Key Reflections
* Ayman al-Zawahiri engaged in terrorism for five decades and represents an Egyptian ideological strain that pursued insurrection in the Middle East, North Africa, and the West.
* Al-Zawahiri was calculating and scheming. He positioned himself as the face of the al-Jihad terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and isolated his rivals by endearing himself to bin Laden in Pakistan.
* Al-Zawahiri worked in tandem with Osama bin Laden to develop al-Qaeda’s strategy and tactics. The Egyptian oversaw many of al-Qaeda’s most consequential mass casualty attacks and plots. He also recruited double and triple agents.
* The September 11 terrorist attacks were only possible because al-Zawahiri coordinated the precursor plot involving the assassination of the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood, two days before 9/11. This eliminated a key ally of the United States and ensured the loyalty of the Taliban who feared Masood.
* During the War on Terror years, al-Zawahiri ensured his own personal safety by insulating himself with the Taliban in Pakistan as well as being protected by Pakistani terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
* Throughout the generations, al-Zawahiri pioneered and evolved the use of technology as a tool to provide the oxygen of publicity for terrorism.
Transcript:
MA: Marcus Andreopoulos
VJ: Victoria Jones
SG: Sajjan Gohel
MA: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast with me, Marcus Andreopoulos.
VJ: And me, Victoria Jones. In this episode we’ll be speaking to Dr. Sajjan Gohel, author of the forthcoming book Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist, The Life and Legacy of Al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
MA: Sajjan is also the International Security Director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, the chair of the NATO DEEP Global Threats Advisory Group (GTAG), and guest teacher at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is also, of course, the host of this podcast, which is why today he’s being interviewed by us, the producers.
VJ: Sajjan, welcome to the show.
SG: Thank you, Victoria. Thank you, Marcus. Appreciate the invitation. Please be gentle!
VJ: How does it feel to be on the other side as the interviewee?
SG: Surreal, but I’m looking forward to it.
VJ: Likewise, as are we. So, let’s just dive in. Can I just ask you to tell us a bit about what inspired you to start looking into Ayman al-Zawahiri as a figure of history or character in the first place?
SG: Sure, so I guess there was a thematic approach that got me interested. Let’s start with some context. I saw the September 11 attacks happen on television, it was something that had a huge impact on everybody at the time, to see that sheer force of terrorism, the brutality of it, the chaos, the panic, the fear that it created. But behind the violence, there was a message, there was a doctrine, which I was very interested in understanding because counter-terrorism has to be much more than capturing, killing, and prosecuting you’ve got to understand the ideology in order to try and find methods to counter.
And as I started looking at it in more detail, I discovered that there was an Egyptian ideological strain from various different figures in history, starting with Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, he’d created the first clandestine movement to plot attacks, conduct assassinations. This was followed by another Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, who was a teacher, turned ideologue, gained the respect of global jihadists because he’d visited the United States, especially New York City, and Greeley, Colorado, which was not necessarily a place everyone would know about, but it gained a lot of attention because Qutb painted a very negative picture of the United States to justify his preconceived notions of Western moral corruption and decadence. His other contribution was that he wrote the book Milestones which spoke about removing what he deemed apostate rulers in the Islamic world by violent force and challenge the moral malaise that countries like Egypt found itself in.
So, his book contributed to eventually being imprisoned and then sentenced to death by the state, under the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Interestingly Qutb’s lawyer was an uncle of Ayman al-Zawahiri, so this left a massive imprint on al-Zawahiri too and he felt he had a personal responsibility to continue Qutb’s legacy and that contributed to him joining the terrorist group al-Jihad, the same entity that then was responsible for assassinating Nasser’s successor as Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Again, ideology played a role because there was a book called The Neglected Duty by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, and that book was the inspiration for the assassination of Sadat. Al-Zawahiri was part of al-Jihad, and so he was arrested for the assassination and then he became the face of the Egyptian jihadist movement. So, I’m giving you a kind of a long ideological trail here and al-Zawahiri was the latest incarnation of that strain, that’s why, ultimately, I started looking at it.
