August 2, 2022, 8:33 AM
August 2, 2022, 8:33 AM
At the head of Al Qaeda since the death of Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose death was announced on Monday by Joe Biden, theorized about the expansion of jihadist franchises without really controlling them.
If he was one of the designers of the September 11, 2001 attacks, “Zawahiri’s greatest success is keeping Al Qaeda alive,” according to Barak Mendelsohn, a professor at Haverford University in Pennsylvania. But for this he had to multiply the number of “franchises” and the loyalties of circumstances, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, in Syria and in Iraq. And accept that these loyalties gradually emancipate.
The theoretician with the bushy beard and large glasses, easily recognizable by a bulge on his forehead, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 15. He survived more than 40 years of jihad, a rare longevity, before being killed at the age of 71 in a drone strike.
He had been reported dead or dying on several occasions, but had recently shown signs of life. “Al-Zawahiri’s apparent increased comfort and ability to communicate coincided with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan,” according to a UN report released in mid-July.
Ironically, the United States offered a record $25 million for his capture while seeming almost uninterested in him. Until the US president himself announced his death during an “anti-terrorist operation” over the weekend.
From the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda
Born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi, near Cairo, into a bourgeois family -his father was a renowned doctor and his grandfather a great theologian from the al-Azhar mosque in the Egyptian capital-, Ayman al Zawahiri became a surgeon. His convictions were early: he joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager.
Involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, he was jailed for three years and in the mid-1980s he moved to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he treated jihadists fighting the Soviets and met Bin Laden. He was for a long time at the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and only joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.
The United States included him in its “black list” for having supported the attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. He was also sentenced to death in absentia in Egypt for numerous attacks, including Luxor in 1997 (62 dead, including 58 foreign tourists). He became Bin Laden’s right hand man and his doctor. He was not interested in fighting in the mountains. It’s about thinking more internationally,” Hamid Mir, Bin Laden’s biographer, was quoted as saying by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).
Will Saif al-Adel take over?
Since 2011, he has lived as a refugee between Pakistan and Afghanistan, limiting his appearances to monotonous video sermons. Whether he is responsible for his decline or he has succeeded in dampening it, he is leaving an organization that is the antithesis of the jihadist international at war with the United States that bin Laden dreamed of.
Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces lieutenant colonel and al-Qaeda old guard figure, is often mentioned as a possible successor. Unless a younger generation arises. In any case, the nebula will still have to prevail against its great rival, the Islamic State group, with which it clashes, ideologically and militarily, in the territories where they operate.
