Word: zawahiri
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...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...
Those attacks were audacious enough. But investigators now believe that al-Zawahiri also made not one but two fund-raising trips to the U.S. in the 1990s. During the second, in 1995, he was introduced to worshipers at the An-Noor mosque in Santa Clara, Calif., as Dr. Abdel Muez, a representative of the Pakistani Red Crescent, the Islamic version of the Red Cross. Al-Zawahiri collected thousands of dollars from donors who were told the money was intended to help Afghan refugees. Dr. Ali Zaki, an Egyptian-born physician who is one of the leaders of the mosque, says...
When questioned by federal agents that year, Zaki told them that he met al-Zawahiri through two men he knew casually from the mosque, Ali Mohamed and Khalid Abu-al-Dahab. Both have since confessed to Egyptian authorities that they were terrorist operatives. In 1999 Abu-al-Dahab was tried in Egypt as one of a group of men accused of involvement in the 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...
...same trial, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia. Some intelligence experts believe the failure of his terrorism campaign against the Egyptian government led him to refocus his war onto the U.S., which he hated for supporting Mubarak, the Saudi royal family and Israel. In 1996 U.S. pressure led Sudan to expel bin Laden's operation. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan, where the ferociously ascetic brand of Islam embraced by the emergent Taliban government was perfectly congenial to them...
...retrospect, it was a mistake to chase the two men out of Sudan. In the mountains and caves of Afghanistan, they were newly safe from prying eyes. In 1998 came the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, for which al-Zawahiri, like bin Laden, was later indicted in New York City. That attack also set off a U.S.-led manhunt throughout the world in which dozens of members of Al Jihad were arrested and extradited to Egypt, further crippling the organization's infrastructure. The besieged group split into two factions. One side angrily denounced al-Zawahiri for dragging...