President Joe Biden is on a roll, after months of struggle. To the recent domestic achievements (a great environmental plan or the strategic challenge to China) he now adds a feat with international repercussions: having rid the world of the most wanted terrorist. An achievement similar to that of another Democrat, Barack Obama, with the execution of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad (Pakistan) on May 1, 2011. The correlation between the two co-religionists comes to signify, symbolically, the point end of the organization that on September 11, 2001 attacked the heart of America. The resonance of the end of the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri, 71, provides Biden with the epic that his mandate, until recently in low hours, needed.
“Al Zawahiri is not charismatic. He did not get involved in the previous Afghan war [contra los soviéticos] and I think he has a lot of detractors within the organization.” These are the words of US Security Adviser John Brennan one day after the fall of Bin Laden, about the considered number two of Al Qaeda. The succession was in the air and Al Zawahiri, an opaque but strong leader, did not seem to have the tricks to take command. But against all odds, and after a brief interregnum of the Egyptian Saif al Adel, himself a veteran combatant in the Afghan war against the Soviets, the Al Qaeda leadership refuted Brennan’s words and elected Abi Mohamed Ayman al-Adel as the new chief of chiefs. Zawahiri.
Al Zawahiri was born in 1951 in the Giza neighborhood of Cairo, into a wealthy family linked to medicine. As the writer Lawrence Wright recounts in the gripping book The High Tower: Al Qaeda and the Origins of 9/11, the young man followed the family tradition and practiced during the eighties in a clinic in the wealthy Cairo neighborhood of Maadi. Al Zawahiri made his profession compatible with the study of Islam -his grandfather had been an imam of the prestigious Al Azhar mosque, a radiating focus of political Islamism-, thanks to the early relationship he established with the Muslim Brotherhood, an illegal Islamist organization in Egypt since 1954 .
Because if Al Qaeda had a Saudi stamp, thanks to Bin Laden’s family fortune and his populist pull, its ideological DNA was entirely Egyptian: the outpost of radical Islamism that would soon take over part of the Maghreb (Algeria, for example) ; the doctrinal aristocracy of the new jihad. Al Zawahiri soon assumed command of the Islamic Jihad, founded in 1973 and responsible for the assassination of Anwar el Sadat in 1981 due to the peace agreement that the Egyptian leader had signed with Israel.
The intellectual authorship of the attack and a stay in prison for three years were the best letters of introduction to the enlightened Saudi with whom he made contact in the mid-1980s in Peshawar (Pakistan). Al Zawahiri had enrolled in the Red Crescent, a tactical withdrawal, half estrangement half exile, to flee from the harassment of the security forces in his country, which subjugated the Islamist movement. Peshawar was the rearguard of the fight against the Soviet invader in Afghanistan – encouraged by the US and Saudi Arabia – and where the doctor took care of the wounded combatants. The exchange between the two was an exercise in osmosis: the Egyptian became an intellectual and ideological reference, infusing doctrine into the Saudi, then leader of a newly created organization called Al Qaeda. In 1988 both agree to merge their groups and a decade later, declare “holy war against Jews and Crusaders.” Only three years later, his men hit the symbol of Western power: the Twin Towers.
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Earlier, in 1993, an alleged assassination attempt on then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led to Al Zawahiri’s expulsion from the country. From there he traveled to Sudan, where Bin Laden had taken refuge after being deprived of his nationality due to his destabilizing activities, dangerous even for the rigorous Riyadh court. With the seizure of power by the Afghan Taliban, and the withdrawal of the Soviets, the “communist atheists” ceased to be the enemies in favor of the godless West. From Africa, the two allies began the countdown to the New York tragedy: the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which caused 150 deaths, and which were the first example of a double suicide attack inspired by Al Zawahiri as modus operandi of the organization. After 9/11, Interpol ordered his search and capture as head of the hydra Al Qaeda. Washington offered a $25 million reward.
For this reason, despite Brennan’s reluctance, the man who was Bin Laden’s right-hand man replaced him at the head of Al Qaeda, that terror international that immediately opened regional franchises, such as the Arab Maghreb (AQMI) or the Shabab ( boys) from Somalia: a way to multiply the radius of action with little investment. Over time, some of these subsidiaries outgrew the lethal impact of the parent company.
Among the merits that the leadership of Al Qaeda earned him, stand out his co-responsibility in the 9/11 attacks, the idea of the double suicide attacks that became a hallmark of the organization and a treaty in which he summarizes his strategy in “causing as many casualties as possible” to the United States. His hatred of the Americans was increased by the death of his wife, a son and two daughters in the retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan in late 2001. Since then, and despite remaining, like Bin Laden, in hiding, he became in the spokesman for Al Qaeda, with a clear mission: “Fight against the infidels who attack the lands of Islam, with the United States and its lackey Israel at the head.” The CIA came close to finishing him off in 2003 and 2004 in the tribal areas of Pakistan, before the rise of the even bloodier Islamic State sent Al Qaeda into the limbo of evil, but in one of those twists of fate, The lace has not corresponded to whoever declared Al Qaeda’s “war on terror” in his day, the Republican and more combative George W. Bush, but to a careless Democratic leader, until a few days ago in need of medals. Like the one that puts the fall of Al Zawahiri at his command.
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