In early May 2011, Pete Souza, the official photographer for the White House at the time, took a picture from inside the "Crisis Hall", one of the most secure halls inside the US Presidential Palace, as US President Barack Obama appeared watching a murder. Osama bin Laden, former al-Qaeda leader.
Obama was not alone in that room, but sat with a number of American officials, most notably "Joe Biden", Vice President at the time.
After 11 years, Biden will return to the same room, this time as president, to discuss a delicate operation to target "Ayman al-Zawahiri", Osama bin Laden's successor and former adviser.
3:30 pm EDT – @POTUS watches situation on ground in Abbottabad live in Situation Room#UBLRaid pic.twitter.com/59KPF7eUTr
— CIA (@CIA) May 1, 2016
The time was 6:18 on the morning of Sunday, July 31, when Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, went out to the balcony of his house in the Sherbour neighborhood, the most prestigious neighborhood of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in order to breathe the air and enjoy the beautiful view in the most prestigious neighborhoods of Kabul .
Sharpur, the British-designed neighborhood that has become a stronghold of foreign communities, embassies and luxury homes, has long seen explosions from time to time by Taliban fighters who have targeted diplomats and foreigners.
However, the strike this time came from the United States, not from the Taliban, and it targeted only the old Egyptian doctor in his last appearance from his balcony, as a drone targeted him with a missile, ending the life of the second most famous face of al-Qaeda and one of the most prominent people accused by the United States of planning the events of September 11 famous.
The operation was not exceptional in nature, as it has been carried out hundreds of times since the arrival of "George Bush" Jr. to power in the United States and his declaration of the "war on terror".
When information is collected and verified and its accuracy is ensured, the process automatically enters into force politically and militarily.
Biden, the current president, followed up on planning for the operation in regular May-June meetings between his team and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and William Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center.
According to what was later announced by the US intelligence, Biden demanded in a meeting on July 25 that the chances of killing any civilians in the operation should be reduced, and then the US intelligence suggested using a drone that used a modified version of the “Hellfire” guided missile “R9X” ( The R9X, a silent killer missile, does not explode but dismembers the target, which Biden agreed to.
In a statement about the operation, the White House announced the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as a result of this precise operation, as US intelligence worked to gather as many information as possible about its target in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises, as happened a year ago when one of the Kabul areas was targeted by plane. It is believed that it sought to kill Al-Zawahiri as well, but the operation was a complete failure and caused the deaths of ten civilians.
This accuracy in targeting al-Zawahiri without causing other casualties appeared as a source of pride for the American president, who praised the accuracy of the new operation and its complete achievement of its objectives without any collateral losses.
Dr. Ayman.. Medicine is a gateway to jihad
So, the career of one of the most famous Arab jihadists ended with an American march. He is the man who started as a serious and talented academic doctor for a prestigious family in Egypt. His father, "Mohammed Rabie Al-Zawahiri" was a senior professor of dermatology at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University, and his grandfather worked for his mother, "Abdul-Wahhab Azzam." He is the former president of Cairo University and the founder of King Saud University in Saudi Arabia after that. He is the brother of Abd al-Rahman Azzam, the first Secretary-General of the League of Arab States.
On his father’s side, his grandfather “Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri” was the sheikh of Al-Azhar between 1927-1929.
Ayman lived the first period of his life in the upscale neighborhood of Maadi in Cairo, which was teeming with the elite of Egyptian society, including Beshwat, ministers, officers and foreigners for decades, especially during the fifties in which Ayman was born and witnessed the radical transformation from the monarchy to the republic.
The Egyptian doctor’s clash with the jihadist arena in Egypt and the region began during the Afghan-Soviet war. Al-Zawahiri visited refugee centers located between Afghanistan and Pakistan to heal the wounds of the mujahideen who defended the country against the communist tide, which the United States also feared, and then allied with the jihadists at the time before turning on them. After the fall of the Soviet Union.
At the beginning of the eighties, Al-Zawahiri was preoccupied with his hostility to the Egyptian regime, as he formed a revolutionary Islamic movement at the time called the "Jihad Organization", and targeted a number of officials in Egypt. Therefore, it was not surprising that Al-Zawahiri's name was mentioned with those who were tried on charges of involvement in the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat. .
