Ayman Al-Zawahiri: attention turns to the other prime suspect
By JIR contributor Ed Blanche
Osama bin Laden is not the only target of George W Bush’s war on global terrorism. The Saudi renegade’s reputed deputy, Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, a lifelong Egyptian radical who many believe is the real brains behind the loose-knit network of Islamic militants, is also a prime suspect. It may be that the USA would find it prudent to go after al-Zawahiri first if it wants to eliminate the enemy it has identified. Indeed, the genesis of what the USA thinks it is coming to grips with may well lie more in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Zawahiri, now 50, was indicted along with Bin Laden by a federal grand jury in New York in 1999 for the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam in August 1998 and has been named as a prime suspect in the 11 September suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
On 25 September, Interpol issued an arrest warrant for him at the request of the Egyptian police, saying he was ‘considered to have masterminded several terrorist operations in Egypt’ as well as the 19 November 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, in which 17 people were killed. Al-Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian military court that year for his activities with al-Jihad, one of the deadliest of Egypt’s Islamic organisations.
While Bin Laden has the charisma and the funds that built the Al-Qaeda (The Base) network of Islamic fundamentalists, mainly from the men who followed him during the fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, al-Zawahiri is widely seen by counterterrorism and Islamic specialists as the intellect and ideological driving force behind the organisation.
According to Arab analysts, al-Zawahiri was instrumental in forging the coalition of al-Jihad (or the wing of it he now controls after its fragmentation by Egyptian security authorities several years ago), Bin Laden’s forces, two Pakistani groups and another from Bangladesh in February 1998 with the purpose of waging war on the USA. The hundreds of al-Jihad members — estimates range as high as 1,000, about one-third of Bin Laden’s force in Afghanistan — with al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan formed a hard core of seasoned militants around which the coalition, the International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders, has been built.
Mohammed Atta, the 33-year-old Hamburg-educated architect who the USA believes was at the controls of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 when it was the first to punch into the World Trade Center on 11 September, was one of at least two of the 19 hijackers who struck on that day believed to have been members of al-Jihad.
The Egyptian influence is extensive. Sobhi al-Sitta, an Egyptian Islamist also known as Abu Hafas al-Masri, is the commander of the front’s military arm — known as the Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Sites, which claimed responsibility for the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. He succeeded another Egyptian, Ali al-Rashidi, who drowned in Lake Victoria, Uganda, in 1995 two years after he had been dispatched to Africa to recruit for Bin Laden. It was the cadres he organised there who carried out the bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam. One of al-Sitta’s daughters married Bin Laden’s son Mohammed in January 2001. A videotape of the celebrations in Kandahar, broadcast by Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite television station, showed Bin Laden sitting with al-Sitta and al-Zawahiri. "Al-Zawahiri’s experience is much wider than even Bin Laden’s," according to Dia’a Rashwan, a leading expert on Islamic militants in Egypt. "His name has come up in virtually every case involving Muslim groups since the 1970s. He’s the chief ideologue in the Bin Laden group. Both he and Bin Laden have combat experience, but it’s Ayman who has the intellectual edge."
Al-Zawahiri has been a central figure in the conflict waged by Islamic zealots in Egypt since the 1970s, fighting alongside the main Islamic group, al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, with the aim of establishing an Islamic state.
Indeed, al-Zawahiri has been active since 1966, when as a boy of 15, he was arrested for membership of al-Ilkwan al-Muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic movement, committed to purging Egyptian society of foreign influences, particularly the British, was founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna. Later outlawed, it became the catalyst for most of the militant Muslim organisations that sprang up across the Arab world.
