Al-Zawahiri, the man running al-Qaeda from his hiding

He was the second-in-command inside al-Qaeda and an associate of Osama bin Laden, the organization's leader until 2011. He then mounted the saddle of the organization after bin Laden's killing in an American airstrike in Afghanistan in 2011.

His name is Ayman Mohamed Rabie al-Zawahiri. He was born in June 1951 and was raised in Heliopolis and Maadi, two high-class neighborhoods of Egyptian capital Cairo. His family includes highly educated people and religious figures. His father, Mohamed al-Shafie al-Zawahiri, was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University. His grandfather, Sheikh Mohamed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, was one of the scholars of al-Azhar and the head of the al-Zawahiri Sufi order.

His maternal grandfather, Abdel Wahab Azzam, was the president of Cairo University. He also worked as the head of the King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was Egypt's ambassador in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Azzam was known among his friends as the Sufi diplomat.

His mother's uncle, Abdurrahman Azzam, was the first secretary-general of the Arab League. His uncle, Mahmud al-Zawahiri, was a well-known optician.

Al-Zawahiri's name was included, along with bin Laden's, in a US list, containing a total of 22 figures, of people wanted for involvement in the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He was believed to be among the main culprits involved in the attack. The US government announced a prize of a staggering $25 million for those who could provide information that could lead to al-Zawahiri's arrest.

Al-Zawahiri graduated from the College of Medicine at Cairo University in 1974. He worked as a surgeon after graduation. He then specialized in eye surgeries and received his Master's Degree four years after his graduation. He then opened his own clinic in one of Cairo's neighborhoods.

Joining jihad and meeting bin Laden

Al-Zawahiri joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement in 1973. He formed a secret terrorist cell in 1978. On October 23, 1981, he was arrested and put in jail for involvement in the assassination of the late Egyptian leader Anwar al-Sadat. By the time of his arrest, al-Zawahiri was the emir of the movement and the person responsible for intellectual and cultural guidance in it.

Although al-Zawahiri proved his innocence in the Sadat assassination case, he was sentenced to three years in jail for possessing unlicensed firearms. He got out of prison in 1985 and then left Egypt for Saudi Arabia to work at a hospital there. Al-Zawahiri then travelled to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then to neighboring Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri met bin Laden and both of them founded a new branch of Islamic Jihad. Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri travelled to Sudan, specifically in 1993, in the company of bin Laden and others. In 1996, Taliban took over power in Afghanistan. This encouraged al-Zawahiri and bin Laden to go back to Afghanistan.

In 1998, al-Zawahiri declared the formation of the International Jihad Movement. He then signed an edict by the movement that called for killing civilians in the US. Six months later, specifically in August 1998, two simultaneous attacks were staged against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The two attacks left 223 people dead.

Operations in Egypt and Jihad's strategies

Al-Zawahiri took the helm of Jihad Movement after its reemergence in 1993. The movement staged attacks that caused the death of 1,200 Egyptians. The movement made an attempt on the life of the late prime minister Atef Sedki. It also tried to assassinate former interior minister Hassan al-Alfi. It staged a massacre in Luxor in 1997. Two years later, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia by a military court.

Al-Zawahiri divides targets into two groups, namely near targets and far targets. The near targets include the interests of what he describes as the "Crusaders" and the Jews, or more specifically the US, its allies and Israel.

He considered the bringing down of Arab regimes, including in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, among the far targets. Al-Zawahiri also called for using countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia as training grounds for Islamic extremists. Al-Zawahiri believed in the precedence of fighting the far enemy to fighting the near enemy.

In this, his strategy differs from this of Daesh which believes that the near enemy, namely Arab regimes and rulers, should be fought first.

Al-Zawahiri described in his book "Bitter Harvest" Muslim rulers who do not rule by Islamic law as "infidels". He said Muslims are under a religious obligation to revolt against these rulers and put observant rulers in their stead. He also described democracy as an "irreligious" concept.

Escape and survival

Nobody knows the exact whereabouts of al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda. He succeeded in escaping arrest since October 2001 by hiding in mountainous areas on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In this, he got support from tribesmen sympathetic with him.

Al-Zawahiri was believed to have stayed in Bulgaria, Denmark and Switzerland. He sometimes used a fabricated passport to travel to the Balkans, Austria, Yemen, Iran, Iran and the Philippines.

According to reports released in December 1996, al-Zawahiri was jailed in Russia for six months after trying to enter Dagestan on the way to Chechnya without a valid visa. He mentioned in an article then that the Russian authorities had failed in understanding the Arab written in files on his personal computer. This was why they could not recognize him.

Al-Zawahiri survived an airstrike that was planned by the CIA on January 13, 2006 and left 18 of his companions in the Pakistani village of Damadola dead.

Although al-Zawahiri always criticizes Islamist movements that call for peaceful change, he praised what came to be known as the "Arab Spring", especially in a footage that was released on June 27, 2011. This footage was released a short time after he became the al-Qaeda leader. He also praised the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and even called for holy war in Syria.

Position towards Daesh

Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the head of al-Nusra Front in Syria, was in Iraq when he suggested jihad in Syria during a meeting with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of al-Qaeda organization in Iraq. This opened the door for the creation of al-Nusra Front as a branch of al-Qaeda in Syria.          

However, in April 2013, al-Baghdadi surprised everybody by declaring the front as a branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Al-Zawahiri considered this a type of mutiny. A short time later, al-Julani broke ranks with al-Baghdadi.

Al-Zawahiri addresses his organization members everywhere in the world by releasing an audio every now and then. This was why Daesh members tended to describe him as the emir in hiding.

Al-Zawahiri wrote a number of books, including "Horsemen Under the Flag of the Prophet", "The Bitter Harvest … Muslim Brotherhood in 60 Years", "Loyalty and Disobedience", "Copied Faith and Unfulfilled Aspirations", "The Black Book", and "The Story of Muslims' Torture Under Hosni Mubarak".