Aiman ​​az-Zawahiri

Aiman ​​az-Zawahiri

Aiman ​​az-Zawahiri (born June 19, 1951 in Maadi , Egypt ; Arabic أيمن الظواهري, DMG Aiman ​​aẓ-Ẓawāhirī ; also al-Zawahiri ) is a surgeon and was the leader of the Sunni - Islamist underground organization al-Jihad . Since the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the founder and leader of the al-Qaeda terror network , he has been number one in its hierarchy . He is on the list of the most wanted international terrorists , designated by the United States Department of State as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist . A $ 25 million reward is available for information leading to his capture or death .

Life

Early years

Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi (Egypt). He comes from a respected family in the Nile Delta : his great-uncle was an imam at al-Azhar University in Cairo , his father a medical professor . Zawahiri was considered exceptionally intelligent and very religious from an early age. At the age of 15, he is said to have founded a first secret group while he was still in school, with the aim of overthrowing the government and the rule of Islam; however, there were many such groups in Egypt at the time. He became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood , which he later left. The capture, torture and execution of Sayyid Qutb , the main ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1966 was a defining event for Zawahiri.

Zawahiri studied medicine in Cairo . In 1974 he finished his studies and worked for three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian army , later in a Cairo hospital.

At the same time he continued his Islamist commitment. In 1974 he said he was in a cell with 40 men. At the end of the 1970s, the al-Jihad group emerged from several cells under the leadership of Kamal Habib . Zawahiri participated and later became its leader. Their strategy was initially aimed at taking power with the help of a coup d'état and killing the head of state and establishing an Islamic order without attacking the population.

Zawahiri married a Muslim woman from Cairo in 1978, with whom he has several children. Today he has four wives in total. In 1980 and 1981, Zawahiri traveled to Pakistan twice for several months as a doctor for the Red Crescent . Even then, Zawahiri expressed an extremely anti-American attitude to an acquaintance .

Sadat is murdered and imprisoned in Egypt

In February 1981, al-Jihad planned a coup in Egypt. The plan was blown and many suspects were arrested. Zawahiri was arrested after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat on October 6, 1981. The main assassin was the officer Chalid Islambuli , the responsible persons behind it are not entirely clear. Zawahiri himself claims to have learned of the attack a few hours beforehand. In court he admitted to have known some of the attackers, but no evidence of any involvement in the crime could be proven. He was jailed for three years for possession of weapons, where he was severely tortured. During his prison time, he finally established himself as one of the leading men of Egyptian Islamism. In prison, he also came into contact with Umar Abd ar-Rahman , the leader of Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya . The two got into an argument over the leadership of the Islamists in Egypt. Even later, the competition between the two groups would show up again and again.

Battle of the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union

After his release, Zawahiri had finally become a violent extremist. In 1985 he went via Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and finally to Afghanistan to take part in the local fight of the mujahideen against the Soviet invasion . There he came into contact primarily with Osama bin Laden , who, together with Abdallah Azzam, recruited new fighters for the war. Zawahiri successfully influenced bin Laden and won his support for al-Jihad. This brought him into conflict with bin Laden's mentor Azzam, who refused to fight against Muslim governments such as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

al Qaeda

After the end of the war in Afghanistan in 1988, Zawahiri could not return to Egypt and initially stayed with bin Laden. At the end of 1989 there is said to have been a kind of founding meeting of Al-Qaeda as a loose mujahideen alliance in which Zawahiri took part; however, bin Laden and Zawahiri continued to work with different goals: bin Laden's struggle against the United States after the Second Gulf War (1991) was not entirely shared by Zawahiri. In autumn 1991 Zawahiri is said to have opened an office in the Bulgarian capital Sofia. In 1992 he returned to bin Laden in Karthum (Sudan), where an Islamic government had come to power. Among other things, the two set up military training camps there.

Zawahiri's goal from Sudan remained the fight against the Egyptian government. He worked with the (new) suicide attacks and a blind cell structure. However, after a director of the group was arrested with a database, the Egyptian authorities arrested around a thousand people, greatly weakening the group. However, al-Jihad carried out attacks on the Egyptian Interior Minister (August 1993) and Prime Minister (November 1993) that year. Since a young girl died in the latter, public opinion turned strongly against the Islamists; the government arrested 280 suspects and sentenced six people to death. To get money, Zawahiri traveled all over the world: he is said to have been to the Balkans, Austria, Dagestan, the USA, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Argentina and the Philippines. However, he had little success, which made al-Jihad more financially dependent on bin Laden.

On June 26, 1995, al-Jihad, together with al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya , carried out an attack on President Mubarak in Addis Ababa . This time the Egyptian authorities acted with even greater brutality against the Islamists. Zawahiri's response was an attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad on November 19, 1995, with 16 dead.

In 1996, Zawahiri and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan. Zawahiri traveled the world again - allegedly via Switzerland, the Balkans, Holland, Russia, Yemen, Malaysia, Singapore and China - to raise money for his fight. He was imprisoned in Russia in December 1996 for six months for illegal residence. Finally he went to bin Laden in Jalalabad in Afghanistan.

In November 1997, Zawahiri and the CIA agent Abu-Umar al Amikri are said to have met in Peshawar , Pakistan . The Islamist influence on the Balkans should be ended and in exchange a seizure of power by the Islamists in Egypt should be made possible. But the deal fell through, Zawahiri's people in Albania were kidnapped and extradited to Egypt.