Al-Zawahiri stands behind bars in an Egyptian court during his 1982 trial. (Getty Images)
After his release from prison, where he spent three years, Al-Zawahiri intensified his visits to Afghanistan, and discovered many commonalities with the jihadists there. During one of his visits, he met an attractive Saudi young man named "Osama bin Laden".
Bin Laden was suffering from many chronic diseases at that time, so Al-Zawahiri became his personal physician.
And soon the relationship between the two men went beyond medical treatment, until Al-Zawahiri became a first advisor to the al-Qaeda leader, and participated in planning the attacks of Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and then the September 11 attacks that targeted New York City and turned US policies in the region and the world upside down.
Although al-Zawahiri did not have the same charisma or charisma as bin Laden, he did not gain his importance within al-Qaeda only because of his proximity to bin Laden, but also because of his important intellectual presence within the organization. Bin Laden succeeds at the helm of al-Qaeda after the latter was killed in May 2011. However, al-Zawahiri's role was not limited to theorizing, as he strived - according to some American sources - to develop al-Qaeda's military arsenal through the development of biological weapons, but the time constraints imposed by him The security pursuits after the September events prevented the man from achieving his goal.
Al-Zawahiri inherited a difficult task, and perhaps he was not sufficiently prepared for it, as he had difficulty restoring the luster of the first jihadist organization in the world, and in some cases he was unable to control it completely, as happened with some leaders who defected from it, such as the Jordanian "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." , the spiritual father of the Islamic State, which was considered an enemy and competitor to al-Qaeda, and "Abu Muhammad al-Jolani", who cut off his organization's "Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham" relationship with al-Qaeda after he was the emir of Jabhat al-Nusra, the arm of al-Qaeda in Syria.
Osama bin Laden (right) with Ayman al-Zawahiri 1998 (European)
The emergence of al-Qaeda, then, eased, and it remained more modest than what al-Zawahiri wished, especially after the wave of the Arab Spring, which scattered politics in the region, despite the greed of bin Laden's heir to reposition after the fall of several Arab regimes that al-Qaeda accused of collaborating with Washington.
Al-Zawahiri followed a new philosophy in managing al-Qaeda’s resources with a system closer to start-up companies. He tried to form branches of the organization to run itself, as happened in Syria, Iraq, Libya and West Africa, and this is the most important and most active project that al-Zawahiri relied on, more than the presence in Afghanistan itself.
However, this strategy proved to be a failure after al-Qaeda’s branches swelled at the expense of the mother organization. It met the inevitable fate of its counterparts from the military and paramilitary organizations, and the Islamic ones in particular, with increasing dissent and mutual accusations, and even blasphemy and fighting among them in some cases.
Al-Zawahiri left al-Qaeda in an unenviable position, as it is in a more difficult situation than it was after the death of "Abdullah Azzam", as the star of its Egyptian leader diminished and his appearance decreased in the last two years.
With the advent of 2020, Al-Zawahiri continued to distance himself little by little from the picture, and his appearance became very little, except for a rare public appearance from time to time, as happened in September 2021, when the man came out in a video recording in which he spoke for about an hour about a number of current issues.
This recording appeared as evidence from which Al-Zawahiri wanted to deny the rumors that spoke about his death, especially when he discussed the current events at the time.
However, Al-Zawahiri did not talk about the memory of the September events, nor about the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021. Rather, he continued talking, making promises and threatening to the enemies of Al-Qaeda everywhere in the world. Then he left, leaving the central administration of the organization in a real crisis, and perhaps the branches will not be affected. Much because it enjoys independence in decision-making, which al-Zawahiri himself was keen on, despite the heavy price incurred by his organization as a result.
Al-Qaeda after Al-Zawahiri...Leadership for the Egyptians?
