Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian-born pan-Islamist militant and physician who served as the second general emir of al-Qaeda from June 2011 until his death in July 2022. He is best known for being one of the main orchestrators of the September 11 attacks.
Al-Zawahiri graduated from Cairo University with a degree in medicine and a master's degree in surgery and was a surgeon by profession. He became a leading figure in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an Egyptian Islamist organization, and eventually attained the rank of emir. He was imprisoned from 1981 to 1984 for his role in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. His actions against the Egyptian government, including his planning of the 1995 attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, resulted in him being sentenced to death in absentia during the 1999 "Returnees from Albania" trial.
A close associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri held significant sway over the group's operations. He was wanted by the United States and the United Nations, respectively, for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and in the 2002 Bali bombings. He merged the Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al-Qaeda in 2001 and formally became bin Laden's deputy in 2004. He succeeded bin Laden as al-Qaeda's leader after bin Laden's death in 2011. In May 2011, the U.S. announced a $25 million bounty for information leading to his capture.
On July 31, 2022, al-Zawahiri was killed in a CIA drone strike in Afghanistan.
Personal life
Early life
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born on 19 June 1951 in Giza, Egypt to Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and Umayma Azzam.The New York Times in 2001 described al-Zawahiri as coming from "a prosperous and prestigious family that gives him a pedigree grounded firmly in both religion and politics". Al-Zawahiri's parents both came from prosperous families. Al-Zawahiri's father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, came from a large family of doctors and scholars from Kafr Ash Sheikh Dhawahri, Sharqia, in which one of his grandfathers was Sheikh Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri who was the 34th Grand Imam of al-Azhar. Mohammed Rabie became a surgeon and a professor of pharmacy at Cairo University. Ayman Al-Zawahiri's mother, Umayma Azzam, came from a wealthy, politically active clan, the daughter of Abdel-Wahhab Azzam, a literary scholar who served as the president of Cairo University, the founder and inaugural rector of the King Saud University as well as ambassador to Pakistan, while his own brother was Azzam Pasha, the founding secretary-general of the Arab League. From his maternal side yet another relative was Salem Azzam, an Islamist intellectual and activist, for a time secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe based in London. The wealthy and prestigious family is also linked to the Red Sea Harbi tribe in Zawahir, a small town in Saudi Arabia, located in the Badr.
He also has a maternal link to the house of Saud: Muna, the daughter of Azzam Pasha, is married to Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, the son of the late King Faisal.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri said that he has a deep affection for his mother. Her brother, Mahfouz Azzam, became a role model for him as a teenager. He has a younger brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri, a younger sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri, and a twin sister, Umnya al-Zawahiri. Heba became a professor of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University. She described her brother as "silent and shy". Muhammad was sentenced on charges of undergoing military training in Albania in 1998. He was arrested in the UAE in 1999, and sentenced to death in 1999 after being extradited to Egypt. He was held in Tora Prison in Cairo as a political detainee. Security officials said he was the head of the Special Action Committee of Islamic Jihad, which organized terrorist operations. After the Egyptian popular uprising in the spring of 2011, on March 17, 2011, he was released from prison by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the interim government of Egypt. His lawyer said he had been held to extract information about his brother Ayman al-Zawahiri. On March 20, 2011, he was re-arrested. On August 17, 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested Muhammad al-Zawahiri at his home in Giza. He was acquitted in 2017.
Youth
Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly a studious youth. He excelled in school, loved poetry, and "hated violent sports", which he thought were "inhumane." Al-Zawahiri studied medicine at Cairo University and graduated in 1974 with gayyid giddan, or roughly on par with a grade of "B" in the American grading system. Following that, he served 1974–1978 as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army after which he established a clinic near his parents in Maadi. In 1978, he also earned a master's degree in surgery. He spoke Arabic, English, and French.Al-Zawahiri participated in youth activism as a student. He became both quite pious and political, under the influence of his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, and lecturer Mostafa Kamel Wasfi. Sayyid Qutb preached that to restore Islam and free Muslims, a vanguard of true Muslims modeling itself after the original Companions of the Prophet had to be developed. Ayman al-Zawahiri was influenced by Qutb's Manichaean views on Islamic theology and Islamic history.
