The London Times
THURSDAY OCTOBER 11 2001
The man to really fear
BY RICHARD OWEN AND DANIEL MCGRORY
Western intelligence has known for years that the
power behind al-Qaeda is not bin Laden but his deputy,
Ayman Zawahiri. It is time to target him
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will offer support
and sweet tea to a weary Tony Blair when they meet in
Cairo today, assuring him that the Arab world’s most
populous nation supports the attacks in Afghanistan.
But he will also have a more covert message for the
Prime Minister: that in focusing on Osama bin Laden
and elevating him to the role of Public Enemy No 1, we
are hunting for the wrong man.
He will also, no doubt, resist the temptation to say
“we told you so”.
Since September 11, the name on everybody’s lips has
been that of bin Laden, the gaunt, hollow eyed
Saudi-born billionnaire whose holy war against America
has made him the prime target in the “war against
terror”. But the real brains behind the attacks on New
York and Washington, indeed the mastermind of the
entire Islamic terrorist campaign against The Great
Satan is not bin Laden at all — but the man often
described as his No 2, the Egyptian-born physician
Ayman Mohammed Rabie Zawahiri.
What’s more, this has long been known not only to
Egyptian intelligence, but in American and British
intelligence circles as well. Long before most people
had ever of bin Laden or al-Qaeda, the Egyptians were
warning Britain and America that the real danger to
the security of the West was the benign-looking,
middle-aged paediatrician with impeccable manners from
Cairo.
Zawahiri was top of the country’s wanted list, which
was sent to London and Washington.But the the tip-off
seems to have been filed and ignored. In 1991
intelligence chiefs in Cairo were appalled to learn
that Zawahiri was on a fund-raising tour of the US.
The white beard was shaved off, the hair dyed, and he
was wearing dark-rimmed spectacles as he visited
mosques and community centres in Texas, California and
in the shadow of the World Trade Centre in New York,
collecting many thousands of dollars for widows and
orphans in Afghanistan.
He shook hands at dinner parties with Arab
millionaires who willingly opened their chequebooks,
after which he slipped back to his office in Peshawar
where he was already amassing the personnel he needed
to carry out his design for an all-out holy war.
In recent days you will have seen a good deal of the
doctor — the slightly hunched figure always found
standing alongside bin Laden during their video
broadcasts. The CIA has taken to calling Zawahiri “the
warm-up man”, because he is always the one to speak
first — and most eloquently — in their joint TV
appearances. In their most recent video, it was
Zawahiri who was handed the microphone first and it
was he who made sure that the tape was sent to the
Qatari satellite television station, al-Jazeera, with
orders to play it to the world the moment that the
bombing started.
While bin Laden, as always, launched into a medieval
rant against the Infidel, it was alZawahiri who
wounded Americans by taunting them to ask themselves
why the Muslim world detests them and wishes them more
harm.
His ubiquitous presence whenever bin Laden is around
is, say intelligence chiefs, al-Qaeda’s way of showing
the West that their organisation is not reliant on
just one man.
“Kill bin Laden or capture him and the message to us
is that his loyal No 2 will carry on the fight with
even more sympathisers,” a senior US security officer
said yesterday.
Bin Laden’s face may be the one that Americans are
taping over targets in their shooting ranges, but the
Egyptians have been in no doubt for years that bin
Laden’s personal physician and closest confidante is
the mastermind for its most hideous atrocities.
Zawahiri realised long ago that if you strike at
Western targets — like bombing tourists on Nile
cruises — the world soon takes notice.
In the shadow of the great Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo’s
“Islamic quarter”, where the minarets of no fewer than
250 mosques pierce the skyline, they speak his name in
a whisper.
But the intelligence community in Cairo is sure that
Zawahiri’s “brilliant but twisted brain” is behind the
US suicide attacks, part of a three-year plot to
entice America into “a war with Islam”, intended to
end in American withdrawal from the Middle East and
the collapse of Israel. The roots of this terrorist
network, in other words, lie not in Afghanistan’s
mountains or even in Saudi Arabia but in Egypt.
On the face of it this seems absurd. Egypt, after all,
is the very model of moderate Islam, a tourist
destination, a place of belly-dancing, the treasures
of Tutankhamun, the Pyramids and Nile cruises.
