Jihadist Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian special forces officer based in Iran, is the leader of al-Qaeda since the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri in the summer of 2022 in a US strike in Afghanistan, the State Department said Wednesday.

“Our assessment is consistent with the UN assessment, meaning (our assessment) the new de facto leader of al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, is based in Iran,” said US State Department spokesman Ned Price, when asked about the United Nations report, which saw the light yesterday on Tuesday.

This report states (pp. 3, 6) that, in the “prevailing” opinion of member states, Saif al-Adel is “now the de facto leader of al-Qaeda” and represents the “continuity” within the ranks of the terrorist organization. .

However, according to the same text, the organization did not officially declare him “emir” for two reasons.

First, this is a sore point for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which does not want to admit that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by the Americans in a house in Kabul in the summer of 2022.

Secondly, Saif al-Adel lives in Iran, a country with a predominantly Shiite population, and al-Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni organization.

“The location of its base raises questions about al-Qaeda’s ambition to reassert its leadership in the global (i.e. jihadist) movement in the face of challenges posed by IS,” the UN text says.

Saif al-Aidel, now 60, was once a lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian special forces. It is considered a form of al-Qaeda’s old guard.

He reportedly expanded the organization’s operational capabilities and trained some of the hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to a project to combat extremism.

He has been in Iran since 2002 or 2003, and although he was initially under strict surveillance, he was later able to travel to Pakistan, according to Ali Soufan, a former FBI investigator.

He is “one of the most professional and experienced soldiers of the global jihadist movement, and his body has signs of battle,” Mr. Soufan emphasized in a 2021 article in CTC magazine.

Source: RES-IPE