After nearly two decades in hiding, the Egyptian terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, successor to Osama bin Laden as head of al-Qaida, has died aged 71. He was killed by two missiles fired from a US drone at his home in central Kabul. Zawahiri provided the arguments and the systematic organisation that persuaded Bin Laden, six years his junior, to operate on an international scale, culminating in the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the US that resulted in more than 3,000 deaths. However, after Bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011, Zawahiri made threats, but never repeated atrocities against the west on the scale of 9/11.
Once leader, he steered an al-Qaida demoralised by Bin Laden’s death, and later by the emergence in Iraq of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS) movement. Though the rival jihadis rapidly outdid al-Qaida in brutality, after five years they were largely crushed, leaving Zawahiri’s now more decentralised operation intact, and spreading.