VJ: Very interesting and speaking of all the Egyptian ideologues that you’ve been mentioning, I know your PhD focused on this topic as well. So, how much of the book is related to what you were looking at with your PhD? Does it build upon that work?
SG: Well, I’m not going to bore everybody with the huge, intricate details of my PhD, but the book in many ways, I guess, has been an on/off process since 2009 and it’s evolved substantially. I would say that it’s primarily a different contribution and that’s because so much has happened between 2009 to 2022 involving Ayman al-Zawahiri. I do encapsulate that Egyptian strain, but it’s very much centred around the prism of al-Zawahiri, his life, 55 years and terrorism, covering a several generations, and also areas that were not looked at previously, including his time as the head of al-Qaeda when he took over from Osama bin Laden in 2011.
VJ: That’s very interesting. One other question I was just curious about is, what was the most surprising thing you’ve discovered during your research for the book, and then also relatedly, could you tell us a bit about your methodology and how you went about finding relevant material?
SG: So, what I found surprising was just how significant and important Ayman al-Zawahiri’s family is when it comes to Egyptian society, both on his paternal and maternal side and that also would then play a role in his own calculus, his own worldview. So, for example, on Ayman al-Zawahiri’s paternal side, one of his relatives, one of his grand uncles, Muhammad al-Zawahiri was the grand Imam at the Al Azhar seminary, one of the most prestigious Islamic institutions in the world and he had attained that position during British colonial occupation of Egypt, and eventually he was pushed out of that role because of his tensions with Britain. And that in particular then had a knock-on effect in terms of why Ayman al-Zawahiri was so opposed to Western presence in the Islamic world.
The other thing that was important was also on his maternal side. So, one of his great uncle’s Abdul Rahman Azzam, was the first Secretary General of the Arab League and he was there when the British Mandate of Palestine came to an end, and the state of Israel emerged, and the wars with various Arab countries. So, again, that had a massive impact on Ayman al-Zawahiri’s thinking. And perhaps the third thing that struck me was that al-Zawahiri actually saw himself as a historian. If you look at a lot of his writings, his doctrine, it is shaped by archival research. How he got hold of those archival documents is something that is very curious, but he was somebody who looked at the past to understand the present.
And in terms of my methodology, a lot of it was piecing together various different strands across decades of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s life, interviewing people that knew him, interviewing people that were investigating him, a lot of counter-terrorism officers that had spent their lives trying to locate him, trying to understand who he was, what he was about, and then trying to piece it all together. It was not an easy process. It took a long time, many years, but it was very satisfying to then be able to put the different pieces of the puzzle together to form that wider picture.
MA: These different pieces of the puzzle that you mentioned, they really uncover a lot about someone that is perhaps less well known than the likes of Osama bin Laden. But for those who do know about al-Zawahiri, what would you say is the most misunderstood thing about him?
SG: Well, often there’s this perception that al-Zawahiri gave very long, turgid statements, that was certainly a reputation that he perhaps had in the latter years of his time as the head of al-Qaeda, but I think that often gets misunderstood because he was also very nuanced. And if you look at everything associated with al-Qaeda, it tends to be, as you mentioned, tied with Osama bin Laden, but in fact, there was al-Zawahiri’s hand, always behind the scenes. He was very cunning. He was long term thinking. This is an individual that was responsible for plotting some of the most significant terrorist attacks that we had seen prior to 9/11, such as the U.S. embassy bombings. This was a person who also started recruiting double agents and even triple agents all the way from the 1980s, sending them to the United States, so that they could be his eyes and ears.
He was thinking long term, that if you are going to defeat the regimes in Egypt, especially in the 1980s, which at that time was led by Hosni Mubarak, then you needed to understand the countries that supported Egypt, such as the United States. So, this was somebody who was planning, strategically, tactically, and I think that has often been ignored and neglected. The fact that you had somebody that was looking at having agents and spies for a terrorist organisation in the 1980s is unheard of.
