Four months after succeeding Osama bin Laden at the head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri is spreading jihadist propaganda over the Internet, but must mainly be preoccupied with his own survival, experts say.
On June 16, six weeks after bin Laden was killed in a US raid, 59-year-old Egyptian al-Zawahiri was chosen to replace him as “commander-in-chief” of the Islamist militant group, a post previously unknown to the outside world.
Since then some jihadist groups, such as the Yemeni-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), have pledged allegiance.
Other factions which had previously followed bin Laden’s calls have been content to welcome al-Zawahiri’s appointment.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and author of a history of al-Qaeda, sees the Islamist group’s actions over the past four months as “purely defensive.”
“They are presiding over a jihadist capital which is diminishing,” he said.
Nowhere is it making any real progress, he added. While AQAP may be taking some towns, like Zinjibar in Yemen, that is “mainly due to the chaos reigning in the country. And even in this case it doesn’t amount to a victory for [al-]Zawahiri.” In the face of the maelstrom of the Arab Spring, which has seen regional governments fall through people power — though sometimes with a large helping hand from NATO and the West — al-Zawahiri has hailed the successive fall of despotic regimes, doing so via Islamist Web sites.
Last month the veteran of the Egyptian opposition forces called on Libyans to found an Islamic regime and for Algerians to revolt.
In July he hailed the Syrian mujahidin.
However, Filiu said that his pronouncements have fallen “practically unnoticed in the Western media. Compared to bin Laden’s threats it’s negligible.”
Dominique Thomas, specialist on Islamism at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, another French political science school, said al-Zawahiri was sending messages to affiliated groups, “trying to keep himself above the crowd,” with the main message that the Arab revolutionaries should create Islamic states and not allow the West to “steal their revolutions.”
However, al-Zawahiri, with a US$25 million bounty on his head and a permanent target for US drones’ Hellfire missiles, is in no position to mount or coordinate major operations. His imperative is survival.
“The pressure from the Americans is enormous,” Thomas said.
When US-Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in September, “he had not taken the threat seriously.”
In the mountainous, inaccessible Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where al-Zawahiri is believed to be hiding out “there are drone attacks almost every day,” Thomas said.
For Douglas Lute, US President Barack Obama’s main adviser on Afghan and Pakistan affairs, “al-Qaeda is in uncharted waters after the death of bin Laden.”
“They never had a succession process, this is a period of turbulence for this organization which is our archenemy,” he added.
“In this succession period there are three to five key senior leaders in al-Qaeda that if removed from the battlefield would seriously jeopardize al-Qaeda’s capacity to regenerate and therefore move us decidedly further toward defeat,” Lute said.
Al-Zawahiri knows whose name is at the top of that list.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion