Egyptian surgeon said to be the brains of Osama bin Laden's outfit

By HAMZA HENDAWI The Associated Press 9/19/01 2:09 PM

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Osama bin Laden has cash, men and the kind of personality around which cults are built. But it's a surgeon from Cairo who is thought to have the experience and ideological commitment to keep the world's most feared terror group operating.

Ayman al-Zawahri, who hails from a middle class family of doctors and scholars, is second only to bin Laden in the hierarchy of an international alliance set up in 1998 with the aim of killing Americans and destroying U.S. interests wherever they may be.

Bin Laden is said by the United States to be the prime suspect in last week's horrific suicide attacks on the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Both he and al-Zawahri are believed to be living in Afghanistan.

Al-Zawahri, 50, is the leader of Jihad, a secretive militant group that is blamed for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat during a Cairo military parade. The group takes its name from the Arabic for "holy war."

He has been a fixture in Egypt's Muslim militant scene since 1966 when, as a 15-year-old, he was arrested and later freed for his membership in the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's oldest fundamentalist Muslim group.

"Al-Zawahri's experience is much wider than even bin Laden's," said Dia'a Rashwan, one of Egypt's top experts on militants. "His name came up in virtually every case involving Muslim groups since the 1970s."

A 1974 graduate of Cairo University's medical school, al-Zawahri obtained a master's degree in surgery four years later. His father, who died in 1995, was a pharmacology professor at the same school. His grandfather, Rabia'a al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Cairo's al-Azhar, mainstream Islam's main seat of learning, early in the last century.

Ayman al-Zawahri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known of which is "The Bitter Harvest," a critical assessment of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

"He is the chief ideologue in the bin Laden group," said Rashwan. "Both he and bin Laden have combat experience, but it is Ayman who has the intellectual edge."

Al-Zawahri is the most senior in a brigade of several hundred Egyptians thought working under bin Laden's leadership in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden, al-Zawahri and the other Egyptians are among the militant Muslims from the world over who went to Afghanistan during the 1980s to fight invading Russian troops. When the Soviet Red Army pulled out in 1989 and the pro-Moscow government fell three years later, many of the militants stayed on in Afghanistan.

Besides Sadat's slaying, al-Zawahri's Jihad is also blamed for several assassination attempts against other senior Egyptian politicians during a Muslim insurgency in the 1990s, including former Prime Minister Atef Sedki. It also claimed responsibility for the 1996 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Al-Zawahri was tried along with scores of Jihad members for their part in Sadat's assassination. He was convicted and served a three-year sentence for illegal possession of arms. After his release, he left for Saudi Arabia. In 1999, he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court for activities linked to Jihad.

He left Saudi Arabia soon after arriving there, first heading to Peshawar, Pakistan, and later to neighboring Afghanistan.

According to Mohammed Salah, an Egyptian journalist who closely monitors Muslim groups, al-Zawahri re-established Jihad in Afghanistan in 1990 after the group was dealt a severe blow in the aftermath of Sadat's assassination.

"No one ever really talks to him," said Salah, who writes for the respected London-based daily Al Hayat. "He would be touring camps in Afghanistan and delivering sermons then just be on his way."

Jihad, according to Rashwan, doesn't rely on popular support and specializes in assassinations. Membership, he said, is subjected to strict criteria.

Al-Zawahri now heads only a faction of Jihad following disagreements with other leaders of the group over his February 1998 pact with bin Laden's al-Qaida group, two Pakistani groups and one from Bangladesh to create the International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusades.

Targeting Americans and U.S. interests as a declared aim was likely to draw unwelcome interest -- and the wrath of a superpower, the Jihad leaders who split with al-Zawahri argued.

Some of these Jihad leaders, like Mustapha Hamza, and members of other Egyptian groups, like the Gamaa Islamiya, continue to be based in Afghanistan outside the front.

Of the estimated 3,000 active members of the front in Afghanistan, about 1,000 are thought to be Egyptians, according to Salah. Others put the number at dozens or several hundreds at most.

Al-Zawahri is not the only senior Egyptian in the international front.

Sobhi al-Sitta, also known by the alias Abu Hafas al-Masri, is the commander of the front's military wing, known as the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Sites, which claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

One of Sitta's daughters married a son of bin Laden, according to TV footage of the wedding broadcast on an Arab satellite station in January.

Sitta succeeded another Egyptian, Ali al-Rashidi, who drowned in Uganda's Lake Victoria in 1995, two years after he was sent to Africa to recruit members for bin al-Qaida.

Salah said the cells al-Rashidi set up later bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

-- Anonymous, September 19, 2001

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-- Anonymous, September 19, 2001