http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1053/focus.htm
23 - 29 June 2011
Issue No. 1053
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Egyptian premier Jihadist
Abdel-Rahim Ali* profiles El-Zawahri, Al-Qaeda's new boss
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Ayman Mohamed Rabie El-Zawahri, known in Jihadist circles as Abul-Ezz, has been
the effective leader of the Egyptian Jihad Organisation since 1992, following
the resignation of Sayed Imam El-Sherif, or "Dr Fadl", but he was not a leader
in the Al-Qaeda organisation until February 1998.
Click to view caption
File photo: El-Zawahri (left) with the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan
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El-Zawahri's affiliation with Al-Qaeda came with a stroke of the pen. In his
capacity as a representative of the Egyptian Jihad, he along with the
representatives of six other militant Islamist organisations signed the
declaration founding the International Front to Fight Jews and Americans which
the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden proclaimed in February 1998. Apart
from El-Zawahri and Bin Laden, the other four signatories were Mounir Hamza as
secretary- general of the Society of Ulema in Pakistan, Fadl Al-Rahman Khalil
in his capacity as emir of the Ansar Movement in Pakistan, Sheikh Abdel-Salam
Mohamed Khan as emir of Al-Jihad in Bangladesh, and Rifaai Ahmed Taha, chairman
of the Egyptian Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya's Shura Council abroad.
Barely was the front formed than it began to unravel. Only days after Bin
Laden's announcement, Rifaai withdrew his signature on behalf of the Al-Gamaa
Al-Islamiya. Before the year was out, the membership had been reduced to
Al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Jihad, which became the focus of an extensive dragnet
mounted by US intelligence agencies with considerable assistance from numerous
Western and Arab intelligence agencies. The Egyptian Jihad was the hardest hit
by the manhunt. Most of its leaders were apprehended and eventually handed over
to Egypt where they were tried before military tribunals. Many were sentenced
to death in what became known as the "Returnees from Albania" case, although
there were actually returnees from Azerbaijan, South Africa and elsewhere.
At this point, which is to say in late 1999, Al-Qaeda and the Jihad decided to
merge to form Qaeda Al-Jihad, most of whose positions and statements to the
media were issued by the Bin Laden/El-Zawahri duo. A Jihadist of the stature of
Abdallah bin Mohamed Ali Bin Hussein Al-Fadel Al-Qamari, (Abul-Fadl Al-Qamari)
was the exception. In The Al-Qaeda Generation, published in 2005, the
first-in-charge of Qaeda Al-Jihad in East Africa and Somalia wrote, "Many are
puzzled by the word 'Al-Qaeda.' There's the Al-Qaeda mother organisation, there
are collaborators and there are the Afghan Arabs who took part in the Jihad in
Afghanistan. All these, today, are classed as Al-Qaeda, just as the Egyptian
Jihad led by Ayman El-Zawahri is as Al-Qaeda and Ayman El-Zawahri, himself, is
ranked as Al-Qaeda's second-in-command. Yet, I have never once taken a single
order from Sheikh Ayman El-Zawahri or anyone else. I follow the line-
of-command of Al-Qaeda mother organisation and the second-in-command in that
hierarchy is the brother Seif Al-Adl who replaced the late Sheikh Abu Hafs, the
'Commandant'. Al-Jihad and Al-Qaeda may have united ranks after the 11
September operations, but we have never taken orders from anyone but our
historic leadership."
Al-Qamari's remarks substantiate rumours of a power struggle in Al-Qaeda ranks
many years ago at a time when his illness excited speculations on his impending
death. However, they also give us a glimpse into how Al-Qaeda's first
generation regarded the hierarchy question and El-Zawahri after the Egyptian
Jihad joined ranks with Al-Qaeda in February 1998.