Al-Zawahiri was born on 9 June 1951 in Cairo. His father, a pharmacology professor at Cairo University’s medical school, died in 1995. Ayman graduated from the same school in 1974 and later obtained a master’s degree in surgery. His paternal grandfather, Rabia’a al-Zawahiri, was the Grand Imam at the al-Azhar institute, the highest religious authority for the Sunni branch of Islam and mainstream Islam’s paramount seat of learning, early in the last century. His great-uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
Al-Zawahiri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known of which is The Bitter Harvest, a critical assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood. He worked as a paediatrician, but abandoned his practice to follow a path of violent opposition to the secular Cairo government and by the late 1970s he had taken over Islamic Jihad. On 6 October 1981, al-Jihad activists, disguised as soldiers, assassinated President Anwar Sadat at a military parade outside Cairo to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Ramadan War against Israel. Sadat was murdered because he had made peace with Israel in 1979.
Al-Zawahiri was arrested along with hundreds of other Islamic militants in a nationwide dragnet. The authorities were unable to prove he was directly involved in the assassination plot, but he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for possessing weapons. He was released in 1984 and two years later left Egypt, going first to Saudi Arabia, travelling from there to Peshawar, Pakistan, the gateway for Islamic militants who poured into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets after they invaded in December 1979.
The Egyptian government, whose insistence for many years that Islamic terrorism had become global fell on deaf ears, informed Western intelligence services several years ago that al-Zawahiri travelled with French and Swiss passports in the name of Amin Othman. He is also understood to have a Dutch passport in the name of Sami Mahmoud el-Hifnawi in the early 1990s when he apparently travelled extensively in Western Europe, living at various times in Switzerland and Denmark. Al- Jihad members testified during the 1999 trial in Egypt that he had entered the USA in 1995 using the alias Dr Abdel Moez and while there raised funds used to finance the attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. According to London’s Guardian newspaper, the US House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee on immigration was told by a counterterrorism expert in January 2000 that al-Zawahiri was one of several Islamic militants who had been granted green card status by the US Immigration Service. Al-Zawahiri seems to have had vastly more experience in clandestine operations than Bin Laden.
Ahmed Salama Mabruk, a senior al-Jihad figure among the 107 (63 in absentia) on trial for ‘using terrorism to… undermine state institutions’, said at that time that al-Zawahiri was in Afghanistan, but had been missing for six months after being arrested by the Taliban. "I am convinced that al-Zawahiri was abducted by the Central Intelligence Agency," he said. Although the CIA would have dearly loved to have got their hands on the Egyptian fugitive, he was in fact residing with Bin Laden at the Tora Bora military base in eastern Afghanistan.
According to Arab analysts, al-Zawahiri, after re-establishing al-Jihad in Afghanistan from where he controlled its activities in Egypt by cadres of ‘Arab Afghans’ (Arabs who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan), decided to widen its operational horizons to target the USA and move the focus of the Islamists’ war against the Cairo government away from domestic attacks into the international arena. Evidence of this strategy includes a car bombing in Croatia in September 1995 after prominent Egyptian Islamic activist Taalat Qassem was arrested there and, according to Egyptian dissidents, shipped back to Cairo; the assassination in Geneva in November 1995 of an Egyptian diplomat believed to be an intelligence officer tasked with hunting down Islamic militants; and the bombing of the embassy in Islamabad, a key base for Egyptian intelligence operations against people like al-Zawahiri.
Whether it was al-Zawahiri who influenced Bin Laden in February 1998 when the Islamic alliance was formed in Afghanistan, or the other way round, is a matter of conjecture. But from their union grew an apocalyptic vision that in many ways resonates more of al-Zawahiri’s modus vivendi than Bin Laden’s. Other al-Jihad leaders disagreed with al-Zawahiri’s alliance with Bin Laden, fearing it would incur the wrath of the world’s superpower — as indeed now seems to be case. They broke away from al-Zawahiri, although they and elements of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya remain in Afghanistan.
After the Americans unleashed 70 or more Tomahawk cruise missiles against Bin Laden’s camps following the East Africa bombings, al-Zawahiri telephoned a Pakistani reporter and declared: "The war has started. The Americans should wait for an answer … Tell the Americans that we are not afraid of the bombardment, threats and acts of aggression. We suffered and survived Soviet bombings for 10 years in Afghanistan, and we are ready for more sacrifice." |
