PROFILE of Al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri... Writer describes the politics leading to the merger, in June of 2001, of two terrorist organizations, Al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad... Although Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda, has become the public face of Islamic terrorism, the members of Islamic Jihad and its guiding figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have provided the backbone of the larger organization’s leadership. Mentions that the Zawahiri family has many physicians, including Ayman. The Zawahiri name, however, was associated above all with religion. In 1929, Rabie’s uncle Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old university in the heart of Old Cairo, which is still the center of Islamic learning in the Middle East... Tells about the anti-American influence of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb... The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. Tells about the formation of Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the late seventies... Tells about Zawahiri’s eventual involvement in the Afghan war against Soviet occupation... Describes Zawahiri’s role in Sadat’s assassination and his subsequent imprisonment... While Zawahiri was in prison, he came face to face with Egypt’s best-known Islamist, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman... Zawahiri profoundly disagreed. Zawahiri was released in 1984, a hardened radical. Mentions bin Laden’s dominant influence at the time, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam... When bin Laden first came to Peshawar, he stayed at Azzam’s guesthouse. Tells about a documentary film crew which observed bin Laden’s dependence on Zawahiri’s medical care... Bin Laden’s final break with Abdullah Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Tells about bin Laden’s movements during the Gulf War... Bin Laden felt betrayed by the American military presence in Saudi Arabia... Bin Laden moved to Sudan, and Zawahiri followed him there... Hassan al-Tourabi, a graduate of the University of London and the Sorbonne, who was instituting Sharia and trying to establish in Sudan the ideal Islamic republic that Zawahiri and bin Laden longed for in their countries. In Khartoum, Zawahiri set about reorganizing Islamic Jihad... Describes their subsequent expulsion. After a near-disasterous arrest in Russia, Zawahiri began working more closely with bin Laden in Afghanistan, and most of the Egyptian members of Islamic Jihad went on the Al Qaeda payroll. During the early nineties, Zawahiri travelled tirelessly, setting up training camps and establishing cells. Tells about the 1998 formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders, which listed jihad groups in Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, and Palestine... Zawahiri was interested in the use of biological and chemical warfare. In a memo from April of 1999, he observed that “the destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons,” and proposed that Islamic Jihad conduct research into biological and chemical agents... Al Qaeda training videos recently acquired by CNN show that poison gas had been tested on dogs... According to a source in the C.I.A., American agents came close to apprehending Zawahiri a month before September 11th, when he travelled to Yemen for medical treatments. Some intelligence officials believe he was somehow killed in an American bombing raid. No body has been found.
