The death of Al Qaeda leader in Qatar

Rita Katz, the director of SITE Intelligence Group tweeted about “rumors that are yet to be verified regarding the death of Al Qaida’s leader in Qatar” about a month ago.

However, Qatari Government officials still haven’t confirmed this news. There are a number of unconfirmed reports circulating that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who served as the leader of al-Qaeda since the death of Usamah Bin Laden, passed away of illness about a month ago but al-Qaeda group and the Qatar government haven’t confirmed this news so far.

The fact that there are no statements released about the reality of this news from the al-Qaeda group and nor the Qatar government and also that the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri is not clear, is a very complex issue to analyze. Considering the history of Qatar’s support for the al-Qaeda group, one can say: Qatar is liquidating Ayman al-Zawahiri in order to preserve the disclosure of the many secrets between Qatar and Al-Qaeda. It would be surprising if Qatar were covering-up his death if he really is dead.

It is very typical of both Qatar and the al-Qaeda group to not publish news and confirmations about the death of its leaders in an appropriate manner.

For instance, the group never confirmed the death of Hamza bin Laden. When Adam Gadahn (AKA Azzam the American) died in 2015, it took the group five months to acknowledge his death. Even the death of Osama bin Laden, if it wasn’t for the US, his death might have been kept hidden for a long period of time by the Qatar government and al-Qaeda.

This issue is important for Afghanistan and it’s fight with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. If his death is true then, this is good news for Afghanistan, especially with the intra-Afghan peace talks moving forward. Because, Al-Zawahiri also had close ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan, one of his most significant strategic victories was that he had managed to preserve al Qaida's relationship with the Afghan Taliban, which has survived despite enormous international and U.S. military pressure to cut ties.

 The United Nations recently reported that in recent months, Zawahiri personally negotiated with senior Afghan Taliban leadership to obtain assurances of continued support. These talks appear to have been successful; despite commitments to the U.S. government as part of the February 2020 Doha peace deal, the Afghan Taliban has neither publicly renounced al Qaida nor taken any apparent action to limit the group's operations in Afghanistan.

Senior Taliban sources repeatedly claimed that state funding from Qatari authorities started funding them in 2006. The same applies to al-Qaeda group. Although it is still uncertain in comparison to the level reached by funding in later years, at this point external funding (Qatari and Pakistani) consisted (according to sources in the Taliban’s financial structure) of several tens of millions of dollars, allowing for the insurgency to expand inside Afghanistan. Thus, in 2006, the size of the Taliban insurgency groups started growing at a much bigger scale than the past. These donors of the Taliban group were only sponsoring the Taliban groups in Afghanistan and they refused to support other groups like Hizb-I Islami, which belongs to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. One of the only ways that other groups like Hizb-I Islami could access the funding was to join the Taliban and only then they could have access to funding. It seems like a smart way to expand the group of fundamentalists through which later Qatar maybe make it easier to have ground in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the Al-Qaeda group will be facing many serious challenges moving forward once the death of their leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is confirmed. For one, there's the question of who will lead al Qaida after Zawahiri's gone? Much like the generation before it, the next AQ leader’s successor will face the dilemma of balancing what many in al Qaida believe is the imperative of transnational terrorism in the West and the costs of U.S. and U.S.-allied counterterrorism efforts.

 Many leaders likely perceive a major attack as proving al Qaida's imprimatur as the dominant jihadi movement, in service of bin Laden's grand strategy of baiting and bleeding the United States in challenging confrontations.