Over a decade ago, when Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound and killed the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al Zawahiri assumed the reigns of the al Qaeda terrorist network.
Al Zawahiri, who has long been shrouded in mystery and previously had served as al Qaeda’s No. 2, was reported to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden is expected to deliver remarks on the “successful counterterrorism operation” at 7:30 p.m. EST.
BIDEN TO ADDRESS NATION AFTER ‘SUCCESSFUL COUNTERTERRORISM OPERATION’
Many foreign policy experts remained perplexed as to how al Zawahiri managed to avoid being captured or killed by the United States or allied forces for so long. Some had theorized that al Zawahiri was already dead or in poor health. Others suspected that he was hiding in Pakistan like bin Laden, making it difficult to reach him. Authorities had placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
Last year, after Taliban forces toppled the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, video surfaced that appeared to show the al Qaeda leader alive and commemorating the carnage his terrorist group inflicted on 9/11, when roughly 3,000 people were killed. The timing of the video came weeks after the Taliban returned to power.
Speculation began to brew that the Taliban takeover could make Afghanistan more suitable for al Zawahiri and al Qaeda. Twenty years prior, the Taliban had been accused of harboring al Qaeda, which served as part of the justification for the U.S. invasion following 9/11.
Al Zawahiri was born in Egypt in 1951 to a well-off family. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist, as a teenager and began plotting to overthrow Egypt’s government in favor of establishing a Muslim theocracy, according to the Washington Post. During his youthful machinations, he cultivated a band of followers that eventually became known as the Jamaat al Jihad.
In 1981, he was arrested after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and claimed to have been tortured in prison, according to the book Ayman al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him. The arrest was made due to his ties to al Jihad. Eventually, he was released because authorities lacked evidence that he was part of the conspiracy to kill Sadat, per a post from the Brookings Institution.
Following his release, al Zawahiri is believed to have engaged in multiple terrorist schemes across the world, including in Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan. During the 1980s, he made multiple trips to Afghanistan, where he would eventually collaborate with bin Laden, according to the Department of Defense. The two collaborated on efforts to subvert the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
By the 1990s, al Zawahiri’s al Jihad merged with al Qaeda, which was bigger in size and had more financial resources. In 1998, al Zawahiri was indicted for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings that killed hundreds in several East African cities. Those attacks propelled al Zawahiri into the international spotlight alongside bin Laden.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Three years later, the two were credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks. In a letter to the U.S., bin Laden outlined several motivations for the attack, including U.S. support of Israel, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions on Iraq, and more.
If al Zawahiri has indeed been killed, the U.S. and allied forces have succeeded in killing or capturing almost all of the high-profile al Qaeda members who operated in the time surrounding 9/11.