MA: Well, you certainly do get across this point that this was a very methodological, strategic thinker. So, do you think he’d prefer this role, in the background directing operations? Or did he wish for fame in the same way that perhaps bin Laden achieved in those late 1990s, early 2000 years?
SG: That very much depends on the period that we’re looking at. He certainly courted attention and notoriety. So, for example, when he was imprisoned for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, even though he was on the periphery of that particular incident. He became the face of the movement. You see him being very charismatic behind the prison cell. So, the perception that he was very turgid, and boring is actually not reflective of who he was and how he grew, as being a leader of a global jihadist movement. You see him behind the prison cell, captivating the media, the public that are present, the fact that all the other individuals in the prison cell are following every word, then chant as he finishes his statements.
This was somebody who wanted the attention, he liked the oxygen of publicity. And as I mentioned, he became the face of the movement. This was also somebody who could speak in English. Not many people knew that, but Ayman al-Zawahiri was fluent, very articulate in English, unlike Osama bin Laden. He was fiery, he was very intense in what he was saying. Over time, personal security became his priority. He would still appear in a lot of the al-Qaeda videos and propaganda, seeking to inspire and influence terrorists around the world. But perhaps at that point, he preferred to take a role which was more safe and secure rather than court the limelight as much as he had perhaps done previously.
MA: That’s interesting. So, what do you make of the claim that al-Zawahiri was not instrumental to the 9/11 attacks in 2001?
SG: It’s an important question because the September 11 attacks have defined al-Qaeda, and certainly there are scholars and journalists that have made the point that Ayman al-Zawahiri was not intrinsic to the 9/11 attacks. And I don’t necessarily disagree with that, because primarily Ayman al-Zawahiri had been tasked to actually do the precursor to 9/11, which if it did not happen, the September 11 attacks could not have occurred either.
So, what doesn’t get a lot of attention and it is as important as the September 11 attacks was the assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, which was on 9th September 2001. And the reason why that was done was because Ahmad Shah Massoud, as the leader of the Northern Alliance, was a major thorn in the side of the Taliban. He was the one preventing the Taliban from completely controlling Afghanistan. And as we know, al-Qaeda was allied to the Taliban, the Taliban had given al-Qaeda safe sanctuary. So, in order to carry out the September 11 attacks, al-Qaeda’s calculus was that the United States would react, that they would want to launch some kind of invasion in Afghanistan, but that they would be weakened, they would be hemmed in, and they would also suffer casualties if they didn’t have an ally on the ground.
So, the theory was that if Ahmad Shah Massoud was successfully eliminated, the Northern Alliance would fall apart, it would dissolve, and the U.S. would not have a viable ally on the ground. Ayman al-Zawahiri had to plan a very sophisticated operation to lure Ahmad Shah Massoud into a false sense of security. So, for over a year, there was a plot to convince Ahmad Shah Massoud that journalists from Belgium wanted to interview him as part of a documentary, and that dialogue had begun well over a year before the September 11 attacks. Ahmad Shah Massoud was fooled into agreeing to that interview, and then on September 9, 2001, two individuals pretending to be journalists carried out an attack in which a bomb inside a video camera exploded, killing one of the terrorists as well as Ahmad Shah Massoud. That was the signal, the green light, to the September 11 plotters that they can carry out their operation.
Without Ayman al-Zawahiri’s role in the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, 9/11 would not or could not have happened and it would not have been successful. So, I don’t disagree with people that say that he didn’t plot the September 11 attacks, but he was certainly consulted about it, he was involved in the planning of it, and he was the key to the precursor to 9/11.
VJ: Sajjan, I was wondering if you could tell us how you ended up choosing the title for the book, Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist.
SG: This was a long-drawn-out process. I think both of you were involved in helping in that as well. The original idea that I had was calling it the ‘$25 Million Terrorist’ and that was because that’s the bounty placed by the United States on Ayman al-Zawahiri. The fact was that was the highest amount ever put on any individual wanted by the United States. My editor at Oxford University Press made the point, that two decades after that bounty was put on, $25 million was not a lot of money anymore, and that inflation has perhaps devalued that. I wouldn’t personally say no to $25 million! But I do agree that it doesn’t necessarily carry the same resonance that it used to.
