"The man to really fear is Ayman Zawahiri"
thetimes.co.uk
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. |
