The death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, who was killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan, represents an important shift in the course of global jihadist movements.
Al-Zawahiri is not considered the last historical leader of al-Qaeda, which was inaugurated nearly three decades ago, but he is also the man responsible for the most dangerous transformations in the organization’s path and its transition from “local jihad” to “global jihad.”
Which contributed to transforming Al-Qaeda into a global organization that attracts jihadists from all over the world.
Al-Zawahiri, an eye surgeon, traces his lineage back to an ancient family. His grandfather, Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, was the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque in the first quarter of the 20th century, and one of his uncles was the first Secretary-General of the League of Arab States;
He is Abd al-Rahman Azzam, and his maternal grandfather is Abd al-Wahhab Azzam, professor of oriental literature and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University in the thirties of the last century. .
After Al-Zawahiri graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in the mid-seventies, Egypt was witnessing the so-called Islamic awakening and the emergence of Islamic currents again after the years of repression under Nasser, and perhaps this encouraged Al-Zawahiri to engage in organizational activity.
Al-Zawahiri was born in Cairo on June 19, 1951, and grew up in the arms of that family full of eminent clerics and politicians. The relationship of these transformations to the nature of the political and security conditions that the country was going through in the fifties and sixties.
Al-Zawahiri says in his book “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet” that the jihadist movement in Egypt “began its current path after the mid-sixties when the Nasserite regime launched its famous campaign in 1965 against the Muslim Brotherhood, and put 17,000 in prisons, and executed Sayyid Qutb and two of his companions, may God have mercy on them, The authorities thought that by doing so, they had eliminated the Islamic movement in Egypt irreversibly, but God willing, these events will be the spark for the beginning of the jihadist movement in Egypt against the government.
Therefore, al-Zawahiri and other young Islamists celebrated the fall of the Nasser regime after the 1967 war, and saw that this was an important reason for the spread of the jihadist movement, as he put it.
It is clear that Al-Zawahiri was greatly influenced by Sayyid Qutb's ideas about Sharia and governance, as well as by the torture and execution that happened to him after that in 1965. Rather, he sees him as a supreme example of sacrifice for the sake of his ideas and principles.
Therefore, it is not possible to ignore the role of tyranny and oppression inside Egyptian prisons during the sixties in the transformation of many young Islamists towards extremist jihadist ideas, which we see repeated in varying degrees with Mubarak’s rule and currently under the current regime that exercises unlimited repression with Islamists;
He pushed some of them to join violent currents and enter into a confrontation with the state and the Egyptian security services.
When Al-Zawahiri joined the Faculty of Medicine in Egypt in the late 1960s, Egypt was living in difficult conditions after the heavy defeat against Israel in the 1967 war, which greatly affected the feelings of the Egyptian youth at that time, as they held former President Gamal Abdel Nasser with the defeat as evidence of the failure of the ideology of Arab nationalism that He followed it and preached it, so they began to search for other ideologies and ideas.
For example, Al-Zawahiri says in his well-known book “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet”: “As for the jihadist movement in Egypt, the defeat of 1967 added a dangerous factor that affected its growing trajectory. The symbol of oppression and tyranny, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose followers tried to They portray him to the people as the immortal and indomitable leader.”
After Al-Zawahiri graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in the mid-seventies, Egypt was witnessing the so-called Islamic awakening and the emergence of Islamic currents again after the years of repression during the era of Abdel Nasser. It is the organization that was involved in the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Therefore, al-Zawahiri was arrested, imprisoned and tried among hundreds brought to trial in connection with the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and he spent 3 years in prison for illegal possession of weapons, but the judiciary acquitted him of the major accusations.
Al-Zawahiri’s travel to Saudi Arabia and from there to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the mid-1980s was a turning point in his jihadist career. At that time, he met the former leader of the organization and his friend Osama bin Laden, and together they decided to go to Sudan and establish al-Qaeda there in the early nineties, and then announced the beginning of a new phase of global jihad. And they launched their well-known campaign, the "Global Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders" in 1998, and only a few months passed until Al-Qaeda, led by bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, began targeting US interests in Africa and later in the Arabian Peninsula.
As for the major operation of the organization, it was represented in the attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 civilians in the United States, and as a result, the administration of former US President George W. Bush launched his war on Afghanistan and Iraq.
In all of these events, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri became influential figures and symbols within the global jihadism, and the video “tapes” that the two people issued regarding the organization’s operations were a source of inspiration for many jihadists, and therefore the organization’s branches spread in more than one region in the world, from Asia to the East To Morocco in the west, through the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, the Levant, Yemen and East Africa.
Al-Zawahiri was the right-hand man of bin Laden, and one of the main theoreticians of Al-Qaeda. He wrote many books, most notably “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet” in which he recounts parts of his history and the transformations he went through since he was a young man in Egypt until his leadership of the organization and the operations that he carried out. As well as his position on other groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, which he strongly criticizes as a result of its peaceful nature and what he sees as appeasement of the regime in Egypt.
Al-Zawahiri also clearly links the oppression and targeting of the Islamic movement with the support Arab governments receive from America, as well as their support for Israel on the other hand.
According to al-Zawahiri, the assassination of President Sadat was due to his alliance with America and Israel. He says in the same book, "The killing of Sadat was a strong blow to the American-Israeli scheme in the region." Therefore, al-Zawahiri defended the necessity of moving from fighting the near enemy: the authoritarian Arab regimes, to Attacking the Far Enemy: Western governments, especially the United States.
What is remarkable about the matter is Al-Zawahiri’s criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood because of its peaceful opposition to the regime in Egypt. He wrote a book on the subject called “The Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood in Sixty Years,” in which he strongly attacks the Muslim Brotherhood and its acceptance of the democratic process and elections.
Certainly, the killing of al-Zawahiri is a major blow to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the world.
However, it is more a symbolic development than an operational one, as the influence of al-Qaeda as a jihadist movement has faded over the past decade due to the decline in its combat and organizational capabilities on the one hand, and the emergence of other groups of jihadist extremists on the other hand, notably the Islamic State (ISIS) ) who currently dominates the jihadist scene in the world.
With the death of al-Zawahiri, an important stage in the development of jihadist ideas ends, in which the struggle against Arab regimes and Western governments has been transformed into an ideology in its own right under the slogan of global jihad, a stage in which al-Zawahiri played a fundamental role, whether through his influential role in al-Qaeda or through his writings. and its videos and video messages, but at the same time it opens the door wide to the possibilities of the emergence of jihadist organizations more radical than Al-Qaeda in the foreseeable future.