In Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi had been orchestrating suicide bombings of Shiite Muslim shrines. His followers frequently videotaped the beheading of hostages. Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who helped organize the Sept. eleven terrorist attacks within the U.S. and alternative violence, told Zarqawi he was going too so much.Washington— In July 2005, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri sent an extended letter to the group's lead operative in Iraq, urging him to tone down his activities.
"We are in a very media battle, in a very race for the hearts and minds" of Muslims, wrote Zawahiri, who was named Thursday to succeed Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda's leader. And most Muslims "will never notice [such tactics] palatable."
Zarqawi did not heed the counsel, and a year later he was killed in a very U.S. airstrike, aided by variety of} his growing number of enemies. If the commit to rein him in revealed Zawahiri as a canny strategist, it conjointly illustrated how very little management Al Qaeda's leaders had over their affiliates even then.
Zawahiri, who contains a $25-million yank bounty on his head, are wanting to launch a serious strike to prove himself and avenge Bin Laden, say U.S. officers and terrorism consultants. however he might notice the organization even tougher to manage.
Al Qaeda and its offshoots have more splintered, Zawahiri lacks Bin Laden's charisma, and the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, where Zawahiri is presumed to be hiding, can build it tougher for him to speak, said Daniel Byman, director of analysis at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a Washington suppose tank.
"It's a company liable to division. you've got multiple power centers. there's a major disagreement on priorities. And whereas he is been within the terrorism business for forty years, nobody ever used the word 'charisma' in talking concerning Zawahiri," Byman said.
U.S. officers said they believe the Al Qaeda announcement Thursday was authentic, however they downplayed its importance.
"Frankly, it barely matters," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
A U.S. counter-terrorism official said Al Qaeda members don't seem to be as dedicated to Zawahiri as they were to Bin Laden, which is able to build it tougher for him to guide.
Some consultants say that might initially build him a lot of dangerous.
"Zawahiri will definitely attempt to prove his bona fides by pushing for attacks and reprisals whereas finding ways that of taking advantage of the chaos and disillusionment ensuing from the Arab Spring — with a spotlight little doubt on Egypt," said Juan Zarate, who was counter-terrorism advisor to President George W. Bush.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism skilled at Georgetown University, agreed that Zawahiri lacks Bin Laden's temperament. "But do not you're thinking that that the No. one issue on Zawahiri's agenda is to drag off an enormous, bloody attack?"
A scion of an upper-middle-class family, Zawahiri, 59, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at fourteen, and at fifteen he shaped a a lot of radical underground organization. within the Nineteen Seventies, he served 3 years as a surgeon within the Egyptian army.
When Islamic militants assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Zawahiri was arrested, however authorities could not prove his role within the plot, and he was released. He linked up with Bin Laden in Pakistan, where he was running a bunch serving to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
"Accounts of Zawahiri's life from family friends and jail cellmates paint him as an ungainly, withdrawn, disputatious man of very little grace and far violence," wrote Steve Coll in "Ghost Wars," his 2004 history of Al Qaeda.
After the war Zawahiri followed Bin Laden to Sudan and then back to Afghanistan, where they were sheltered by the Taliban regime. They planned the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, the 2000 suicide bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole off the coast of Yemen and also the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Their stated goal is to ascertain a caliphate to impose their version of Islam over all Muslim countries. as a result of the U.S. backed Israel and what they thought-about apostate Arab regimes, Americans were their enemy.
In a 2001 document, Zawahiri said it had been Al Qaeda's intent to kill as several Americans as potential. within the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan killed one among his wives, a son and a daughter. Zawahiri makes reference to that incident in his letter to Zarqawi, saying he had "tasted the bitterness of yankee brutality."
In a video he posted once Bin Laden's death, he vowed revenge on the u. s., arguing that the killing would spark a "jihadist renaissance."
Al Qaeda's approval ratings are low across several Muslim countries, starting from three-dimensional in Lebanon to twenty-eight within the Palestinian territories, in keeping with a might seventeen poll by the Pew analysis Center's world Attitudes Project. and also the pro-democracy movements of the "Arab Spring" appear worlds faraway from Al Qaeda's ideology.
Still, it'd take solely another successful attack to reestablish Al Qaeda as a heavy threat, Hoffman said.
"They is also lots weaker, however they pin their religion and hope on pulling off a successful operation," he said. "Hopefully we will deprive them of that, however i'd say, below a replacement leader, the threat they cause remains considerable."
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