Egyptian surgeon seen to succeed Bin Laden

ISLAMABAD—Egyptian-born doctor and surgeon Ayman al-Zawahri is al-Qaida’s second-in-command expected to succeed Osama bin Laden.

Zawahri has been the brains behind Bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages.

In the latest monitored by the SITE Intelligence Group last month, he urged Muslims to fight North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and American forces in Libya.

Born into an upper-class family of scholars and doctors in an upscale Cairo neighborhood, the cerebral Egyptian in his late 50s is second after Bin Laden on the FBI “most wanted terrorists” list.

Both Bin laden and Zawahri eluded capture when US-led forces toppled Afghanistan’s Taliban government in late 2001 after al-Qaida’s Sept. 11 attacks on US cities.

Bespectacled, with grey hair and a grey beard, Zawahri won prominence in November 2008 when he attacked then US President-elect Obama as a “house Negro,” a racially charged term used by 1960s black American Muslim leader Malcolm X to describe black slaves loyal to white masters.

In a subsequent video, in September 2009, Zawahri returned to the attack on Obama, saying he was no different from his predecessor George W. Bush.

“America has come with a new deceptive face…It plants the same dagger as Bush and his predecessors did. Obama has resorted to the policies of his predecessors in lying and selling illusions,” said Zawahri.

Like Bin Laden, Zawahri has long been thought to be hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border.

‘Brain to the body’

Analysts have described Zawahri as al-Qaida’s chief organizer and Bin Laden’s closest mentor. “Ayman is for Bin Laden like the brain to the body,” said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo.

In a video after the Sept. 11 attacks, Zawahri called them a “great victory” achieved “thanks to God.”

He has not always been so ebullient.

As US-led forces drove out the Taliban in 2001, Afghan sources described him flying into a fury at the nonchalance of Taliban fighters playing badminton behind the front lines while US bombs rained from the skies.

Born in 1951, Zawahri was the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world. He graduated from Egypt’s most prestigious medical school in 1974 and did a second degree in surgery.

By then he was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.

Sentenced to death

When the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1973, he joined. When members posed as soldiers and assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, he was among 301 people arrested. He went on trial but was cleared. He did, though, spend three years in jail for having an unlicensed pistol.

Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, he was a key figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state there, in which more than 1,200 Egyptians died.

In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia.

Zawahri’s wife, Azza, and three daughters were reported killed in a bombing strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban, in early December 2001.

Reuters