Over a decade ago, when Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound and killed the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al Zawahiri assumed the reigns of the al Qaeda terrorist network.
Al Zawahiri, who has long been shrouded in mystery and previously had served as al Qaeda’s No. 2, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan on Saturday, President Joe Biden announced on Monday. Biden said al Zawahiri was in Kabul to reunite with his family members.
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“Justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more. People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer,” Biden said in his address from the White House. “One week ago, after being advised the conditions are optimal, I gave the final approval to go get him, and the mission was a success. None of his family members were hurt [and there were] no civilian casualties.”
Many foreign policy experts remained perplexed as to how al Zawahiri managed to avoid being captured or killed by the United States or allied forces for so long. Some had theorized that al Zawahiri was already dead or in poor health. Others suspected that he was hiding in Pakistan like bin Laden, making it difficult to reach him. Authorities had placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
Last year, after Taliban forces toppled the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, video surfaced that appeared to show the al Qaeda leader alive and commemorating the carnage his terrorist group inflicted on 9/11, when roughly 3,000 people were killed. The timing of the video came weeks after the Taliban returned to power.
Speculation began to brew that the Taliban takeover could make Afghanistan more suitable for al Zawahiri and al Qaeda. Twenty years prior, the Taliban had been accused of harboring al Qaeda, which served as part of the justification for the U.S. invasion following 9/11.
Al Zawahiri was born in Egypt in 1951 to a well-off family. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist, as a teenager and began plotting to overthrow Egypt’s government in favor of establishing a Muslim theocracy, according to the Washington Post. During his youthful machinations, he cultivated a band of followers that eventually became known as the Jamaat al Jihad.
In 1981, he was arrested after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and claimed to have been tortured in prison, according to the book Ayman al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him. The arrest was made due to his ties to al Jihad. Eventually, he was released because authorities lacked evidence that he was part of the conspiracy to kill Sadat, per a post from the Brookings Institution.
Following his release, al Zawahiri is believed to have engaged in multiple terrorist schemes across the world, including in Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan. During the 1980s, he made multiple trips to Afghanistan, where he would eventually collaborate with bin Laden, according to the Department of Defense. The two collaborated on efforts to subvert the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
By the 1990s, al Zawahiri’s al Jihad merged with al Qaeda, which was bigger in size and had more financial resources. In 1998, al Zawahiri was indicted for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings that killed hundreds in several East African cities. Those attacks propelled al Zawahiri into the international spotlight alongside bin Laden.
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Three years later, the two were credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks. In a letter to the U.S., bin Laden outlined several motivations for the attack, including U.S. support of Israel, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions on Iraq, and more.
With al Zawahiri dead, the U.S. and allied forces have succeeded in killing or capturing almost all of the high-profile al Qaeda members who operated in the time surrounding 9/11. Al Zawahiri is believed to have fathered at least seven children.
