Ayman al-Zawahiri was the ideologue of the Al Qaeda network, whose leadership he took over after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was one of the most prominent terrorist leaders killed in the past two decades, but his death is unlikely to have a significant impact the jihadist movement.
Al Qaeda leader killed in a CIA “precise tailored” operation in Kabul
Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed on the balcony of his home in Kabul on Sunday evening by two Hellfire missiles launched by a US drone. There were no other casualties, although al-Zawahiri's wife, his daughter and her children were still in the house at the time of the attack.
The official announcement was made only a day later by the American president, Joe Biden, who is still in isolation after being infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Al-Zawahiri was eliminated in an operation carried out by the CIA . The CIA had been aware for years of a so-called “support network” for the terrorist leader and knew that his family had moved to Kabul several months earlier. Al-Zawahiri was later identified at the same location and spotted several times on the balcony where he would be killed.
There was no way the terrorist leader could be in Kabul, especially for such a long period of time, without the Taliban knowing it, which means that they violated their commitments to the Americans that, in exchange for their withdrawal from Afghanistan, would stop collaborating with the Al-Qaeda network and protecting their commanders and militants. The American withdrawal, which ended a year ago, was described as a disaster, as the Taliban were able to take advantage of the situation and capture most of Afghanistan before the last troops were evacuated. The killing of al-Zawahiri, a year later, has also been interpreted as Biden’s revenge. The president was quick to say that he had kept his promise that terrorists would continue to be hunted in Afghanistan even if there was no need for thousands of soldiers to actually be there.
Ayman al-Zawahiri: the Egyptian jihadist involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks
In his speech on Monday, Joe Biden stressed that Ayman al-Zawahiri was involved in the organization of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Back then, nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners. Two of them hit the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the third was used as a projectile against the Pentagon building, and the fourth crashed after the passengers had tried to wrest it from the terrorists' control. Almost 3000 people were killed then, these being the worst and bloodiest terrorist attacks ever organized.
“We make it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out”, said Joe Biden, also stating that justice had been done for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama Bin Laden's deputy and the terrorist network's unofficial chief ideologue. Al-Zawahiri, a doctor by trade, from a respectable Egyptian family, had been radicalized ever since his youth: in the 70s he became a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, considered to be one of the most important ideologues of modern jihad, was also a member of the group. It was Faraj who said that the holy war - jihad - is the main religious duty of a Muslim. Abd al-Salam Faraj was executed by the Egyptian government for his involvement in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat by the Islamic Jihad.
After the assassination, Ayman al-Zawahiri was also arrested, along with hundreds of other members of the group, so he used the public trial as a springboard to gain fame. After his release, al-Zawahiri went to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he became involved in the anti-Soviet war. During that time, he started collaborating with Osama bin Laden, and his influence started growing. In 1998, bin Laden and a number of other radical leaders, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, declared jihad against the United States and its allies, and only a few months later the first major terrorist attacks were organized by Al Qaeda, which simultaneously attacked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was the beginning of an Al Qaeda campaign that would culminate in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The decline of al-Qaeda under Ayman al-Zawahiri
The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching the so-called “Global War on Terrorism”, a campaign aimed primarily at destroying al-Qaeda and killing or capturing its leaders. The first major operation of the war was the invasion of Afghanistan, used by the al Qaeda network as a base with the agreement of the Taliban, who controlled most of the country's territory. In fact, in exchange for the accommodation provided by the Taliban, al Qaeda had fought alongside them against the forces of the Northern Alliance and had assassinated, on September 9, 2001, its main leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Numerous militants and commanders of the Al Qaeda network were killed or captured, but Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri managed to escape. Bin Laden would be killed almost ten years later, in early May 2011, following an operation by the US special forces in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
Al-Zawahiri took over the leadership of the terrorist network, but it is believed that because his priority was to hide, he was not very involved in running the day-to-day operations of the terrorist network. Moreover, at the time of Bin Laden's death, Al Qaeda was already a decentralized organization, with its groups operating largely independently, the most notable examples being Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with its main bases in Yemen, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). After 2011, the al-Nusrah Front, Al Qaeda's Syrian “branch”, also gained notoriety, but it was also then that the total break with the Iraqi group occurred, renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and, later, the Islamic State.
The tensions with the Iraqi al-Qaida were already a long story and had become known as early as 2005, when an exchange of letters on ideological and tactical topics between Ayman al-Zawahiri and the AQI founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi emerged. Al-Zawhiri had criticized al-Zarqawi for his group's excessive brutality, which risked costing the jihadists the war for the Muslims’ “hearts and souls”; however, the AQI leader rejected the criticism of Al-Qaida's number two, making it clear that he was not going to listen to him. The Islamic State – a group that claimed to have stemmed from al-Zarqawi and proved even more brutal than him – started a war against Al Qaeda and its allies, including the Afghan Taliban, claiming the leadership of the entire jihadist movement. It continues to be divided today into groups that have proclaimed their allegiance to one of the two major jihadist organizations. However, the Islamic State has been stronger in the last decade.
The killing of al-Zawahiri, a PR stunt with limited impact on the global jihadist movement
Ayman al-Zawahiri was one of the world's most wanted terrorists, with a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Only Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Musab al-Zarqaw and several other terrorist leaders killed in the past twenty years have had such notoriety and impact on the global jihadist group. For the United States and the Biden administration, the killing of al-Zawahiri is certainly a PR stunt: he was the last of the major terrorists linked to the 9/11 attacks.
His death also shows, as Joe Biden noted, that no matter how long it takes, the United States will pursue and eliminate its opponents. The CIA, a secret service marked over time also by some blunders and failures, proved to be a real and formidable force, and the effectiveness of the strike, which did not cause the so-called “collateral damage” (unlike other similar moves, which resulted in the death of many civilians) is a sign of the US’s technological power that couldn’t go unnoticed at a time when Russian missiles, which Moscow claims are just as accurate, are killing thousands of civilians in Ukraine.
Beyond all that, it remains to be seen whether al-Zawahiri's death will have any notable impact on the global jihadist movement. Al Qaeda is now, just like the Islamic State, more of a brand than a coherent organization. One cannot seriously speak of centralized managements to coordinate the two large networks. Under their umbrella there are groups that have joined them rather symbolically, but are little - or not at all - coordinated from an operational point of view from the center. Al-Zawahiri will certainly have a successor, but he will lack the Egyptian’s notoriety and, anyway, he will be busier hiding, lest he himself be killed, than organizing terrorist attacks in the West.
Al-Zawahiri is the last notable exponent of a generation of jihadists who began to assert themselves by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and peaked when declaring war on the West. The jihad of the Muslim extremists does not end with the death of al-Zawahiri; but it remains to be seen whether networks like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State will ever be as dangerous as they once were.
