Al-Masri had spent 40 days in Paktika, which borders South Waziristan, leading a company of non-Afghans in assaults against Afghan and coalition forces, and had lost several fighters, Yusuf said.
He said the Egyptian took his instructions directly from his countryman al-Zawahri, by e-mail or handwritten letters delivered by messenger.
Yusuf has family ties to al-Qaeda and says his two eldest brothers died fighting with al-Zawahri against Northern Alliance soldiers during Taliban rule. Afghan authorities confirm Yusuf is a senior Taliban from northern Afghanistan — not the Taliban spokesman who goes by the same name.
A report by counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling said al-Masri was a scientist in the Egyptian military chemical weapons program, but turned against his government for making peace with Israel in 1979.
He joined al-Zawahri’s Islamic Jihad group, and when it merged with al-Qaeda, became head of Project al-Zabadi, its WMD program, Darling wrote in a report posted in the Long War Journal, a Web site on terrorism.
Only after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan did evidence of al-Masri’s chemical experiments emerge, at al-Qaeda’s Darunta complex 112km east of Kabul.
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