One of the last times al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was on center stage was roughly 40 years ago, when the international media captured his rants from a cage behind an Egyptian courtroom.
The cameras caught him shouting about the torture he and other prisoners suffered at the tactile hands of Egyptian jailers. He started the group chanting: “We live Muslims. We are Muslims.”
Zawahiri’s prison time in Egypt not only set him up against the regime there, but marked the start of his lifelong hatred of the U also.S.
When he joined forces with Osama bin Laden eventually, he passed that enmity along, but it ended for al-Zawahiri on Sunday local amount of time in Afghanistan after an unmanned U.S drone fired two hellfire missiles at a safe house in Kabul, killing him.
President Biden noted Monday that al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s deputy during 9/11 and that he was “deeply mixed up in planning.”
“For decades he was the mastermind behind attacks against Americans,” Biden added, noting the 2000 USS Cole attack and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
Biden also detailed al-Zawahiri’s role leading al-Qaida since bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in 2011, including contacting followers in recent weeks to attack the U.S. and allies.
Bruce Hoffman, director of the guts for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown College or university, said in 2011 that while al-Zawahiri had a reputation to be prickly and dogmatic, he might emerge as an even more robust leader than bin Laden.
“Unlike bin Laden, he had the street cred at having been a dyed-in-the-wool terrorist from enough time he was an adolescent,” Hoffman said. “OK, he’s much less telegenic as bin Laden. He lacks bin Laden’s charisma. He doesn’t have bin Laden’s mellifluous voice, but he is an extremely powerful figure within the movement still.”
Bin Laden had talked about setting up a base for a broader Islamist movement as if it were a mantra. He wanted a company that didn’t need him to survive. And al-Zawahiri has kept it moving in the decade since bin Laden’s death.
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