on Mullah Akhtar Mansoor's death on 25 May 2016. He was killed in a drone strike on the balcony of his home in Kabul on 31 July 2022, he was 71.