The Endurance of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Figure 1.  Ayman al-Zawahiri photo from Dabiq.

 ‘Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue…’

Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Political Morality (1794).

Though advanced in age Zawahiri is as elusive as ever, he has outlived Osama bin Laden, and is now the paramount leader of al-Qaeda. Engaged in Islamist activism, since 15, frequently imprisoned and tortured. Zawahiri has endured, survived and he still thrives, secreted away either in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The following quote is from an article in Foreign Policy by Harold Doornbos and Jennan Moussa, on August 16, 2016: “Zawahiri was perhaps the most difficult person in the world to contact — he had not been seen in public in years, and is still in hiding, most probably somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Here then is a look at Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Ayman al-Zawahiri the leader of Qutb’s “vanguard” grew up in a quite middle-class suburb called Maadi, five miles south of noisy Cairo. In 1960, the Zawahiri clan was a medical dynasty; Rabie Zawahiri (Ayman’s father) was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University. His brother was a highly regarded dermatologist and an expert on venereal diseases. Thirty one members of Zawahiri’s family were doctors or chemists or pharmacists scattered throughout the Arab world.  However the Zawahiri’s were known more for their, religiosity than anything else. Rabie’s uncle was the rector of Egypt’s, thousand year old al-Azhar (still the center of Islamic studies in the ME), in 1929, his father and grandfather were also al-Azhar scholars.

Ayman al -Zawahiri was born in 1951 June 19, along with his twin sister, Umayma. The twins were at the top of their classes, upon till medical school. He was a bookworm who excelled in his studies; he hated violence and avoided sports.  Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, patriarch of the Azzam clan (his mother’s side of the family), said that Ayman was actually closer to his mother’s side of the family, the political side. Since the first Egyptian parliament, more than 150 years ago, there have been Azzam’s in government, but always in the opposition. Mahfouz carried on the resistance tradition, having been imprisoned when he was fifteen, for conspiring against the government.  Sayid Qutb had been Mahfouz Azzam’s Arabic teacher in the third grade, in 1936, and Qutb and his young protégé developed an enduring bond. Azzam would write for the Muslim Brotherhood’s magazine that Qutb published in the early years of the revolution. He was Qutb’s personal lawyer and was the last person to see him alive before his execution.   

Ayman al-Zawahiri heard again and again, from his uncle Mahfouz tales of the martyr Qutb, his piety, and the tortures he endured in prison. In the Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright summed up the solidifying of Qutb’s thought, into political will, resolve and action in Ayman al-Zawahiri and his peers: “The Nasserrite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades. But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.  

That same year al-Zawahiri helped structure an underground cell, bent on overthrowing Egypt’s government and establishing an Islamic state, at the time Zawahiri was fifteen years old.

Zawahiri years later recalled that: “We were a group of students from Maadi High School and other schools”. The primary target of Zawahiri and his colleagues was the secular Nasserite regime. They focused on defeating the near enemy, impure Muslim society, the far enemy, the West. Zawahiri hoped to help fulfill the realization of Islam’s hoped for caliphate, which ended in 1924 after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Zawahiri said that: “Then history would make a new turn god willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government”. 

 Zawahiri’s student Islamist activist cell grew to become the terrorist organization known as al-Jihad.

Zawahiri envisioned a complete overthrow of the existing order. He had begun quietly recruiting Egyptian military officers. Zawahiri’s primary strategist was Abaoud al-Zumar, a colonel in military intelligence. Who was a hero of the 1973 war against Israel. Another highly ranked member of Zawahiri’s cell was a heroic tank commander, Essam al-Qamari. Zawahiri described Qamari as a noble person in the true sense of the word".  Qamari began smuggling weapons and ammunition from army strongholds and storing them in Zawahiri’s medical clinic in Maadi, which was in a downstairs apartment in the duplex where his parents lived. In February of 1981, during a weapons transfer from the clinic to a warehouse, police arrested a man carrying a bag filled with guns, military bulletins and maps, showing location of all the tank emplacements in Cairo. Qamari realizing his compromised position disappeared. Several of Qamari’s officers were arrested. Zawahiri was not arrested however most of al-Jihad’s other leaders were.

A military cell within al-Jihad conceived and carried out the assassination, of Anwar Sadat, in the midst of the government crackdown on al-Jihad. A 23-year-old Lieutenant named Khaled Islambouli, agreed to kill Sadat, the following month during a military parade. During the parade, in celebration of the 1972 war, surrounded by dignitaries, including several American diplomats and Boutros Boutros –Ghali, the future secretary-general of the UN, Sadat was saluting the passing troops when a military vehicle veered toward the reviewing stand. 

Figure: 2 Lieutenant Islambouli firing into the stands.

Lieutenant Islambouli and several of his cohorts leaped from the vehicle and tossed grenades into the stand. Islambouli shouted: “I have killed the Pharaoh”, upon emptying the cartridge of his automatic weapon into Sadat’s body. Zawahiri claimed to have been unaware of the plot, until nine o’clock on the morning of October 6, 1981, only hours before the assassination was to take place. Zawahiri stated that he was: “I was astonished and shaken”. Zawahiri claimed that he counseled no action to aid and abet the plotters, he said: “What can we do? Do they want us to shoot up the streets and let the police detain us? We are not going to do anything”.  

Figure 3: Islambouli at his trial in Cairo.

