Ayman al-Zawahiri replaced Osama bin Laden as leader of al-Qaeda. after many years as a key strategist of the organization. The fact that he was not seen as “charismatic” and competition from rival Islamic State militants reduced his ability to inspire large-scale attacks against Western targets.

71-year-old Zawahiri died in an American drone strike, as US President Joe Biden said live on television last night. US officials said the attack took place on Sunday in the Afghan capital Kabul.

In the years since bin Laden’s death in 2011, U.S. airstrikes have killed Zawahiri’s second-in-commands, crippling the veteran Egyptian fighter’s ability to coordinate the group’s international operations.

He watched as al-Qaeda was effectively sidelined by the 2011 revolutions in the Arab world, which were carried out mainly by middle-class activists and intellectuals who opposed years of authoritarian rule in their country.

Although he had a reputation for being tough and aggressive, Zawahiri was able to mobilize international armed organizations that staged massive uprisings, some of which were rooted in the unrest that resulted from the Arab Spring.

The violence has destabilized a number of countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But the days of al-Qaeda as a centralized and hierarchical network that attacked the US on September 11, 2001, are over.

Instead, the group’s armed activities have returned to their roots in local conflicts, fueled by a combination of local tensions and transnational jihadist social media networks. Zawahiri’s militant Islamist activities span decades.

The first time the international community heard his name was when he stood in a cage in a courtroom after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981.

“We have made sacrifices and are ready for more sacrifices until the victory of Islam,” shouted Zawahiri, dressed in a white kelabiya, while his co-defendants, outraged by the peace agreement that Sadat signed with Israel, shouted slogans. Zawahiri served a three-year prison sentence for illegal possession of weapons, but he was cleared of the main charges.

Trained as a surgeon – one of his nicknames was “Doctor” – Zawahiri went to Pakistan after his release from prison, where he worked in the Red Crescent, assisting Islamic mujahideen who were wounded when the Afghans fought the Soviet troops.

During this period, he met bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance. Assuming leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahiri became a leading figure in the mid-1990s campaign to overthrow the government and create a purely Islamic state.

The Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on Islamic Jihad after the assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in June 1995.

A now gray-haired, white-turbaned Zawahiri responded by ordering a 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. Two cars loaded with explosives crashed into the gates of the complex, killing 16 people.

In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahiri to death in absentia. Prior to that, he lived the spartan life of a militant who helped bin Laden create al-Qaeda.

A video shown by Al Jazeera in 2003 shows two men walking on a mountainside. Western intelligence agencies hoped that this image would reveal their hiding place.

Threats of global jihad

For years, Zawahiri was thought to be hiding along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This year, U.S. officials discovered that Zawahiri’s family – his wife, daughter and children – had taken up residence in a hideout in Kabul, and later found Zawahiri himself at the same location, a senior U.S. official said.

The same source said he was killed in a drone attack when he stepped onto the balcony of the house on Sunday morning. There were no other injuries.

Zawahiri took over al-Qaeda in 2011 after US Marines killed bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan.

Since then, he has not stopped calling for a global jihad, always with a Kalashnikov at his side in his video messages. In memory of bin Laden, Zawahiri promised to continue attacking the West, recalling bin Laden’s threat that “you will not dream of security until we experience it as a reality and until you leave Muslim lands.”

As it turns out, the rise of an even tougher Islamic State in 2014-2019 in Iraq and Syria generated just as much, if not more, interest from Western counterterrorism agencies.

Zawahiri often tried to stir up passion among Muslims by commenting online on sensitive issues such as US policy in the Middle East or Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, but his speech lacked bin Laden’s resonance.

On a practical level, Zawahiri is believed to have been involved in some of al-Qaeda’s biggest operations, helping orchestrate the 2001 attacks when al-Qaeda hijackers were used to kill some 3,000 people in the US.

He was charged with involvement in the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The FBI put out a $25 million bounty on him and he was on the Most Wanted List.

Notable family

Zawahiri did not come out of the slums of Cairo like the others who were recruited by the armed groups for a holy cause.

He was born in 1951 into a noble Cairo family and was the grandson of the great Imam of Al-Azhar, the highest spiritual center of Sunni Islam.

He grew up in the leafy Cairo suburb of Maadi and was the son of a pharmacology professor. He embraced Islamic fundamentalism at the age of 15 and was inspired by the revolutionary ideas of the Egyptian writer Said Qutb, an Islamist who was executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the regime. Zawahiri’s fellow medical students at Cairo University in the 1970s describe him as a young man full of life who went to movies, listened to music and joked with friends.

“When he got out of prison, he was a completely different person,” said a doctor who studied with Zawahiri, who declined to be named.

From a cage in a courtroom after Sadat was killed during a military parade, Zawahiri addressed the international press, saying militants had been subjected to horrific torture in prisons, including floggings and attacks by wild dogs.

“They arrested wives, mothers, fathers, sisters and sons during the trial to put psychological pressure on these innocent prisoners,” he said.

His fellow prisoners believe that these conditions further radicalized Zawahiri and led him on the path of global jihad.

Source: APE-MPE, Reuters.