The elusive Egyptian doctor might be hiding in a fortified cave or on the run from American bombs and forces in Afghanistan. He could be mingling among Westerners in Europe under an assumed name and in disguise, or among his native Egyptians sipping coffee and tea.
Osama bin Laden may be the public face of global Islamic terrorism, but Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon being hunted around the world, is its architect.
As the investigation proceeds into the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks in the United States, al-Zawahiri is emerging as a figure considered to be as powerful as–if not more powerful than–bin Laden, Western intelligence sources say.
With another top bin Laden deputy, Mohammed Atef, confirmed dead on Saturday, al-Zawahiri’s leadership becomes even more crucial, intelligence authorities say. Capturing or eliminating bin Laden probably would do little to halt Al Qaeda’s terrorist activities if al-Zawahiri remains firmly at the helm, they say.
“I really think he is the most dangerous figure,” said Yonah Alexander, director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington. “He was tested in the field. He was tested in prison. He is a fugitive. He comes with credentials that bin Laden doesn’t have.”
Before American air strikes sent them fleeing, al-Zawahiri, 50, often was pictured at bin Laden’s side, a portrait of a trusted lieutenant and elder adviser. Outside the limelight, however, al-Zawahiri is the brain trust and chief of daily operations in Al Qaeda, say Egyptian analysts who have followed his violent career.
Al-Zawahiri has surfaced publicly once since the U.S. bombings in Afghanistan began, sitting with an assault rifle to his right while he was videotaped reading an anti-American statement. The recording was transmitted by satellite to a pan-Arab television station last weekend.
It is not known when or where the tape was made, but al-Zawahiri appeared to be countering a Nov. 7 speech by President Bush.
“Let America describe us as [terrorists] as it wants, the truth remains,” he said in clipped sentences while hinting at more terrorist acts against America. “Its campaign will be a failure, God willing.”
Al-Zawahiri’s role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remains unclear. Officially, international intelligence authorities rank him as “the second most-wanted man in the world” after bin Laden.
But bin Laden takes many of his cues from al-Zawahiri, according to intelligence experts inside and outside the Arab world.
In the Muslim war camps of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, al-Zawahiri indoctrinated the younger bin Laden into deeper Muslim militancy, eventually steered him away from Arab targets and toward destroying American interests, and taught him how to build a terrorist network, they say.
“No one has more influence on bin Laden than Zawahiri,” said Mohamed Salah, the Islamic affairs correspondent and expert on Egyptian terrorism for the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper, based in London. “The way bin Laden thinks and acts comes directly from being close to Zawahiri.”
Led model for Al Qaeda
Leading the resurrection of a dormant, violent Islamic cause in Egypt from exile abroad, al-Zawahiri directed a terrorist hub in Egypt in the 1990s that became a model for the formation of Al Qaeda, according to intelligence authorities and reports of testimonies from dozens of militants brought to trial in the late 1990s in Cairo.
Using a false identity, al-Zawahiri gave orders, raised money and approved plans to try to destabilize Egypt’s moderate government. From Denmark and Switzerland, he directed a network of some 1,200 radicals–many of whom had fought with al-Zawahiri in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. For much of the 1990s, the radicals attacked police and politicians, plotted assassinations and planted bombs, Egyptian authorities say.
Al-Zawahiri leaned heavily on help from his connections who were allies in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, a Saudi exile who settled in Sudan, provided arms and money transported by camels to Egypt on a remote trail known as the “40-day road,” according to military court reports that are usually not made public in Egypt.
Radical Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who taught in central Egypt and still has hundreds of devoted followers there, issued spiritual battle cries from America, including from a New York jail cell while on trial for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, say some former colleagues in Egypt.
Several dozen transplanted Egyptians in Europe and the United States served as financial transfer agents, sent coded messages by telephone and e-mail, acted as go-betweens in weapons deals, harbored radicals who learned to fly at U.S. flight schools and were couriers for the movement, according to reports of confessions in Egyptian courts.
Al-Zawahiri oversaw it all and even traveled to the U.S. to raise funds, a few suspects reportedly testified.
In the 1990s, their moniker was al-Jihad. In a massive and violent crackdown, Egyptian forces crushed al-Jihad by decade’s end, arresting thousands and forcing hundreds of others to flee Egypt.
Today, dozens of those who escaped abroad are the backbone of Al Qaeda, or The Base, Egyptian authorities say. Al-Zawahiri, learning from al-Jihad’s successes and failures in Egypt, has adopted similar techniques in directing Al Qaeda’s campaign against the U.S.
“If you want to understand how Al Qaeda runs today, look at how Zawahiri led al-Jihad,” said a senior Egyptian official in Cairo, where al-Zawahiri is listed as Egypt’s most wanted fugitive.
