Islamabad - Egyptian-born doctor and surgeon and
"emir as it were"
Ayman al-Zawahri is al Qaeda's second-in-command expected to succeed Osama bin Laden following his killing in a fire-fight with US forces in Pakistan.
Zawahri has been
the leader Egyptian Islamic Jihad and
the the brains behind bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the US and its allies in video messages.
from Wikipedia:
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad formerly called simply Islamic Jihad originally referred to as "al-Jihad," and then "the Jihad Group", or "the Jihad Organization", is an Egyptian Islamist group active since the late 1970s. It is under worldwide embargo by the United Nations as an affiliate of al-Qaeda. It is also banned by several individual governments including that of the Russian Federation. Since 1991 it has been led by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The organization's original primary goal was to overthrow the Egyptian Government and replace it with an Islamic state. Later it broadened its aims to include attacking the United States and Israel interests in Egypt and abroad.
EIJ has suffered setbacks as a result of numerous arrests of operatives worldwide, most recently in Lebanon and Yemen.[citation needed] In June 2001, Al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which had been associated with each other for many years, merged into "Qaeda al-Jihad." |