• Ayman al-Zawahiri was an eye surgeon who helped form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant group.
• He became as al-Qaeda’s visible spokesman in the years following the 9/11 attacks.
• Was ranked second only to Bin Laden on US government’s list of 22 “most wanted terrorists”.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was murdered by a US drone strike in Afghanistan, was widely regarded as al-chief Qaeda’s ideologue.

He was an eye surgeon who helped form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant group before taking over al-Qaeda leadership after Osama Bin Laden was killed by US forces in May 2011.

Prior to it, Zawahiri was regarded Bin Laden’s right-hand man, and some experts felt he was the “operational brains” behind the September 11, 2001, strikes in the United States.

Zawahiri was ranked second only to Bin Laden on the US government’s list of the 22 “most wanted terrorists” in 2001, with a $25 million (£16 million) bounty on his head.

Zawahiri became as al-Qaeda’s most visible spokesman in the years following the 9/11, appearing in 16 films and audiotapes in 2007 – four times as many as Bin Laden – as the organization attempted to radicalize and recruit Muslims around the world.
His assassination in last weekend’s Kabul attack was not the first time the US intended to assassinate Zawahiri.

He was the target of a US missile strike near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in January 2006.

Four al-Qaeda members were killed in the attack, but Zawahiri survived and appeared on video two weeks later, telling US President George W Bush that neither he nor “all the powers on earth” could bring his death “one second closer”.

Family Background:

Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951, in Cairo, Egypt, into a respected middle-class family of doctors and professors.

His grandfather, Rabia al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of al-Azhar, the center of Sunni Islamic study in the Middle East, and one of his uncles was the Arab League’s first secretary-general.

Zawahiri started interested in political Islam while still in school and was detained at the age of 15 for belonging to the illegal Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest and largest Islamist organization.

His political activities, however, did not prevent him from studying medicine at Cairo University’s medical school, where he graduated in 1974 and eventually earned a master’s degree in surgery four years later.

His father, Mohammed, who died in 1995, was a pharmacology professor at the same university.

Early life:

Zawahiri first carried on the family history by establishing a medical practice in a Cairo suburb, but he was soon drawn to extreme Islamist groups seeking for the Egyptian government’s overthrow.

He joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad when it was created in 1973.

In 1981, he and hundreds of other suspected members of the gang were apprehended after several members of the group posing as soldiers assassinated President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo. Sadat had enraged Islamist activists by negotiating a peace treaty with Israel and earlier detaining hundreds of his critics in a security crackdown.

During the mass trial, Zawahiri emerged as a defendants’ leader and was recorded telling the court: “We are Muslims who follow our religion. We are attempting to construct an Islamic state and civilization.”

Despite being absolved of involvement in Sadat’s killing, Zawahiri was convicted of unlawful possession of weaponry and sentenced to three years in prison.

According to fellow Islamist prisoners, Zawahiri was tortured and beaten on a regular basis by Egyptian authorities during his time in prison, an experience that is supposed to have converted him into a fanatical and violent extremist.

Zawahiri fled to Saudi Arabia after his release in 1985.

Soon after, he travelled to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then to neighboring Afghanistan, where he founded an Egyptian Islamic Jihad faction while working as a doctor during the Soviet occupation.

After Egyptian Islamic Jihad re-emerged in 1993, Zawahiri assumed leadership and was a prominent figure in a series of attacks by the organization on Egyptian government politicians, including Prime Minister Atif Sidqi.

During the mid-1990s, the group’s drive to destabilize the government and establish an Islamic state in Egypt resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Egyptians.

The US State Department designated him commander of the Vanguards of Conquest organisation in 1997, a faction of Islamic Jihad suspected of being behind the slaughter of foreign tourists in Luxor the previous year.

He was convicted to death in absentia by an Egyptian military court two years later for his role in the group’s numerous attacks.

Activities :

During the 1990s, Zawahiri is reported to have travelled around the world in quest of refuge and finance.

He is reported to have lived in Bulgaria, Denmark, and Switzerland in the years following the Soviet departure from Afghanistan, and to have used a phoney passport to travel to the Balkans, Austria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and the Philippines.

He reportedly spent six months in Russian detention in December 1996 after being arrested in Chechnya without a proper visa.

According to a statement supposedly prepared by Zawahiri, the Russian authorities neglected to have the Arabic texts discovered on his computer translated, allowing him to remain anonymous.

Zawahiri is thought to have relocated to the Afghan city of Jalalabad in 1997, where Osama Bin Laden was stationed.

A year later, Egyptian Islamic Jihad formed the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders with five other radical Islamist terrorist groups, including Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

The first proclamation issued by the front included a fatwa, or Islamic edict, authorizing the death of US citizens. Six months later, two simultaneous attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania resulted in the deaths of 223 individuals.

Zawahiri was one of the individuals whose satellite phone conversations were claimed as evidence that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the plot.

The US targeted the group’s training centers in Afghanistan two weeks after the attacks. The following day, Zawahiri called a Pakistani journalist and said:  “Tell America that its bombings, its threats, and its acts of aggression do not frighten us. The war has only just begun.”

In the years after Bin Laden’s murder, US air strikes killed a slew of Zawahiri’s deputies, undermining his ability to coordinate globally.

In recent years, Zawahiri had become a distant and insignificant figure, only issuing messages on occasion.

The US will celebrate his death as a success, especially after the messy pullout from Afghanistan last year, but Zawahiri held little weight as new groups and movements such as the Islamic State have grown in power.

Undoubtedly, a new al-Qaeda commander will emerge, but he will have even less influence than his predecessor.

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