It is home to 87 million courteous and cultured Arabs
proud of their history and hospitality. Once
British-ruled (like Palestine and Jordan), Egypt still
prides itself on its cosmopolitan outlook (the green
lawns of the Cairo Sporting Club, once the domain of
the British colonial elite, still dominate Zamalek
island in the centre of Cairo).
Its political stability is personified by President
Hosni Mubarak, the bluff, thickset former air-force
pilot who has ruled Egypt since the assassination of
President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and who together with
King Abdullah of Jordan is a symbol of order and
reason in the turbulent world of the Middle East.
But beneath this surface swirl the torrents of Islamic
fundamentalism, which burst out now and then in
attacks on Western tourists by groups such as al-Gamaa
al-Islamiya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Mubarak has survived as long as he has by suppressing
them — for all his apparent tolerance — with
unswerving ruthlessness. It was Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, after all, which succeeded in murdering Sadat
by dressing its killers in Egyptian army uniforms so
they could infiltrate a military parade.
As they passed the presidential podium they turned
their weapons on the man who had “betrayed Islam” by
daring to make peace with Israel in 1979.
What few realised at the time — though we certainly
know now — was that the man behind the murder, indeed
the man behind Egyptian Islamic Jihad itself, was
Zawahiri. He was arrested in the police crackdown
which followed, but only on a technical charge of
illegal possession of weapons (a pistol). What has
happened is that in the years since this debut he has
transferred his activities to the global stage,
conceiving the idea of a worldwide network of Islamic
terrorists who would “bring America to its knees”.
“He is the ideologue of Islamic terror, but also its
organiser,” one diplomat in Cairo said.
If the roots of Osama bin Laden’s pathological hatred
of America lie in his desire to see US forces expelled
from the Gulf, there can be little doubt that the
source of Zawahiri’s obsession lies in Egypt.
Mubarak has largely kept the lid on unrest, and there
have been few overt signs of terrorism inside Egypt
itself since an attack on tourists at Luxor in 1997.
But if Egyptian Islamic terrorism has been
successfully exported by Zawahiri, counter-terrorism
experts warn, it could equally well be “re-imported”,
especially if there are street protests in Egypt
against US and British actions in Afghanistan. Islamic
Jihad, though dormant, is still a force to be reckoned
with in the poverty-stricken breeding grounds of
militancy in Egypt.
It was from Zawahiri’s old university at Cairo where
at least one of the suicide pilots in the September 11
attacks was recruited. Mohammed Atta, the hijack
leader with the piercing eyes, was a member of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad and one of Zawahiri’s
hand-picked men.
Like so many of the modern breed of terrorist,
Zawahiri did not come from a poor background. On the
contrary, he was born in 1951 to a well-off
middle-class family with a strong professional as well
as religious background. His grandfather was Grand
Imam at Al-Azhar University (which still stands next
to the mosque of the same name), the foremost seat of
learning for the Sunni branch of Islam.
A great uncle was the first Secretary-General of the
Arab League, while Zawahiri’s father was a professor
of pharmacology who died six years ago.
The young Zawahiri graduated in 1974 from the medical
faculty at Cairo University, where his father taught
and he appeared destined for a comfortable career as a
paediatrician.
What stopped him was his fascination with radical
politics.
From his teenage years he was intoxicated by the
fervour of the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan
Al-Moslemoon), the prototype of all Islamic militant
organations. This was founded in 1928 with the aim of
“purging” Egypt of “foreigners” which in reality meant
the British.
At the age of 15 he was arrested for membership of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned in post-colonial
Egypt — and still is — just as it had been under
British rule.
But Zawahiri was critical of the Muslim Brotherhood’s
shortcomings, castigating its failure to overthrow
Egypt’s secular and “corrupt” regime in a book called
The Bitter Harvest. By the late 1970s, according to
Janes Intelligence Review, he had taken over Islamic
Jihad as a more likely veh for an Islamic revolution.
It was at this point, it seems that Zawahiri’s
audacity and capacity to “think the unthinkable” came
to the fore, with the plot to murder Sadat.
Medicine was forgotten: mission and megolamania had
taken over.
After serving three years in prison in the wake of the
Sadat assassination, he was released and left Egypt
for Saudi Arabia and then Pakistan, joining the
thousands of “Afghan Arabs” who flocked to Peshawar to
help the Afghan resistance to fight the Russians after
the Soviet invasion of 1979 — one of many, in fact,
who after forcing the Russians out turned on the
“other superpower” even though the US had covertly
helped them in their anti-Soviet campaign. Zawahari
soon became adept at using false passports (another
feature of the September 11 plot), masquerading at
various times as an Arab with Swiss, French or Dutch
citizenship. He got to know his enemy at first hand by
living in Western Europe and the US.