HE AL-QAEDA LINE-OF-COMMAND: In his discussion of Al-Qaeda's line-of- command
at the time El-Zawahri signed up, Al-Qamari states that the second-in- command
after Osama bin Laden was Abu Hafs Al-Masri (or Atef Abu Sitta). Abu Sitta had
succeeded Abu Obeida Al-Banshiri who drowned in Lake Victoria in 1996. Abu
Sitta, himself, died in the NATO raids on Tora Bora in October 2001. Below him
came Abu Islam Al-Masri followed by Mohamed Shaaban Al-Ikhwani who left Egypt
in 1987 to join Al-Qaeda, which put him in charge of operations against the
Russians in Afghanistan in Khost and Jihadval. More recently, he headed
operations in Dagestan and died in February 2010 following an armed
confrontation with Russian security forces.
Next in line came Abu Mohamed Al-Masri, the deputy to Abu Islam who left
Al-Qaeda following the 11 September attacks in order to devote himself to
proselytising work, and he was followed by Seif Al-Adl who, at the time, was
responsible for the Al-Farouq camp. On the latter, Al-Qamari writes, "He is a
paratrooper officer in the Egyptian army. He has been very hardworking and
useful in training and tactics, and developed new infantry battle methods. He
has held many responsible posts in Al-Qaeda, including security offices.
Currently he is the second-in-command in Al-Qaeda, having been promoted to that
position following the death of Abu Hafs Al-Masri. He married the daughter of
the journalist Abul-Walid Al-Masri [Mustafa Hamed, former Al-Jazeera
correspondent in Afghanistan] and has children from her."
That was the hierarchy that greeted El-Zawahri when he joined forces with
Al-Qaeda in 1998, from which point onwards he would become closer and closer to
Bin Laden and one of the organisation's top leaders. The hierarchy also
explains why, following the death of Bin Laden, Seif Al-Adl was chosen as
temporary leader until the principle of shura (consultation) could be put into
effect and a new "emir" chosen through the process of mubayaa (free swearing of
allegiance) by the members of Al-Qaeda shura council and the emirs of the
organisation's branches. But why was El-Zawahri chosen and not Seif Al-Adl?
HY EL-ZAWAHRI WAS CHOSEN: Or to be more precise, the reasons that Seif Al-Adl
was bypassed. The first reason is the now 13-year-old merger between Al-Qaeda
and the Egyptian Jihad which, as we noted above, created Qaeda Al-Jihad. The
consequent interweaving of the two organisational structures would inevitably
affect the selection process, which favoured El-Zawahri, not only because he
had been an official spokesman for Bin Laden for many years but also because of
the prevalence of Egyptian Jihad members in Qaeda Al-Jihad.
The second reason has to do with proximity, or the lack of it, in the case of
Seif Al-Adl who spent nine years, from October 2001 to October 2010, as a quest
of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. During this period, he was responsible for
Iranian-Qaeda relations, for which he earned the epithet, "Iran's man inside
Qaeda Al-Jihad". His selection as Al-Qaeda leader would have been tantamount to
an admission that the organisation was now totally under Iranian sway.
The third reason has to do with the qualifications of the two men in light of
the demands of the coming phase. El-Zawahri is more of an intellectual and
organisational leader than a military and intelligence commander. This type of
leader is what Al-Qaeda needs now, following the success of the Arab
revolutions and the onset of a new era in which ideas and organisational
abilities will be more instrumental than arms and military action, which is
Seif Al-Adl's field of expertise.
Ayman El-Zawahri was born in 1951 to a prominent and well-off family in Maadi.
His uncle on his father's side was the renowned Egyptian dermatologist Mohamed
El-Zawahri and his father was a diplomat who had served as Egypt's ambassador
to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Turkey. The medical connection may at least
partially explain why the young El-Zawahri headed towards medicine, obtaining
his Bachelor of Science in medicine in 1974 and his Masters in surgery in 1979.
However, the El-Zawahri family's true repute derives from his grandfather Rabie
El-Zawahri, who served as grand imam of Al-Azhar. His mother Omayma Azzam hails
from another famous lineage. Her uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam Pasha, served as the
first secretary-general of the Arab League. Her father, Abdel-Wahab Azzam, was
a professor of oriental literature at Cairo University and noted for his
seminal translation of Shahnamah from Persian into Arabic.
