understanding the assassination of al-Zawahiri
Brian D'Agostino
Brigitte DEMEURE
O là la Brian, I fear I have to disagree with you again.
I send you below an article in Le Monde, which refers to the works of a French expert of Al Qaida (Stéphane Lacroix), who speaks and reads Arabic - which is according to me a necessity if one wishes to be an expert in this field, I am not sure about Bergen.
Besides, I am not certain the women in Afghanistan are happy about the withdrawal of the US ...
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who dedicated his life to jihad
The Al-Qaeda leader was killed in an American drone strike on July 31. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda, his career saw all of the different strains of contemporary jihadism.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was the longest-lasting figure of radical and jihadist Islam until his death announced by US President Joe Biden on Monday, August 1. His life alone covers all the evolutions of contemporary jihadism, from its rise in Egypt in the 1970s to the triumph of the Taliban, back in power in Kabul since August 2021. The 71-year-old Al-Qaeda leader lived in the capital and was killed in a US drone strike on July 31, which targeted the balcony of the house where he lived under Taliban protection.
"Of all the main figures of the international jihadist movement, it is the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri who best illustrates the history of contemporary radical Sunni Islamism," wrote the researcher Stéphane Lacroix, a specialist in Islamist movements, in Al-Qaida dans le texte (“Al-Qaeda in the Text”) (2008). "For 30 years, from Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan and other places, he would have one objective:" establishing the reign of Islam in Egypt, before "a spectacular reversal," in which he made it his priority to fight against the United States and the Christian West, which he accused of waging war against Islam.
Graduated from medical school at age 23
Ayman al-Zawahiri comes from a line of religious men, making him a scion of the Islamist aristocracy. He was born in 1951 in Cairo to a family of the Sunni bourgeoisie, whose ancestry is full of religious men associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, ever since it was founded by the schoolteacher Hassan Al-Banna in 1928 in the city of Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal. His paternal great-uncle was an imam at the prestigious Al-Azhar religious university, while his maternal grandfather, a cleric, was, among other things, the founder of the King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where many Muslim Brotherhood members fled after a crackdown by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. A brilliant pupil and student – he graduated from medical school at the age of 23 – and rather reserved and pious, Ayman al-Zawahiri was involved in politics from his adolescence.
In 1966, he joined a clandestine cell of the Muslim Brotherhood and set himself the goal of overthrowing the regime. The date is not a coincidence. That was when the Egyptian fundamentalist thinker Sayyid Qutb was convicted of plotting the president's assassination and was executed. Qutb is generally considered to be the inspiration for Sunni jihadist movements, along with the Pakistani Abul A'la Maududi. Qutb posited a theory of violence as a response to the ruthless repression and torture he and the Muslim Brotherhood suffered in the prisons of the Nasser regime.
Former Islamic jihadist
To return power to God in a world that has gone back to the time of jahiliyyah (ignorance in Arabic), he argued that violence can be used against political and religious powers, even Muslim ones, and against all those who follow them, as long as they are kouffar, i.e. impious. For Qutb, jihad is the imperative duty of every Muslim; it is the consequence of takfir, excommunication. The teaching and the “martyrdom” of Sayid Qutb, already violently anti-Western after a one-year study stay in the United States, would leave a lasting impression on all Egyptian Islamist circles.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was also traumatized, like a majority of his fellow citizens, by Israel's defeat of a coalition of Arab states in the Six-Day War in June 1967 war. When Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser's death in 1970, he let the Islamists out of prison in order to counter the influence of the Nasserite left, which he wanted to get rid of. The Islamists, including radicals, took advantage of this to increase their presence on university campuses, where they quickly gained the upper hand.
Several radical organizations emerged, including Gama'a al-Islamiyya and the Islamic Jihad. Al-Zawahiri would go on to join the latter organization, which was characterized by its elitism and its cult of secrecy. Unlike Gama'a al-Islamiyya, which planned to enforce sharia law by operating in the open in society, the Islamic Jihad aimed to seize power from above by infiltrating the military.
When Sadat signed the Camp David peace accords with Israel in the late 1970s, the break with Islamist circles was complete. Islamic Jihad militants belonging to the army seized the opportunity of a military parade on October 6, 1981 to assassinate Anwar Sadat and attempt to seize power. The coup failed. Al-Zawahiri was one of hundreds of Islamists rounded up in the aftermath. They were tortured, which the young al-Zawahiri recounted in English while he was in the dock at the request of his companions, for the benefit of the journalists present at the trial of Sadat's assassins. He would later describe it in a book written in Arabic. Under torture, he was forced to reveal the names of his comrades and even to contribute to the arrest of some of them, including one of his most loyal allies, the officer Issam Al-Qamari, and to testify against them before the judge.