Underground cell
By the age of 15, al-Zawahiri had formed an underground cell with the goal to overthrow the government and establish an Islamist state. The following year the Egyptian government executed Sayyid Qutb for conspiracy. Following the execution, al-Zawahiri, along with four other secondary school students, helped form an "underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state." It was at this early age that al-Zawahiri developed a mission in life, "to put Qutb's vision into action." His cell eventually merged with others to form al-Jihad or Egyptian Islamic Jihad.Marriages and children
Ayman al-Zawahiri was married at least four times. His wives include Azza Ahmed Nowari and Umaima Hassan.In 1978, al-Zawahiri married his first wife, Azza Ahmed Nowari, a student at Cairo University who was studying philosophy. Their wedding, which was held at the Continental Hotel in Opera Square, was very conservative, with separate areas for both men and women, and no music, photographs, or gaiety in general. Many years later, when the United States attacked Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in October 2001, Azza apparently had no idea that al-Zawahiri had supposedly been a jihadi emir for the last decade.
Al-Zawahiri and his wife, Azza, had four daughters, Fatima, Umayma, Nabila, and Khadiga, and a son, Mohammed, who was a "delicate, well-mannered boy" and "the pet of his older sisters," subject to teasing and bullying in a traditionally all-male environment, who preferred to "stay at home and help his mother." In 1997, ten years after the birth of Mohammed, Azza gave birth to their fifth daughter, Aisha, who had Down syndrome. In February 2004, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded and subsequently stated that Abu Turab Al-Urduni had married one of al-Zawahiri's daughters.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's first wife Azza and two of their six children, Mohammad and Aisha, were killed in an airstrike on Afghanistan by US forces in late December 2001, following the September 11 attacks on the U.S. After an American aerial bombardment of a Taliban-controlled building at Gardez, Azza was pinned under the debris of a guesthouse roof. Concerned for her modesty, she "refused to be excavated" because "men would see her face" and she died from her injuries the following day. Her son, Mohammad, was also killed outright in the same house. Her four-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, Aisha, had not been hurt by the bombing, but died from exposure in the cold night while Afghan rescuers tried to save Azza.
In the first half of 2005, one of Al-Zawahiri's three surviving wives gave birth to a daughter, named Nawwar.
In June 2012, one of al-Zawahiri's four wives, Umaima Hassan, released a statement on the internet congratulating the role played by Muslim women in the Arab Spring. She is also known to have written a leaflet explaining women's role in jihad.
Medical career
In 1981, Ayman al-Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he worked in a Red Crescent hospital treating wounded refugees. There, he became friends with Ahmed Khadr, and the two shared a number of conversations about the need for Islamic government and the needs of the Afghan people.Ayman al-Zawahiri worked as a surgeon. In 1985, al-Zawahiri went to Saudi Arabia on Hajj and stayed to practice medicine in Jeddah for a year. As a reportedly qualified surgeon, when his organization merged with bin Laden's al-Qaeda, he became bin Laden's personal advisor and physician. He had first met bin Laden in Jeddah in 1986. According to other sources, they met the first time in 1986 at a hospital in Peshawar.
In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States, where he addressed several mosques in California under his Abdul Mu'iz pseudonym, relying on his credentials from the Kuwaiti Red Crescent to raise money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines—he raised only $2000.
Militant activity
Assassination plots
Egypt
In 1981, Al-Zawahiri was one of hundreds arrested following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Initially, the plan was derailed when authorities were alerted to Al-Jihad's plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information, in February 1981. President Sadat ordered the roundup of more than 1,500 people, including many Al-Jihad members, but missed a cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Sadat during a military parade that October. His lawyer, Montasser el-Zayat, said that al-Zawahiri was tortured in prison.In his book, Al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him, Al-Zayat maintains that under torture by the Egyptian police, following his arrest in connection with the murder of Sadat in 1981, Al-Zawahiri revealed the hiding place of Essam al-Qamari, a key member of the Maadi cell of al-Jihad, which led to Al-Qamari's "arrest and eventual execution." He was released from prison in 1984.
In 1993, al-Zawahiri's and Egyptian Islamic Jihad's connection with Iran may have led to a suicide bombing in an attempt on the life of Egyptian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi, the man heading the effort to quash the campaign of Islamist killings in Egypt. It failed, as did an attempt to assassinate Egyptian prime minister Atef Sidqi three months later. The bombing of Sidqi's car injured 21 Egyptians and killed a schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim. It followed two years of killings by another Islamist group, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, that had killed over 200 people. Her funeral became a public spectacle, with her coffin carried through the streets of Cairo and crowds shouting, "Terrorism is the enemy of God!" The police arrested 280 more of al-Jihad's members and executed six.
For their leading role in anti-Egyptian Government attacks in the 1990s, al-Zawahiri and his brother Muhammad al-Zawahiri were sentenced to death in the 1999 Egyptian case of the Returnees from Albania.