Ayman El-Zawahri was drawn towards Islamist militancy at a very early age. He
had read Sayed Qotb's Signposts on the Road not long after it had been smuggled
out of prison in 1962. At the time, copies of the book circulated among
students who formed small "study circles" to discuss it. In A Knight beneath
the Banner of the Prophet, El-Zawahri recalls this period: "Sayed Qotb's last
words when he refused to appeal to president Abdel-Nasser for a pardon were,
'The index finger that swears to the unity of God in every prayer refuses to
write a plea for mercy.' These words became for fundamentalists a constitution
and methodology for remaining firm on principle."
In tones of deepest reverence and awe for Qotb, El-Zawahri continues, "He
emphasised the importance of unification in Islam and stressed that the battle
between Islam and its enemies is, at heart, an ideological one centring around
the question of unification. It is the question of who should rule and have
power: the dominion of God and His Law versus worldly methods and material
principles or the so-called mediation between the Creator and his creation.
This emphasis was clearly instrumental in helping the Islamic movement know and
define its enemies and in drawing its attention to the fact that the internal
enemy is no less dangerous than the external one and, indeed, that the internal
enemy is the tool used by the external enemy and the screen behind which he
hides in his war on Islam."
It was also at this point that El-Zawahri developed some early insights into
strategy and tactics: "The group that had rallied around Sayed Qotb decided to
strike out against the existing government [in Egypt] on the grounds that it
was hostile to Islam, deviated from the way of God, and opposed to deferring to
the authority of the Sharia. However, their planning was simplistic and they
did not seek to change the regime or to create a vacuum in it. Rather, they
only aimed to deliver pre-emptive, defensive or retaliatory blows in the event
that the regime planned a new campaign of persecution against Muslims."
Nevertheless, as poor as the Qotbists' planning may have been its significance
was great: "It clearly meant that the Islamic movement had just declared war on
the regime as an enemy of Islam, whereas until then all its literature and all
its principles held that the enemy of Islam resided abroad only."
El-Zawahri continues: "Although the Sayed Qotb group and its members were
oppressed and persecuted under Nasserist rule, this failed to limit their
growing influence among Muslim youth... The call of Sayed Qotb to dedication to
the unity of God and to total submission to the dominion of God and to the
sovereignty of the Divine way still sparks the fire of the Islamic revolution
against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad, the bloody chapters of which
continue to unfold day after day... The government had thought that, with the
death of Sayed Qotb and his colleagues in the mid-1960s, the fundamentalist
movement had received a fatal blow. But the apparent calm on the surface
concealed the intensive fermentation that Qotb's ideas had catalysed beneath
the surface and that would produce the nucleus of the Jihadist movement in
Egypt."
As he informs us, El-Zawahri belonged to that first cell of the Egyptian Jihad
which was formed after the execution of Sayed Qotb. Certainly a major turning
point was the Arab defeat in the 1967 war. El-Zawahri observes that this defeat
triggered a "return of consciousness" to Egyptian society whose people hastened
back to the embrace of Islam. He writes that, at this point, "the Jihadist
movement strengthened its resolve, now that it realised that the arch enemy was
an idol manufactured by the huge propaganda machine and the campaign of
tormenting and bullying Islamists."
TRATEGY: El-Zawahri's analysis sowed the seeds for the thinking that would lead
him to Al-Qaeda's brain centre, where he spearheaded its most significant
evolution based on the concept of the "enemy coalition".
In A Knight beneath the Banner of the Prophet, he recalls that he had completed
the tenets of his new theory in 1999. Regardless of the significance of this
date, the theory elevated him to the status of most important Al-Qaeda
ideologue since 2001, furnishing yet another reason why he was such a strong
competitor against Seif Al-Adl for the leadership of the organisation following
the death of Bin Laden.