Bin Laden's right-hand man
Ayman al-Zawahiri was released in 1984 after being cleared of any involvement in the plot against Sadat, but was sentenced to three years in prison for carrying an illegal weapon. He had already spent a short time in Afghanistan in 1980, where he had used his skills as a surgeon with the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviet invasion. He returned there in 1985, with the blessing of the Egyptian authorities, who were only too happy to keep their opponent away.
It was at an Afghan Mujahideen base in Peshawar, Pakistan, that al-Zawahiri met Osama bin Laden, the son of a great Saudi merchant family who used his fortune to help Islamist fighters coming from across the whole Arab and Muslim world. At the time, bin Laden's spiritual guide was a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, Abdullah Azzam, a disciple of Sayyid Qutb and theorist of jihad. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated in a bomb attack in November 1989, which one hypothesis attributes to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would have killed him to put an end to the rivalry between them to gain favor with the rich Saudi heir. From that moment on, al-Zawahiri became bin Laden's inseparable ally and right-hand man.
The year 1989 marked a turning point. The USSR completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the war was over.
"The unity imposed on the disparate groups of Islamic extremists who had fought against the Soviet army disintegrated," wrote Jason Burke, a British specialist in Islamist movements, in Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam. National and ethnic divisions began to resurface and grew stronger among the volunteers. "Al-Qaeda is created with the explicit intention of overcoming these divisions and creating an international army that would protect Muslims from oppression," explained Burke. It was a small, loose group led by al-Zawahiri and bin Laden.
Fighting a 'distant enemy'
The two men moved to Sudan in 1989 where an Islamist junta had taken power. Al-Zawahiri set himself the idea of overthrowing the Egyptian regime, "the close enemy." He planned and commanded several failed attacks against Cairo's leaders, including an aborted assassination operation against President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. But the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the landing of American troops in Saudi Arabia and Operation Desert Storm, which drove Saddam Hussein's army out of the emirate, reshuffled the cards. Bin Laden advocated fighting not only the godless and corrupt Saudi regime, but also the "distant enemy," namely the United States, whose forces were defiling the land of the two holy mosques.
After brief stays in European countries, al-Zawahiri joined bin Laden in Afghanistan, who had found refuge with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, to whom he pledged allegiance and aligned himself with his views. His priority was no longer Egypt, but the transnational jihad within a “World Islamic Front for the Holy War against Jews and Crusaders” created alongside Osama bin Laden in 1998. Because they had refused or renounced violence in favor of a grassroots Islamization, both the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and radicals from the Gama'a al-Islamiyya – who had renounced armed struggle after a particularly atrocious attack on tourists in Luxor in 1997 – were the targets of his wrath.
After the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 and the offensive launched by the United States against the Afghan Taliban regime, Ayman al-Zawahiri became a public figure. He was designated Al-Qaeda's number two and the United States put a price on his head: 25 million dollars. After the fall of the Taliban, no one knew what had happened to him, any more than they did bin Laden – until he reappeared in a video recording in October 2002 to warn the United States against an invasion of Iraq that was already in the making. From his hideout, supposedly in the Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan, he then began to send out messages with a dual objective at more or less regular intervals? They aimed to terrorize the West – the United States in particular – and to set precise aims for jihadists throughout the world, depending on the situation. His "appearances," with his white turban and large glasses, were more frequent than bin Laden's. His speeches were also marked out by his implacable tone.
Bin Laden, with his slow, articulate way of speaking, appeared only in sound recordings, always in a low, monotonous voice regardless of the violence of what he was saying. He would occasionally offer his enemies a "truce, on certain conditions."
Al-Zawahiri, on the other hand, was the ruthless imprecator who appeared on screen, the “prosecutor” always seeking the “maximum penalty” against the “coalition of Jews and Crusaders” and "the disbelieving regimes,“ ”usurpers" of power on Islamic territory. Obviously keeping abreast of international news – including France's burqa law – he would rapidly utter the most virulent threats and incantations promising apocalypse to the "enemies of Islam." Obsessed by the caricatures of the Prophet published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 and republished in 2006 by the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, al-Zawahiri called to attack Europe in general and France in particular, which he considered the "pioneer of impiety." Bin Laden, for his part, prioritized the fight against "America and the Jews."
Ideologist-in-chief
At the same time, al-Zawahiri wrote two books (Riders under the Banner of the Prophet and Allegiance and Rupture) that established him as the movement's chief ideologist.
