Word: jihadism
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...vision of worldwide jihad is one that al-Zawahiri has imparted steadily to bin Laden since 1985, when they first worked together on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Back then, bin Laden, the scion of a rich Saudi family, was helping finance Arab volunteers in the Afghan war. Al-Zawahiri was working in field hospitals treating Afghan and Arab fighters. He was also, however, already the effective head of Al Jihad, the secretive Egyptian terrorist group bent on overthrowing the government of Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak. And al-Zawahiri was becoming further convinced that establishing Islamic rule throughout...
...following the calamity of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which discredited secular nationalism throughout the Arab world, many younger Arabs turned to Islamic fundamentalism. Al-Zawahiri was one. By 1979, when Egypt signed the Camp David accords with Israel, al-Zawahiri had embraced Al Jihad, a violent and highly secretive organization dedicated to establishing Islamic rule in Egypt and across the Arab world. Adopting a strict and belligerent brand of Islam, al-Zawahiri steeped himself in the absolutist beliefs of Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in 1966 for plotting against Nasser's government. Qutb's book Signposts Along the Road...
...Zawahiri's own forte then was organization, not ideology. The most secretive of Al Jihad's leaders, he became a master of underground work, recruiting militants, many of them from the Egyptian armed forces, and organizing them into clandestine cells. He left few traces of his own involvements. After Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, al-Zawahiri was tried as one of hundreds of defendants, but prosecutors were unable to charge him with any direct connection to the plot. Court testimony alleged that he met with top conspirators on the night of Sadat's killing, then again a week later...
...Afghanistan collapsed into factional fighting following the Soviet defeat in 1989, al-Zawahiri ushered back to Egypt many of the Arab veterans of the war. There they became Al Jihad operatives, dedicated to Mubarak's overthrow. Meanwhile, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden relocated to Sudan. Most of the missions that al-Zawahiri launched into Egypt, including separate attempts to assassinate the Prime Minister and a former Interior Minister, ended in failure. The successful bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan was the demented high point of the campaign. Mubarak's security forces responded with a ferocious crackdown in which hundreds...
...terrorist campaign against the Mubarak government. In a written confession presented to the court, Abu-al-Dahab said that on the U.S. trip, al-Zawahiri netted only about $2,500, which was considered a poor showing. All the same, Abu-al-Dahab also claimed to have learned from Al Jihad leaders that the money had helped to underwrite the embassy bombing in Pakistan...