Said to be in hiding
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Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, considered almost inseparable before Sept. 11, reportedly are hiding in different camps in Afghanistan or elsewhere and are likely on the run, recent intelligence reports suggest. His face nearly hidden by a scraggly beard, al-Zawahiri appeared with bin Laden on pan-Arab television as the U.S. offensive against Afghanistan began in early October.
“I could barely recognize him,” said Fouad Allam, a former high-ranking Egyptian anti-terrorism official who interrogated al-Zawahiri in the 1980s. “He was far more angry and far different than I remember. He was always of a part of a holy cause. Now he seems to be the holy cause.”
Al-Zawahiri was born in suburban Giza, near the pyramids, to a wealthy Muslim family with ties to Egypt’s elite. His father was a pharmacology professor at Cairo University. His family has strong ties to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old institution of conservative Muslim thought.
Al-Zawahiri grew up in a country split between staunch Muslims who resisted the increasingly secular government and those who welcomed Westernization.
As a teenager, al-Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed group pushing for a pan-Arab Muslim state. Its members were arrested, beaten and sometimes executed. Egyptian security officials began their first files on him when he was 16.
In 1981, Egyptian radicals disguised as soldiers assassinated President Anwar Sadat, who resisted running Egypt under Islamic law and allowed the violent crackdown on Muslim militants.
Al-Zawahiri, while on the edge of the movement, was one of thousands of Muslim radicals rounded up. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison on a minor weapons possession charge. In the Citadel, a dank prison that dates to medieval times, he met fellow radical Montasser al-Zayat in an adjoining cell. They became friends, sharing ideals and plotting to oust Egypt’s secular leadership.
“He had a quiet charisma,” al-Zayat said. “He believed strongly in his ideals.”
After prison, al-Zayat became a lawyer, defending Muslim radicals. Al-Zawahiri opened a medical clinic in the suburb of Maadi that today is the center of Cairo’s American expatriate life.
The Muslim movement beckoned al-Zawahiri. He left Egypt in 1985 to join Arabs flocking to the Afghan front to join the war against the Soviet Union. In 1986, after a brief return to Cairo, al-Zawahiri left Egypt and reportedly has not been back since. His family, which shuns interviews, says only that they have had no contact with him since 1986.
Al-Zawahiri roamed the conservative Muslim world, crystallizing his radicalism in Saudi Arabia, where he became enamored of the teachings of Rahman, who left central Egypt to teach in the strict Saudi religious environment. Rahman arrived in the United States in July 1990 to spread his brand of Muslim fundamentalism.
Much in common
In 1989, after returning to Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri met bin Laden. They had much in common, including wealthy backgrounds and a zeal for the fundamentalist Muslim cause.
Al-Zawahiri, by then convinced that the only way to Muslim victory was through violent overthrow of moderate Arab regimes, became a mentor to bin Laden, al-Zayat said.
“He became bin Laden’s teacher, shaping his mind toward the idea” of holy war, said al-Zayat, who a decade later defended his friend in a military court in Cairo that sentenced al-Zawahiri to death in absentia for terrorist acts inside Egypt. “Bin Laden transformed then, and that was the basis for Al Qaeda.”
When the Afghan war ended, al-Zawahiri became a nomad. He used aliases and sometimes adopted disguises. He used fake passports to settle alternately in Pakistan, Sudan and Europe. Reports surfaced that he was fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
He also was in California raising funds under the pretense of soliciting for Muslim charities, according to Egyptian court testimony.
Mainly, though, Egyptian authorities say he was running a resurrected al-Jihad from abroad.
Al-Jihad took responsibility for failed assassination attempts against Egypt’s Interior Minister Hassan Alfi in August 1993 and Prime Minister Atef Sedki in November 1993. It claimed to be behind the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Then, after militant attacks killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians in November 1997 in Luxor, al-Jihad imploded. Even longtime true believers, like al-Zayat, were disgusted by the attacks on foreigners and renounced violence.
Still, al-Zawahiri had global designs for al-Jihad. He set his sights on American targets, which he figured were far more vulnerable.
In 1999, al-Zawahiri signed al-Jihad’s name to a regional Muslim declaration forming the “International Islamic Front to Combat Jews and Crusaders,” a group organized by bin Laden.
Group dies
Al-Zawahiri’s remaining followers in Egypt saw his ploy as self-promotion and dangerous to the well-being of militant Muslims in Egypt.
They formally severed ties with him, and al-Jihad died in Egypt as its last remaining members not in jail went underground.
Meanwhile, al-Zawahiri, back in Afghanistan, summoned a band of more than two dozen al-Jihad foot soldiers from Egypt. In the last few years, the bin Laden network, led by al-Zawahiri, has been linked to the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and September’s terrorist attacks, U.S. investigators say.
Americans are mistaken to think “that if bin Laden goes, then the entire Al Qaeda collapses and there is no charismatic leader,” said Alexander, the U.S. terrorism expert.
Al-Zawahiri “proved himself over the decades,” he said. “We’re going to hear more from him in the coming months.”