Word: zawahiri
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Then came the attacks of Sept. 11. In the view of many experts on terrorism, it was al-Zawahiri as much as bin Laden who launched them. Placid looking, almost avuncular--especially for a man who has been sentenced to death in absentia by the Egyptians--al-Zawahiri, 50, is by choice a less visible symbol of terror than bin Laden. Three years ago, at a small press conference in the Afghan city of Khost, bin Laden announced the formation of the World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, an umbrella group of radicals from across...
...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...
While there, he was tortured by the usual means: he was shocked, beaten and hung upside down. After his release in 1984, al-Zawahiri spent a year back at his Maadi clinic, but for Islamic radicals, the climate in Egypt had become too hot. Offered a job at a hospital in the Saudi port of Jidda, al-Zawahiri successfully sued Egyptian authorities who attempted to prevent him from leaving the country. It may have been in Jidda that he first met bin Laden. Within a year, he was working in Peshawar, Pakistan, giving medical care to bin Laden's anti...