An Egyptian doctor and fighter, he was a leader in the Egyptian Jihad group, then he allied with Osama bin Laden to establish Al-Qaeda and succeeded him in its leadership.
He was at the top of the US administration's wanted list as one of the heads of "global terrorism", until the White House announced his death in an air strike on the evening of Monday, August 2, 2022.
Birth and upbringing
Ayman Muhammad Rabie Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri (relative to the al-Zawahiri tribe) was born on June 19, 1951 in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to an ancient Egyptian family, well-known in the fields of forensic science, literature, politics and medicine.
His grandfather, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zawahiri, assumed the sheikhdom of Al-Azhar Mosque during the period 1930-1935, and his maternal grandfather, Dr. Abdel-Wahab Azzam, was a professor of oriental literature and dean of the Faculty of Arts, and held several prestigious positions. He was the president of Cairo University, and Egypt’s ambassador to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
His maternal uncle, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, was the first Secretary-General of the League of Arab States.
As for Ayman's father (Dr. Muhammad Rabie Al-Zawahiri), he was a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, and is considered one of the most famous dermatologists and venerealists in Egypt and the world (died in 1995), and his uncle Mahmoud Al-Zawahiri is a specialist in ophthalmology and is world-famous.
Education and Training
Al-Zawahiri received his initial education in the schools of Heliopolis and Maadi (two of the prestigious neighborhoods in Cairo), and joined the Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, where he graduated in 1974 with a grade of very good, then obtained a master’s degree in general surgery in 1978, and he is fluent in the English language.
In the following year, he married a graduate of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University and had four daughters and one son.
Intellectual Orientation
Al-Zawahiri belonged from his childhood to the Islamic movement and fluctuated between several factions of it. 1998 Founding and leadership of the "Al-Qaeda Organization" in its global form.
Practical Experience
After graduating, Al-Zawahiri opened a private medical clinic in the Maadi area of Cairo, and lived through the period of political détente that Sadat began his reign in the early seventies, and the Islamic movement at that time was remarkably active in universities until the leaders of Egyptian university students at that period became symbols of Islamic work later.
Al-Zawahiri's first appearance on the media level was after the assassination of former Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat on October 6, 1981, in which al-Zawahiri was accused of being involved in the "Jihad Group" to which al-Zawahiri belonged.
In that case, he was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing an unlicensed weapon, so he was tortured in prison. After his release in 1985, he traveled to several countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, then settled in Afghanistan, where he engaged in the "Afghan jihad" against the invasion. Soviet Union during the eighties of the twentieth century.
He participated in 1985 as a surgeon in the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Hospital in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, to treat the wounded as a result of the war. Then, in the later stages of the war, he moved to the front lines of the fighting to practice his work in treating the wounded in field hospitals inside Afghanistan, and there he met the leader of Al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden, who later became his ally.
Al-Jihad Group - of which Al-Zawahiri is one of its most prominent leaders - was accused of carrying out violent military operations inside Egypt, including the attempt to assassinate former Prime Minister Atef Sedky, which made the security services deal with its members very violently.
Ayman al-Zawahiri refused to return to Egypt - after the end of the "Afghan Jihad" - for fear of being sentenced by the military court set up by the Egyptian government in 1992 to consider the case of what it called "returnees from Afghanistan", in which some of those belonging to the "Jihad Group" were sentenced "To death.
It is believed that al-Zawahiri moved in 1997 to the Afghan city of Jalalabad to join Osama bin Laden, who was residing there, and supervised the joining of "jihadist groups", including his own, to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, forming what they called the "global Islamic front for jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders."
The front's first statement - issued in early 1998 - included an unprecedented "religious fatwa" allowing the killing of civilians in the United States and accusing them of working to establish a Jewish crusader alliance to fight Islam, and six months after this announcement (August 1998) two simultaneous attacks destroyed the two American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 223 people.
Then came the Egyptian military court, which in 1999 examined another case called "returnees from Albania", and sentenced al-Zawahiri to death in absentia, to make the issue of his return to Egypt unlikely.