One of the central tenets of his theory was that the battle had to be moved to
enemy territory. "The Islamic movement and its Jihadist vanguard, indeed the
whole Islamic nation, must engage the chief criminals -- the US, Russia and
Israel -- in battle. We can no longer let them control the battle between the
Jihadist movement and our governments from afar where they can feel safe. They
must be made to pay and to pay dearly."
He explains, "the masters in Washington and Tel Aviv use [Arab/Muslim] regimes
to protect their interests and to fight their battles against Muslims. If the
shrapnel from battle reaches their own homes and bodies, they will first
exchange accusations with their proxies over which of them have been remiss and
then they will have to choose between two equally unpalatable alternatives:
either they will have to wage their own battles against Muslims, which would
clearly inspire a Jihad against heretics, or they will begin to revise their
thinking after admitting the failure of their violent and unjust confrontation
against the Muslim people. This is why we must move the battle to the enemy
territory. Only then will the hands of those that set fire in our countries get
burned."
But the theory had another major tenet: "The struggle to establish a Muslim
state cannot be waged regionally. It is clear that the US-led Crusader-Jewish
coalition will not allow any Muslim force to come to power in any Muslim
country and that it will mobilise all its energies to attack and overthrow such
a force if it ever did reach power. Towards this end that coalition will open
up a battle theatre that will cover the entire world and it will impose
sanctions, if not declare outright war, on anyone who assists the Muslim
government. Therefore, in order to accommodate this new situation we must
prepare ourselves for a battle that is not confined to a single region and that
confronts both the heretic enemy from within and the Crusader-Jewish enemy
abroad."
In so declaring, El-Zawahri publicly departed from a central tenet held by all
Jihadist movements in Egypt and the Arab world, not least of which was the
Egyptian Jihad Organisation that he, himself, led since 1992. That tenet was to
"confront the near enemy first" (meaning Arab governments) in order to
establish a base to use as a staging point for the holy war against various
heretical countries and governments elsewhere. "We cannot postpone the conflict
with the external enemy, for the Jewish-Crusader alliance will not give us time
to defeat the internal enemy and then to declare holy war on it. In fact, the
American and Jews and their allies are already present, with their armies, in
the heart of this region, and are preparing to confront us."
HE FUTURE OF AL-QAEDA: Not even the wave of Arab revolutions seems to have
altered El-Zawahri's thinking. In the first statement he issued since
succeeding Bin Laden he said, "If the Arab revolutions do not bring Islamists
to power, we must resort to arms." Curiously, few analysts have referred to
this declaration in their discussions on the impact of the Arab revolutions on
the future of Al-Qaeda and its influence.
Accordingly, it is very unlikely that El-Zawahri's arrival to the peak of power
in Al-Qaeda will usher in profound changes in its outlook and strategy. The
only modification is that even those revolutionary governments that overthrew
dictatorships but that do not empower Islam and apply Islamic Sharia, in the
way that El-Zawahri thinks they should, will be counted among Al-Qaeda's
enemies, alongside all those Americans, Jews and Crusaders and their
collaborators, inclusive of the establishments that help them economically or
morally. The whole lot will come under his crosshairs.
However, Al-Qaeda's most likely focus in this post-Bin Laden transitional
phase, if we may use the term, will be to fulfil the project of reaching power
in one country so that it can serve as a platform for expansion. Accordingly,
it will reduce its attacks against the "distant enemy" (the US and Europe) as
much as possible and home in on Yemen as the most promising candidate, at this
stage, for the realisation of Al-Qaeda's dream. And so Yemen could be it if the
Abdallah Saleh government is overthrown, creating a void in the absence of any
clear scenario for a peaceful rotation of authority supported by the Arab
states and the international community. A Yemen plunged into anarchy will
enable Iran to notch up its assistance to Al-Qaeda (through the Seif Al-Adl
connection) to the greatest possible extent, using the Houthis, who control
large tracts of the Yemeni north, towards this end. Then, Iran will add the
nascent Islamic Emirate of Yemen to its strengths in the master chess game it
is playing against the US and the West.
* The writer is an expert in Islamist movements.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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