Zawahiri signed the Manifesto for an International Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders on February 23, 1998, with Osama bin Laden and others on behalf of a radical wing of al-Jihad . The change from the “near enemy” of one's own government to the “distant enemy” of the USA is made very clearly in the manifesto. The fight against the latter is declared a duty of every Muslim. For Zawahiri, closer cooperation with bin Laden was an opportunity to get money for his struggle and to pursue his radical course, which has now met resistance in the al-Jihad group: For example, Islamists imprisoned in Egypt had declared in 1997 to renounce violence.

Al-Jihad organized bomb attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998. In a trial in Cairo against 107 fundamentalists, Al Naggar confessed to the Nairobi attack. Zawahiri and his brother were sentenced to death in absentia. In the summer of 1999, Zawahiri resigned from the al-Jihad group because of arguments over future strategy, but became its leader again a few months later. He was engaged in the procurement of biological and chemical weapons and was probably involved in the organization of the attack on the US warship USS Cole (DDG-67) in Yemen on October 12, 2000. In June 2001, his group finally merged with bin Laden's al-Qaeda for Kaidat al-Jihad .

In recent years Zawahiri has been seen as the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden and after him the most important man in Al-Qaeda . After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, Zawahiri appeared on October 7, 2001 together with bin Laden in a video message.

In his December 2001 work Knight under the Banner of the Prophet , Zawahiri justified the attack of September 11, 2001 . There he continues to criticize the “unbelieving governments in the Arab countries”. He wants to replace them with strict Islamic rules, if necessary with extreme violence.

In 2003 and 2004, Zawahiri made ten video statements. He attacked above all the USA and its allies, z. B. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf . He criticized the Guantanamo prison camp , the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan; He commented on Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the dispute in France over the wearing of headscarves in public buildings ( headscarf dispute ).

On September 1, 2005, Al-Jazeera broadcast a video that confessed to the attacks on London's public transport network on July 7, 2005. In addition to Zawahiri, one of the assassins, Mohammed Sidique Khan, can be seen.

On January 14, 2006, several US television stations (including CNN ) reported that Zawahiri may have been killed in an attack on the Pakistani village of Damadola , near the Afghan border. The operation was ordered by the CIA . Later it turned out that the attack was aimed at Zawahiri, who was not in the village.

On January 30, 2006, a video message surfaced in the media in which Zawahiri threatened the US with new terrorist attacks and verbally abused George W. Bush . At the beginning of March 2006, Zawahiri reported with a video message and commented on the Palestinian Hamas and France (see above). At the beginning of May and most recently in July 2006, he also spoke up via video.

On September 11, 2006, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, CNN and Al Jazeera broadcast a new video message in which Aiman ​​al Zawahiri called for increased resistance against the US and its allies.

After the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, Zawahiri reported by video to call for resistance in Iraq .

Zawahiri's new field of activity was the conflict in Somalia for several years . The Ethiopian troops have to be "wiped out", to do this all means are right: from ambushes to laying mines to suicide attacks, he explains in an Internet message. The intervention of the Christian dominated Ethiopia had led to the decisive turning point in the civil war in Somalia. Somalia is one of the " crusader battlefields used by America and its allies and the United Nations against Islam and Muslims," ​​the tape message said.

After the death of Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri became the new leader of Al-Qaeda in June 2011. This emerges from a message posted on an Islamist website in June. It says that the "General Command" of Al-Qaeda decided after extensive debates that Zawahiri should succeed Osama bin Laden. As the “ emir ” of the organization, he should continue the “ holy war ”. This has made him number one on the list of the most wanted international terrorists ; the US is offering $ 25 million for his capture. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Works (selection)

• 1990: The bitter harvest. 60 years of the Muslim Brotherhood
• 2001: Knight under the Prophet's banner
• 2002: loyalty and betrayal
• 2008: The remission of sins

literature

• Berndt Georg Thamm : Al-Qaida. The network of terror . Hugendubel, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7205-2636-4 .
• Gilles Kepel (Ed.): Al-Qaida dans le texte. Paris 2005
  • in German: Al-Qaida texts of terror , Piper, Munich 2006
• Thomas J. Moser: Politics on God's Path, On the Genesis and Transformation of Militant Sunni Islamism . Innsbruck University Press IUP, Innsbruck 2012 ISBN 978-3-902811-67-7 pp. 121-141
• Lawrence Wright: Death Will Find You: Al-Qaeda and the Road to September 11th . Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-12986-7 .
• Ayman Rabie al- Zawahiri , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 26/2011 of June 28, 2011, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Web links

• Lawrence Wright on Aiman ​​az-Zawahiri in The New Yorker , June 16, 2011.
• Profile of the US authorities (German)
• Al-Qaeda: Women should wear veils: Europe's Muslim women as "holy warriors" , the Standard, July 28, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ IRAQ: US offers $ 10-million reward for Al Qaeda in Iraq leader , Los Angeles Times News from October 7, 2011 ( Memento from October 8, 2011 on WebCite )
2. ↑ As Sahab - The London Bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan liveleak.com, August 8, 2017 (English)
3. ↑ Der Spiegel : Al-Qaeda calls for jihad from January 5, 2007
4. ↑ NZZ : Kaida calls for resistance against the "crusaders" in Somalia from January 5, 2007
5. ↑ Criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood
6. ↑ In europ. Languages ​​completely only available in English, in: Laura Mansfield Hg., His own words: A translation of the writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri. Lulu, Raleigh (North Carolina) 2006 ISBN 1847288804 pp. 199ff. In this book also other writings in Engl.
7. ^ Criticism of Sayyed al-Sharif