The leaders of the two organizations assassinated by the United States (from the right): Bin Laden, Al-Baghdadi, Al-Zarqawi, and Al-Zawahiri (Al-Jazeera + agencies)
In an article for the website "The Atlantic", the American writer "Graeme Wood" said that the process of rejuvenating al-Qaeda's leadership (that is, to be from the youth and the new generations) is an inevitable issue, stressing that the death of al-Zawahiri will not affect the organization, because a large segment of jihadist youth has stopped For a long time, the leader of Al-Qaeda has been viewed as a weighty Islamic leadership.
Moreover, some parties have recently underestimated his words after he loosened his grip, and defections increased, and some Al-Qaeda school graduates tried to establish other organizations that differ ideologically from the parent organization to keep pace with regional and global changes.
After Al-Zawahiri's death, a natural question surfaced: "Who will succeed bin Laden's successor?"
On the surface, it seems very complicated, as Al-Qaeda is a different organization from the Islamic State, for example, where the latter has a clear policy of change for its leaders, who are overthrown, which happened on four previous occasions, the first of which was in 2006 after the death of the founder of the organization. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
As for Al-Qaeda, it has changed its leadership only once since 1988. The task will never be easy, especially in light of the conflict between the wings that is taking place within the organization and which makes the issue of succession perhaps more difficult than the international tracking of Al-Qaeda leaders.
Disagreements emerged between different wings within al-Qaeda after documents were leaked indicating al-Zawahiri’s desire to “Egyptianize” the organization. Abu Omar al-Masry, Abd al-Rahman al-Mughrabi, and Abu Ziyad al-Iraqi;
However, in the event of Al-Zawahiri’s capture, illness or death, it is necessary to pledge allegiance to the following leaders in the prescribed order, and they are “Abu al-Khair al-Masri,” “Abu Muhammad al-Masri,” “Saif al-Adl al-Masry,” and “Abu Basir al-Wuhayshi” (the Yemeni). ).
Saif Al-Adl Al-Masry (networking sites)
This pledge actually set an important condition for the pledge of allegiance to Al-Zawahiri's successor, which is that the person be present in Khurasan or one of the "active" branches of Al-Qaeda, and in case that is not possible, the next candidate is passed, and so on.
But this Egyptian-majority list quickly shrank to one name. Most expectations indicate that the caliphate belongs to him, Saif al-Adl, a former officer in the Egyptian army, for the simple reason that the other three, Abu Muhammad, Abu al-Khair and al-Wuhayshi, were already killed previously.
Saif al-Adl was not ahead of the list, with Abu al-Khair serving as al-Zawahiri's first deputy, while al-Wuhayshi was the only candidate within the geographical areas specified by the agreement.
But after al-Wuhayshi was killed, in an American drone strike in 2015, al-Qaeda was forced to admit the kidnapping of the Iranian diplomat, "Noor Ahmad Nakbakht", who disappeared in 2013, a confession that al-Qaeda aimed at conducting an exchange deal with Tehran in which al-Qaeda leaders would be released from Iran's prisons and then from the country.
The deal was concluded and five leaders were released from prison, including the three Egyptian candidates to succeed Al-Zawahiri.
However, the whereabouts of Saif al-Adl, the only survivor on the list, is still unknown, as no one can be certain that he left Iran in the recent period and fulfilled the condition of being in a geographical area where al-Qaeda is active.
Abu Baseer Al-Wuhayshi (networking sites)
This will not be the only obstacle that may prevent Saif al-Adl from reaching the head of the organization, as death can reach him, as it reached most of the leaders who signed the aforementioned pledge, and the absence of al-Zawahiri may push the anti-Egyptian wings to change the document or completely bypass it. And there is a valid argument here that all of them were killed while Saif al-Adl is most likely under house arrest in Tehran, which means that none of the names that al-Zawahiri wrote with his own hands are ready to lead the organization today, in the view of the opposing wing.
Only the coming days will answer the question “Who will succeed Al-Zawahiri?” It is expected that the name of the new leader will be announced next September at a time when the organization is facing an unprecedented existential challenge.
Either it wakes up to retake the initiative in the arena of global jihad, or it will continue to recede and be forgotten in favor of new youth organizations, headed by ISIS branches and cells in various parts of the Islamic world.