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Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was on the FBI's most-wanted list, was killed by a CIA airstrike in Afghanistan over the weekend. Al-Zawahiri helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks and was Osama bin Laden's replacement as leader of the terrorist group. Bin Laden once said, 'Killing Americans is a duty for every Muslim.'
Al-Zawahiri, who was 71 years old, had been in charge of the terrorist group since President Barack Obama's Seal Team Six killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. His death is the most important and successful American operation against terrorism since President Donald Trump killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.
The Washington Post said that al-Zawahiri was born in Egypt to a family in the upper middle class. He was trained as a doctor and first became interested in terrorism when he was a teenager growing up outside of Cairo.
At the age of 15, he and some friends started an underground group called Jamaat al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. Their goal was to overthrow Egypt's government and replace it with an Islamic theocracy.
In the 1980s, the group came up with a number of plans to kill Egyptian leaders. In October 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was killed, and the group is thought to have been involved.
As a doctor, al-Zawahiri sometimes worked at a clinic run by the Muslim Brotherhood. He met bin Laden for the first time when the Muslim Brotherhood brought him to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to help refugees who had fled the Soviet Union.
He eventually became bin Laden's main doctor and helped him with a number of long-term health problems, like low blood pressure. This helped them become friends for decades.
In 1997, he helped plan an attack on foreign tourists in Luxor, Egypt, which killed 62 people. He then joined al-Qaeda and turned his attention to the US and Israel when the Egyptian public turned against him.
"To kill Americans and their allies, civilian and military, is a personal duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country where it is possible to do it," al-Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto, according to the outlet.
Three years later, he helped plan the terrorist attacks on September 11 and was in charge of coming up with ideas for more attacks. He set up a program to make biological weapons and sent followers out to find deadly strains of anthrax bacteria and scientists who agreed with them.
In the end, the plans failed when US bombers hit the homes and offices of Al Qaeda's leaders, including al-compound. Zawahiri's His wife, Azza Nowair, who he had six children with, died when she got stuck in the rubble and refused help because she didn't want men to see her without her veil.
Al-Zawahiri was said to be in bad health in his later years and not be seen in public for long periods of time.
He had a hard time keeping up with newer terrorist groups like ISIS, and he sometimes put out writings that one counterterrorism expert called "unbelievably boring."
Still, a pro-Al Qaeda group put out a video in September 2021 that showed that al-Zawahiri stayed true to his mission in his last years.
“Just as they have come together from all corners of the world to fight us,” al-Zawahiri said in the clip.
“We must hit them hard everywhere.”
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