CORRESPONDENT FROM SASHINGTON. Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a raid in Kabul conducted by a CIA drone. Almost twenty-one years after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, the mind alongside Osama Bin Laden leaves the scene hidden in that Afghanistan, which for a year has returned under the control of its former protectors. , the Taleban. Which indirectly confirmed what happened over the weekend. A spokesman denounced the raid with a drone carried out “in full violation of international law”. Repeatedly given up for dead, he has always reappeared with audio messages and rare video. Al Zawahairi was the permanent presence in Bin Laden’s videos and also on his head hung a bounty of 25 million dollars.
Together they were hiding in the caves, fleeing to Tora Bora, also rifle in hand, long beard, white robe and thick glasses, more to reason of the Jihad than of a militiaman. Yet if Al Qaeda in the 90s and then until the years after 11 September was the number one threat to the West capable of massively hitting the Americans in Arabia and the US embassy in Nairobi and again the Uss Cole in October of 2000 in Yemen, the European cities of London and Madrid and finally – but not least – to shatter the Twin Towers was for the vision of this Egyptian doctor who became in 2011 after the death of Bin Laden head of Al Qaeda.
A group in a waning phase then, challenged in subsequent years by Isis whose methods and brutality against the Shiites had never been approved by Zawahiri.
The clash first with the Iraqi Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, killed by the US in June 2006 in Iraq, and then with Al Baghdadi, have become legendary in the jihadist galaxy. If ISIS had a regional dimension – it essentially focused on the reconstruction of the Beirut-Damascus-Baghdad line – the idea of Al Zawahiri’s global holy war was a sort of reconstruction of the great Islamic nation of Umayyad times. Born into a humble family in Maadi, south of Cairo, Ayman was raised in a humble environment. He was a pious and devoted Muslim. As a student he was influenced by the thought of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who had become the spiritual father of militant Islam and by the age of 15 he had founded an extremist group with the aim of overthrowing the Egyptian government to make way for a regime governed by Sharia law. . Zawahiri then studied medicine in Cairo, specializing in surgery, hence the nickname among al Qaeda followers of “The Doctor”. He was one of hundreds of people arrested for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. He served 3 years in prison, then in 1984 he went to Saudi Arabia and then from there to Afghanistan where he joined the battle of the mujahideen against the Soviet invaders. And it was on those mountains that he met Bin Laden with whom in 1988 he founded La Base, or Al Qaeda, a network of terrorist groups.
Zawahiri became from that moment the shadow of Bin Laden. Where the latter had the money and fortune of the Saudi family of builders, Ayman had had the clarity of thought and determination of the jihadist for years. His men of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Eij) have been Osama’s bodyguards for over a decade, ever since the two set up headquarters in Sudan and ran the terror network from there. His movements from there are unclear. Perhaps he went to Chechnya, others say that for a while he joined the Muslims of Bosnia. What is certain is that he went with Bin Laden to Afghanistan and negotiated protection with the Taliban with him. That this time, 21 years later, they failed to protect him.