“He theorizes the fight that Al-Qaeda is waging (...) against the 'distant enemy' and strives to produce the elements of religious legitimization necessary to continue the struggle," said Stéphane Lacroix, who thinks al-Zawahiri has made a fundamental contribution to the radical Islamist movement since the end of the 1990s, as much for the clarity of the movement's strategy and ideology as for him becoming a "media figure." Like bin Laden, the researcher stresses, al-Zawahiri "became a mythical figure, hunted down and yet elusive.”
When Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, in his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by an American commando, it was naturally Ayman al-Zawahiri who took over the torch. Deprived of its charismatic leader, taken by surprise by the Arab revolutions that began in January 2011 in Tunisia before spreading like wildfire to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the jihadist organization was in bad shape. Islam and Sharia law were not among the demands of the huge crowds pushing for the fall of the tyrants al-Zawahiri had vilified in his long diatribes. The organization's center of power then seemed to shift to Yemen, where Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was thriving, while Iraqi jihad, which had gained autonomy under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the 2000s under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq, seemed to be under control. Attacks in Europe and the United States were becoming increasingly rare and difficult to carry out.
Al-Zawahiri, a man of reflection rather than action, become more active in a rapidly changing political landscape: He admonished the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, urging them not to participate in the democratic and electoral game, which he saw as contrary to Islamic values. On the ground, Al-Qaeda quickly adapted by founding local political-military cells under the label of Ansar Al-Sharia (the Partisans of Sharia), in order to occupy the ground left free by retreating dictatorships. The strategy paid off in Yemen, where AQPA took control of entire regions, and in Libya, where one of these cells managed to besiege and kill the American ambassador in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
But very quickly, it was Syria that drew all of the region's factions. Bashar Al-Assad's regime and its particularly deadly and cruel repression of citizens led to an armed rebellion, which was infiltrated more and more openly by the Islamic State in Iraq, whose anti-Shiite discourse found an audience among Syrian insurgents. In 2013, the takeover bid launched by the Islamic State in Iraq and its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi led to the split of the Al-Nusra Front, the main Syrian jihadist organization, whose leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani stayed loyal to Al-Qaeda. From 2014, Al-Qaeda sent several of its officials, secretly refugees in Afghanistan or Iran, to join the Al-Nusra Front and its stronghold in the pocket of Idlib in northern Syria. They would end up eliminated one by one by American drones in the region as part of the international coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq in the Levant.
Protected by the Taliban
The civil war was merciless and the Islamic State (IS) took over, fulfilling bin Laden and al-Zawahiri's long-awaited dream of proclaiming a “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria in June 2014. From then on, the IS became the true face of global jihad, succeeding in recruiting thousands of young Europeans and carrying out spectacular and sophisticated attacks like the simultaneous attacks on November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis. Paradoxically, this "French 9/11" was preceded by two operations carried out by Al-Qaeda followers: the 2012 killings in Toulouse and Montauban by Mohamed Merah, trained by an Al-Qaeda dissident in Pakistani tribal areas; and the January 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers, who were trained by Al-Qaeda in Yemen, thus realizing one of al-Zawahiri old goals.
The excesses of the IS and the international coalition set up by Barack Obama to fight it made it possible to retake Mosul in 2017 and then Raqqa, its Syrian capital, the following year. The collapse of the caliphate returned Al-Qaeda to its prominent place in global jihad, especially since its followers in the Sahel managed to survive France's Operation Serval in Mali in 2013 and then to spread their influence by taking advantage of ethnic and regional conflict. But this success came at the cost of an almost complete autonomization of the jihad movement in the Sahel, which now follows its own logic and seeks its own goals.
Above all, Ayman al-Zawahiri benefited from the Taliban's lightning-fast victory over the regime in power in Kabul, which did not survive the withdrawal of American forces in the summer of 2021. The Taliban's return to power, loyal allies of Al-Qaeda, more than two decades after being driven out, has obviously allowed al-Zawahiri to leave his hideout in Pakistan and settle in the Afghan capital, where he has been able to enjoy real freedom of movement and action – seemingly without any new activity from the Al-Qaeda headquarters for the moment. It is surely this false sense of security that was fatal for Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the Doha agreement signed with the Taliban in 2021, the United States made its withdrawal conditional on abandoning international terrorism. They preferred to take the lead.
Christophe Ayad
envoyé : 3 août 2022 à 11:58
de : Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com>
à : Clio's Psyche Forum <clios...@googlegroups.com>
objet : [cliospsyche] understanding the assassination of al-Zawahiri
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Brian D'Agostino
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