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| Afghanistan |
| Al Zawahiri |
| 2001-09-27 |
| Michael Dobbs Washington Post The ideologist. Born to a wealthy Egyptian family in 1951, Ayman Zawahiri is four years older than bin Laden. The two men appear to have met for the first time in the late 1980s in Peshawar, the Pakistani city that served as one of the bases for mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Like bin Laden, Zawahiri was a disciple of a Palestinian scholar-guerrilla organizer, Abdullah Azzam, who recruited thousands of Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Zawahiri worked as a doctor in the rest house and hospital that Azzam set up in Peshawar for Afghan mujaheddin. (Azzam was killed in a 1989 car bombing in Peshawar that continues to be shrouded in mystery.) While the bespectacled Zawahiri has little of bin Laden's charisma, and prefers to avoid the limelight, many former associates see him as the brains behind al Qaeda. "He has been in the struggle longer than bin Laden, and he is more familiar with the techniques of urban warfare, which is his speciality," said Muhammad Massari, a Saudi dissident in London. "His knowledge of Islamic law is also greater than bin Laden's." Zawahiri's influence over bin Laden can be seen in the 1998 declaration of jihad on "Jews and crusaders," which the two men signed jointly. Before 1998, bin Laden focused primarily on expelling U.S. forces from his native Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam's holiest places. After 1998, he broadened his agenda to include denunciations of the U.S. alliance with Israel and its "aggression" against Iraq. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |