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Al Qaeda Leader's New Book Hints at Jihadist Divisions Over Use of Violence

Ayman al-Zawahiri—technically Al Qaeda's second-in-command, but widely considered among terrorism analysts to have eclipsed Osama Bin Laden in his influence—began his career as an Islamic militant in the early 1980s as an organizer and recruiter for Egypt's Islamic Jihad, at the time an upstart group that focused primarily on fostering domestic mayhem. Jailed after the group's 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, al-Zawahiri's Islamist credentials were burnished under torture by Egyptian authorities while his close-quarters prison association with other influential militants, the core of which formed a sort of Islamic fundamentalist think tank, raised his profile as an emerging jihadist leader. After a period of exile, which included the usual stint fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri rose to command a reconstituted version of his old affiliation, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which officially merged with Al Qaeda in 1998.

Such a distinguished background (from a terrorist perspective, at least) placed al-Zawahiri in a position to expound his politics from a high perch—which he did in his December 2001 e-book, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, presumably written by torchlight in an Afghan cave while American bombs rained outside. Since then, his steady stream of video and audio propaganda has formed the ideological frame for Al Qaeda's violence.

Posted by Bruce Falconer on 03/03/08 at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | Email | Print

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