one telling, it looks like, the story of a wedding
So this one? No occurrence of the string "wedding" but some marrying mentioned in the article.
newyorker.com
September 16, 2002
Zawahiri's Whereabouts
By Lawrence Wright
The Al Qaeda top lieutenant is rumored to be alive.
Issue of 2002-09-16
Posted 2002-09-13
While the American intelligence community continues to debate whether Al Qaeda's leaders are dead or alive, the latest reports concerning Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, have taken an unexpected turn. Zawahiri, an Egyptian-born surgeon who presided over Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that merged with bin Laden's Al Qaeda in June, 2001, has been reported on at least two occasions to have been killed. Now, though, there are new reports that he is not only alive but remarried; according to a London-based observer of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, he recently married two widows of a deceased comrade in a ceremony at an undisclosed location.
Hany al-Sibai, the director of the al-Maqrizi Center for Historical Studies and a man who the F.B.I. alleges is a former member of Islamic Jihad (he denies this allegation), told the London Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat that Zawahiri married the two women after the death of his own wife, Azza Nowair, and two of his six children in an American bombing raid on a fortified cave complex near Jalalabad last winter. Sibai said that Zawahiri's son and one of his daughters were killed in the raid, but that at least two daughters escaped. Sibai also said that he had received confirmed information from several sources that Zawahiri was in good health.
A follow-up article in Al-Hayat related that the two women Zawahiri reportedly married, Amima Ahmad Hassan and Sayida Halawa, had been the wives of Tariq Anwar, one of Zawahiri's top lieutenants, who died in the American bombing raids last fall. Halawa had previously been married to Ahmed al-Najjar, a prominent leader of Islamic Jihad, who was executed in Egypt in 1999. According to Sibai, the women escaped from Kandahar before it fell to troops of the Northern Alliance. Three months after Zawahiri sent for them, the women joined and married him, and are currently living with him and other Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan. A source at the F.B.I. told me that he found the report plausible, adding that the practice of marrying the widows of fallen comrades is a form of social welfare among Muslims.
The announcement in Al-Hayat seems to have been timed to appear on the first anniversary of September 11th. It comes at a time when remaining members of Al Qaeda have been making a number of overtures to the press to suggest that its leaders are still alive. Two members of the organization, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, reportedly met with a journalist for Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language network, and claimed that Osama bin Laden was alive and watching the news on television. Another broadcast carried what sounded like bin Laden's voice reciting the names of the nineteen hijackers, although there was no way of knowing exactly when it had been recorded. And, even if Zawahiri is alive, he has been known in the past to employ tactics of misinformation. Zawahiri was last seen in a video broadcast on Al Jazeera in April; although it purported to be new footage, American intelligence officials believe that the video was actually shot last December. |