The Iranian government named a street after Islambouli in 1981 in honor of his action. Following his execution, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini declared him a martyr. Qadriya, who is also the grandmother-in-law of Osama bin Laden’s son, said she was proud to see a street named after her son in Tehran. “Islambouli admired Iran,” she said. He was greatly affected by its Islamic revolution and hoped the same would happen across the Arab world, she told Ahram Online. “I am very proud that my son killed Anwar al-Sadat,” said Islambouli’s 85-year-old mother, Qadriya. “The government called him a terrorist, a criminal, and a murderer, but they didn’t say that he was defending Islam. They didn’t say anything about the oppressed people in Palestine, about Camp David, or how Sadat sold out the country to the Jews and violated the honor of the Islamic nation,” she was quoted as saying in Ahram online on Sunday. Islambouli who joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Muhammad al-Salam Faraj, Essam al-Qamari, his fellow assassins were executed on April 15, 1982. Following his execution, Islambouli was declared a martyr by many right-wing Muslims around the world, and became an inspirational symbol for radical Islamic movements. A fatwā approving the assassination had been obtained from Omar Abdel-Rahman the “Blind Sheik”, convicted in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

She also said she was able to return to Egypt from Afghanistan thanks to assistance by the Iranian authorities.

“I returned to Egypt through diplomatic channels, not security ones. The Iranian authorities put me in a hotel in Tehran for 15 days and made all the travel arrangements,”

On October 23, Zawahiri was set to travel to Pakistan. After saying goodbye to family members, his brother Hussein drove him to the airport on the way he was stopped, on the Nile Corniche. His cousin Omar recounted the incident: “they took Ayman to the Maadi police station, and he was surrounded by guards. The chief of police slapped him on the face and Ayman slapped him back. Zawahiri immediately became known among the prisoners as the man who struck back.

Zawahiri initially was purely for a strategy of government takeover through a well-organized surgical strike, led by the military wing of his al-Jihad organization, which was populated at the highest levels by Egyptian Army personnel. Essam al-Qamari the heroic and legendary tank commander in the Egyptian tank division, also a key al-Jihad member, was a primary example of the aforementioned.    

Zawahiri and his fellow prisoners were stripped, blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten with sticks. Disoriented, frightened and humiliated they were thrown into narrow stone cells. Zawahiri later wrote that, he was subjected to frequent beatings and other forms of torture. Montassir al-Zayyat an Islamist lawyer, who later wrote a never published biography of Zawahiri, said that: “the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison, transformed him into a violent and implacable extremist”.  In contemporary times Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are comparable, for their level of brutality and “radicalization”.  

Zawahiri was defendant 113 of 302 who were accused of aiding and abetting the assassination. During their trial Zazwahiri and his co-defendants were crowded into a cage that ran across, the vast courtroom. Zawahiri was their spokesman since his command of the English language is clear and concise. On December 4, 1982, video footage of the opening day of the trial shows three hundred defendants, under the lights of the TV cameras, chanting, and praying. Zawahiri stood apart from the others, Zawahiri 31 at the time looks solemn and focused, wearing a white robe the bearded Zawahiri begins a diatribe in clipped, precise English: “Now we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we? Why do they bring us here, and what we want to say? About the first question, we are Muslims who believe in their religion! We are Muslims who believe in our religion, both in ideology and practice, and hence we tried our best to establish an Islamic state and an Islamic society!” We are not sorry, we are not sorry for what we have done for our religion, and we have sacrificed, and we stand ready to make more sacrifices!” We are here the real Islamic front and the real Islamic opposition against Zionism, Communism, and Imperialism!”  “And now, an answer to the second question, why did they bring us here? They bring us here for two reasons! First, they are trying to abolish the outstanding Islamic movement…..and, secondly, to complete the conspiracy of evacuating the area in preparation for the Zionist infiltration”.  The other prisoners scream: “We will not sacrifice the blood of Muslims for the Americans and the Jews”.  They then remove their shoes and raise their robes, exposing the signs of their torture for the worlds media. Then Zawahiri resumes his indignant diatribe, he rants about the : “dirty Egyptian jails….where we suffered the severest inhuman treatment. There they kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs! And they used the wild dogs! And they hung us over the edges of doors, with our hands tied at the back! They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, and the sons!”  His fellow prisoners chant in unison, “The army of Muhammed will return, and we will defeat the Jews!”  He shouts the names of several of his companions who died as a result of torture. He then intones: “so where is Democracy? Where is freedom? Where is human rights? Where is justice? We will never forget! We will never forget!”   

Zawahiri’s torture allegations were substantiated by forensic medical reports. They noted six places where evidence of injury were found. His injuries it was concluded resulted from blows with “a solid instrument”. Zawahiri testified in a case against Intelligence Unit 75, the unit conducting the prison interrogations. At the end of three years Zawahiri was convicted of arms trafficking and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released in 1984, hardened, unbowed and hell bent on revenge Zawahiri was poised for his greatest task yet the Afghan jihad, where he would meet Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri would merge his al-Jihad with bin Laden’s MUKUB creating al-Qaeda.

Figure 4: Bin Laden and  Zawahiri in Tora Bora , Afghanistan.

Figure 5: Info graphic Truth terrorism.

  Further reading: The Looming Tower: Lawrence Wright.

Knights Under The Prophets Banner: Ayman al Zawahiri.

Osama The making of a Terrorist: Jonathan Randal.

The Cell: John Miller, ABC NEWS :  Michael  Stone, Chris Mitchell.

Holy War INC: Peter Bergen.