Zawahiri at the Helm

Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon, has come into his inheritance—Al Qaeda—at a time when the organization is at its nadir. Osama bin Laden, its charismatic founder, is dead, and after some internal debate his No. 2 man, Zawahiri, has taken control. For nearly a decade, bin Laden pushed his followers to come up with a second act to 9/11, but they were unable to match the appalling brilliance of that attack. Now it is up to Zawahiri to salvage an organization that many think (and hope) has drifted into irrelevance.

Compared to bin Laden, Zawahiri lacks charisma, but it would be a mistake to underestimate his commitment and his willingness to spill blood. He was hardened by the torture he endured in the three years he spent in Egyptian prisons following the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, in 1981, and by the savage underground war that he has fought with Egyptian intelligence agencies ever since.

Zawahiri has shown a daring willingness to improvise. He inaugurated the use of suicide bombers with his failed attack on the Egyptian Interior Minister, Hasan al-Alfi, in 1993, although the tactic breaks a fundamental taboo in Islam against the taking of one’s own life. He also introduced the propaganda ploy of the martyrdom video, which would become a signature of Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden needed Zawahiri, not least because of his physical ailments. Although bin Laden did not have kidney disease, as was widely thought, he was often ill; Zawahiri served as his personal physician, and manipulated his position to cement their relationship. Bin Laden also depended on Zawahiri for his organizational skill and the talented men he brought with him. But Zawahiri also depended on bin Laden, whose money, mystique, and connections to wealthy Gulf Arabs gave Al Qaeda an advantage few other terror groups have ever enjoyed.

Zawahiri has experience in rebuilding broken terrorist groups; his own organization in Egypt, Al Jihad, was twice wiped out by operational errors, and Zawahiri had to rally the demoralized survivors, even pretending to step aside from power, although he was never really far from the controls. His ultimate solution was to merge Al Jihad with Al Qaeda, making it into an Egyptian body with a Saudi head. Now that bin Laden is gone, the challenge for Zawahiri will be to keep non-Egyptians in Al Qaeda. Members pledged their loyalty to bin Laden personally, not to the organization, so a new round of declarations will have to be made, providing Zawahiri an immediate test of his popularity.

One big difference in Zawahiri’s leadership from that of his predecessor is likely to be a renewed focus on Egypt. Zawahiri’s terrorist career began when he was fifteen years old, when he started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. Now the government actually has been overthrown, no thanks to Zawahiri’s efforts. The country is in a tumultuous and formative but also vulnerable moment in its history, which Zawahiri will seek to exploit. He knows that Egypt is the real game in the Islamist contest for power. The future of Egypt will determine much of what happens in the rest of the Arab world. No matter how it turns out, the Egyptian revolution will be seen historically as a bookend to the Iranian revolution in 1979, which added reality to the radical Islamist agenda and inspired so many young Muslims, like Zawahiri, to take up jihad. Iran showed them that they actually could take over a major Muslim country and turn it into a theocracy. Zawahiri was always frustrated that it was a Shiite country that became the first important Islamic theocracy in the modern world. He will devote himself to making Egypt a Sunni replica of the Iranian state, and not the end of a trend that has led so many Muslim countries into fundamentalist dead ends.