The substantial funds he raised for Islamic charities
were in fact used to finance one of his first “global”
attacks, the suicide bombing of the Egyptian Embassy
in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1995, in which 17
people died.
It should have been picked up as a warning of things
to come — the use of fanatics prepared to die, the
targeting of two countries at once, Egypt and Pakistan
— but was not.
Nor was the crucial move three years later, when
Zawahiri teamed up with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan
in February 1998, going on to create a broad grouping
of Islamic terrorists under the umbrella of the
International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders —
a name which sounds fanciful to Western ears but has
resonance in the Arab world. They also formed al-Qaeda
as their core “military network”.
Left to himself, counter-terrorism experts say, Osama
bin Laden might have confined himself to a “local”
campaign to rid the Gulf of US forces or to topple the
Saudi monarchy. It was Zawahiri who in 1998 had the
“apocalyptic vision” to weld disparate Islamic
terrorist groups into a force able to take on the
mighty United States and once again to “think the
unthinkable” — in this case the use of suicide pilots
to crash into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon,
and perhaps the use of biological and chemical warfare
in US cities.
When terrorists bombed the US Embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in August 1998, six months after the fateful
bin Laden-Zawahiri merger, and President Clinton
launched cruise missile attacks on al-Qaeda’s training
camps in Afghanistan, it was Zawahiri who responded by
declaring: “The war has started. Now the Americans
should wait for our answer.”
It was he, intelligence analysts now believe, who
crafted the February 1998 “fatwa” issued by himself
and Osama bin Laden ordering Muslims to kill Americans
— including civilians — anywhere in the world, adding:
“. . . with God’s help we call on every Muslim who
wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to
kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever
and whenever they find it.”
When a video of Osama bin Laden was released a year
ago after the suicide bombing of the USS Cole at Aden,
it was again Zawahiri who took centre stage, declaring
on camera: “Enough of words — it is time to take
action against this iniquitous and faithless force
(the US) which has sent its troops all over Egypt,
Yemen and Saudi Arabia”.
In the latest video footage, Zawahiri is seen placing
deliberate and repeated emphasis on the “sufferings of
our Palestinian brothers”, a clear attempt to stoke up
anti-Israeli sentiment on “the Arab street”. Egyptian
officials say they have been “trying for years” to
warn that terrorism rooted in the Middle East, and
particularly in Egypt, would eventually strike at the
West on its own soil. Zawahiri, they say, has been
sentenced to death in absentia in the Egyptian courts,
and is on Interpol’s “most wanted” list, yet has never
been tracked down.
Nobody can know for sure what other audacious schemes
he has up his sleeve, but few in Cairo doubt that his
aim is not only to humble the West but also — and
crucially — to impose an Islamic state in his native
Egypt, succeeding where the Muslim Brotherhood failed
in his youth. Asked a few years ago if he will ever
return to Egypt and abandon his struggle, the doctor
smiled and said: “I will be back only as a conqueror.
I don’t accept going back in return for giving up my
idea of jihad.“
The Zawahiri dossier
1951 Ayman Zawahiri was born into a well-off,
respectable Egyptian family. His grandfather was an
influential academic at Al-Azhar University, and his
father a respected professor of pharmacology.
1960s Zawahiri became involved with militant Islamic
groups, especially The Muslim Brotherhood, dedicated
to expelling foreigners; aged 15, he was arrested for
his membership.
1970s Graduated in 1974 and began a career as a
paediatrician.
1978 As leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement,
he was involved in the plot to murder President Anwar
Sadat.
1981 After Sadat’s assassination, Zawahiri was
imprisoned for three years on a minor firearms charge.
1984 Zawahiri left Egypt to join the Mujahidin in
fighting the Russians. During this campaign he met
Osama bin Laden.
1998 Zawahiri and bin Laden planned the bombings of US
embassies in East Africa, under their umbrella
organisation The International Front for Fighting Jews
and Crusaders.
2001 Zawahiri’s daughter marries bin Laden’s son. He
is now bin Laden’s friend, confidant and personal
physician. |
