0
ISLAMABAD: Top Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri may these days be reviewing a life in which his devotion to religious war has cost him his family, his wealth and perhaps now his future.
The Egyptian, often called the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, was said on Thursday to be surrounded by Pakistani troops on the border with Afghanistan, two-and-a-half years after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks made him one of the most wanted men in the world.
Even his pursuers from the Pentagon and the CIA would admit that Ayman Zawahiri has made the greatest personal sacrifices for the sake of his cause. Decades ago he gave up the affluent life of a Cairo doctor to dedicate himself to the radical underground, a choice that would eventually take him, like Osama bin Laden, to the mountains of Afghanistan.
In Dec 2001, his wife and several children were reported to have been blown to pieces by American bombing in Afghanistan, but the bespectacled Al Qaeda leader managed to escape the US dragnet and went on the run.
Born in 1951, Zawahiri espoused his cause from an early age. In the 1960s he joined Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's oldest militant group. Mr Zawahiri followed in his father's footsteps and became a medical man, graduating from Cairo University's prestigious Faculty of Medicine in 1974.
He was tried, along with many others, for links to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He served a three-year jail term for illegal arms possession but was acquitted of the main charges.
In 1985, Zawahiri left Egypt for Pakistan, where he worked as a doctor treating fighters wounded in battles against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.
Ayman al Zawahiri took over in 1993 at the helm of the Jihad organisation, Egypt's second largest militant group. It and Egypt's biggest militant group, Al Gama'a al Islamia, were the two main forces behind a violent campaign from 1992 to 1997 to set up a purist Islamic state in Egypt, in which more than 1,200 people died. A military court in Egypt sentenced Mr Zawahiri to death in absentia in 1999 for militant activities.
OSAMA'S 'BRAINS': Zawahiri joined forces with Osama in 1998 to form an alliance to strike US and Zionist interests. He has been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The two met in the mid-1980s when both were in Peshawar to support the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. When Osama bin Laden speaks to the world, a bespectacled, avuncular man with grey hair and grey beard is to be found at his side.
But Ayman al Zawahiri is anything but grey: he is the quiet power behind Osama, the man most wanted after the Al Qaeda chief and his top strategist and planner. He is a signatory, along with Osama, to a 1998 declaration of jihad "against the Jews and Crusaders" that heralded the Sept 11 attacks. Associates have described the bespectacled, grey-bearded Zawahiri as a "polite and shy person", and some even suggest he does not have the stomach to lead a militant network.
Yet the Egyptian appeared side-by-side with Osama in cave hideouts and on mountainsides in several of the Al Qaeda videotapes made public since 2001. Ayman is for (Osama) bin Laden like the brain to the body," said Montasser al Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who represented Al Zawahiri in a trial in Cairo in the early 1980s.
One video shows him dressed in a turban and flowing robes, sitting beside Osama at the Afghan wedding of his leader's son in Jan 2001 to a daughter of Al Qaeda's late number three, former Egyptian policeman Mohammed Atef.
He sips tea at Osama's side in a virulently anti-American video statement by his leader. He kneels beside Osama on floor cushions in a Nov 2001 interview with a Pakistani reporter.
An undated video shows Al Zawahiri taking the lead from Osama in praise of the Sept 11 hijackers. "This great victory that was achieved is only thanks to God," he says. "Our 19 brothers gave their lives for God. God chose them for this great victory that we're living now."
In an audio tape last year, Zawahiri urged Muslims to strike at the embassies and commercial interests of the United States, Britain, Australia and Norway and half a dozen Middle East states he called subjects of America and Israel. Mr Zawahiri's two grandfathers were the first Arab League secretary-general and a former grand sheikh of Al Azhar. -Reuters
