Death of Al Qaida leader- Ayman al-Zawahiri

  After Osama bin Laden he is the leader

After the 9 - 11 attacks, It took about ten years for the United States government to get Osama bin Laden. They got him in May 2011. Now, as of tonight, we know it took another 11 years after that to get bin Laden's brain, to get the man who was bin Laden's number two in al Qaeda at the time of 9-11, the man who took over as al Qaeda's leader after bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs. The string of attacks and murders attributed to Ayman al-Zawahiri is stomach churning. He was the ideological mastermind behind the turn of Al Qaida and groups like that toward indiscriminate mass murder of civilians anywhere, including Muslims, all in the name of Islamic piety.

And how we got there. We now now looking back at it, it seems like a straight shot. But if you sort of dropped in at him at any time in his biography, you wouldn't have known he was going there. He was trained as a doctor. He was a trained surgeon. He was from a respected family in Egypt, born and raised in Cairo. By the time he was 15 years old, he was a committed radical who wanted to try to impose Islamic theocracy by force. He formed his first terrorist cell with the aim of overthrowing the government of Egypt when he was all of 15 years old. When Islamic militants did assassinate Egypt's President Anwar Sadat at a military parade in 1981, Ayman al-Zawahiri was one of hundreds of Islamist radicals who was tried and imprisoned for that crime.

He was tortured for years in Egyptian prisons. While he was there, he became an informant, supplying information on his comrades to the Egyptian security services. He was released from prison in Egypt in 1984, even more radical than when he had gone in. He nurtured the growth of his terrorist group, which he had literally founded as a teenager. It was called Al Jihad or Islamic Jihad. He spent time after his release from prison in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He eventually became close with a rich Saudi Arabian guy who in 1988 has founded had founded his own terrorist organization. The Saudi guy was wealthy enough that he was able to bankroll much of their movement himself. He also had great connections all across the Arab world. He was a great recruiter to their cause. Ayman al-Zawahiri eventually became the Saudi guy's personal doctor, which gave them a personal bond behind beyond even their ideological interests. After the two of them supplied and supported the Afghan mujahideen fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan around 1990, they moved on to Sudan and on to Yemen to establish training camps there for international terrorists. At that time, though, Zawahiri was still really focused on trying to overthrow the government in Egypt. That was his lifelong dream. In November 1993, his group, Islamic Jihad, tried to assassinate the prime minister of Egypt. They failed in that assassination attempt, but they did wound and kill civilians instead. Two years later, 1995, Egyptian Islamic Jihad blew up.

                                           

The Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, killed at least 15 people, wounded dozens of people. Two years later, in 1997, Zawahiri helped plan the Luxor attack. This was a half dozen gunmen descending on a big Egyptian tourist attraction just before nine in the morning in November 1997. The gunmen, those six gunmen spent 45 minutes methodically massacring the tourists at that tourist site in Egypt, including kids, people from Egypt, people from Colombia, people from Switzerland and the UK and Japan and Germany. 62 people murdered. Zawahiri was the mastermind of that. That was 1997. In 1998, Zawahiri wrote what amounted to a declaration of war against America. He proclaims that groups like his and his friend Osama bin Laden's group, Al Qaida and all the Islamist terrorist groups he proclaimed were all united as what he called the International Front Against Crusaders and Jews. Not to put too fine a point on it. Zawahiri's declaration in February 1998 proclaimed it their mission to target America, to target the United States of America, and specifically to kill American people anywhere in the world. That was February 1998 that he wrote that declaration of war. Later that same year, in August 1998, they blew up the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. More than 4000 people injured. More than 200 people killed. Then in October 2000, they hit the USS Cole, a guided missile destroyer. While it was being refueled in Yemen. 17 US sailors killed, 37 injured. The year after that, in June, June 2001, Al Qaida.