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.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a