Washington placed Al-Zawahiri's name second - after bin Laden - on the list of wanted men after the Nairobi and Dar al-Salaam bombings because he signed the fatwa calling for the shedding of American blood. It considered him the right-hand man of Al-Qaeda and its leader, Bin Laden.
His first media appearance after the attacks was through a video tape in which he appeared alongside bin Laden and Suleiman Abu Ghaith (the official spokesman for Al-Qaeda) broadcast by Al-Jazeera after the start of the US military strikes on Afghanistan (October 2001), in which he called for jihad against America to get out of the Arab region and stop supporting Israel so that Palestine does not turn into a “new Andalusia.”
Al-Zawahiri believes - as he said in his book The Bitter Harvest - that “the rulers who rule over Muslim countries by other than what God has revealed and by man-made laws are apostate infidels. It is forbidden to follow their whims.”
He believes that the armed resistance of these governments is "jihad for the sake of God." He criticizes other Islamic groups that adopt peaceful methods of change, and calls on them to "striving hard to repel the criminal crusade that targets our faith, our land and our wealth."
In a statement broadcast by Al-Jazeera on March 6, 2006, Al-Zawahiri specified the nature of this "response to the crusade," saying that it called for "working on four interrelated fronts:
The first front: inflicting losses on the Crusader West, especially in its economic entity, with blows from which it continues to bleed for years, and the strikes in New York, Madrid, Washington and London are a good example of that.
In this regard, we must deprive the Crusader West of stealing Muslim oil, which is being depleted in the largest theft known to human history.
The second front: the expulsion of the Crusader Zionist enemy from the countries of Islam, especially from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
And the invading forces of Islam must pay a heavy price for this invasion and leave our lands defeated and their economies collapse, so that we can establish on our land the state of the Muslim Caliphate, God willing.
The third front: the front of action to change the corrupt and corrupt regimes that sold our dignity and pride to the Crusader West and surrendered to Israel, and the people of opinion, influence and the elites of the influential nation must take the initiative to work to change these corrupt and corrupt regimes that have no hope of reforming our conditions as long as they remain on our chests.
The Fourth Front: The People’s Advocacy Action Front. Every preacher, scholar, writer, opinion holder and thinker of the Muslim nation has to play his role in educating the nation about the danger it faces, and incite it to return to Islam and work on the arbitration of its Sharia and caution against every approach, even if he wears an Islamic dress that calls for the rejection of governance legitimacy or arbitration for other methods and principles.”
Al-Zawahiri - who managed to escape from pursuit and is believed to be in the mountainous region on the Afghan-Pakistani border - assumed the "emirate" of al-Qaeda worldwide after the killing of bin Laden at the hands of US forces on May 2, 2011, according to a statement issued by the organization on June 16, 2011.
On June 8, 2011, al-Zawahiri issued a statement threatening the Americans that Osama bin Laden would continue to "terrify" the United States even from "in his grave" because it was facing a "jihadi revolt that would challenge it wherever it was."
The US authorities have allocated a reward of $25 million to anyone who provides information that leads to his arrest, and pledged to kill him as they killed bin Laden.
And from time to time, Al-Zawahiri comes out to the media scene - in video or recorded recordings or through written statements - to comment on the events taking place in different regions of the Islamic world, and define the position of his organization, which has become geographically expanding between the mountains of Afghanistan in the east and the African desert in the west, and what Between Somalia in the south and the plains of the Levant in the north, with an increasing presence in Muslim communities in Western countries.
His last media appearance was on September 4, 2014, when he announced - through a video recording - the establishment of a branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, "that will work to restore Islamic rule to the region that colonialism divided into several countries, and revive the Islamic caliphate in it."
Al-Zawahiri has authored several books
in which he outlined his experience and intellectual vision, including: "Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet", "Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood in Sixty Years", "Loyalty and Disavowal: A Transferred Doctrine and a Lost Reality", and "The Black Book: A Story of Torture" Muslims in the era of Hosni Mubarak.