My other idea was to call it ‘The Enduring Terrorist’ because, prior to 2022, Ayman al-Zawahiri was still at large, he had been on the run for decades, and he had somehow managed to avoid being detected. As we know, he was eventually then found in Afghanistan, after the Taliban re-conquered the country, so that changed the perception of what is enduring!
Eventually then I settled on the title which I’m happiest about, in fact, which is Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist and the reason for that is that if you see the FBI Most Wanted poster, there are aliases that describe Ayman al-Zawahiri, which include ‘teacher’ and ‘doctor’, and then, of course, it says right at the top that he’s one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. So, Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist, which is also reflective as to his own credentials as a doctor and a teacher, as well as being one of the world’s most notorious terrorists.
VJ: And could you also tell us about the significance of the book cover itself? For listeners, the cover of the book depicts Ayman al-Zawahiri raising one finger and then there’s also an image in the background.
SG: There are many easter eggs on the front cover alluding to al-Zawahiri’s life in terrorism. Four in particular: Firstly, the image of al-Zawahiri reflects the moment when he announced in 2011 that he had taken over from Osama bin Laden as al-Qaeda leader following bin Laden’s death in a U.S. counter-terrorism operation in Pakistan.
The second dimension is al-Zawahiri holding aloft his right index finger, where he is alluding to the tawhid, the belief in the oneness of God, and the statement of faith. Overtime, that has become a sign of an ideological cause within transnational terrorist circles. There is an incorrect perception that ISIS coined the usage of the index finger for its terrorist agenda. Actually, al-Zawahiri started it when he was imprisoned following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat back in 1981. That is how far back it goes, and al-Zawahiri was seen doing that in front of the gaze of the world’s media. Interestingly, I have a photo in my book reflecting that.
The third aspect you may notice is the callus on al-Zawahiri’s forehead. It’s a prayer mark aimed to show his own personal piety from repeated prostration in prayer. Sometimes, the mark is quaintly referred to as a raisin. Curiously, Anwar Sadat had the same prayer mark, which he would use to convey his own religiosity.
The last part on the cover is the silhouette of the 1998 US Embassy bombing in Kenya, which al-Zawahiri and his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group coordinated with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. It’s meant to demonstrate al-Zawahiri’s own impact, influence and imprint on bin Laden. So, the four visual aspects of the cover are demonstrating leadership, ideology, theology, and terrorism. All of which were continuously conveyed by al-Zawahiri throughout his decades in terrorism.
VJ: I noticed also that you have a lot of interesting and detailed maps in your book. Why did you decide those were important to include?
SG: Forgive the pun, but I wanted to map out al-Zawahiri’s 55 years in terrorism! I have seen many books on terrorism, and they’re very good books around, but I have been disappointed with the maps, because they just seem to be an afterthought, very basic—they don’t really provide any information, and you wonder why they’re even there. So, I wanted to have maps that could serve as a window into Ayman al-Zawahiri’s life, where he travelled, what he planned, who he was ultimately targeting in terms of his terrorism. I wanted to show how he was moving across four continents: North America, Europe, Africa, Asia. And I think these maps—they tell the story on their own. It conveys hopefully the enormity, and the magnitude of what Ayman al-Zawahiri was inflicting upon the world across generations.
It was interesting, because in many ways, the maps were a project on their own. They tell their own story. I’m very grateful to my cartographer Ed Merritt for the work he put in, because originally, we were thinking about just having one map, and then we ended up creating four, and each one is very detailed, and hopefully it provides a clear illustration as to what terrorists can plan, especially if they’re able to plot and plan across five decades.
MA: Well, I for one am certainly glad that you decided to include so many maps with so much detail. I feel like in a lot of these sorts of books, you can really get lost in the maps before you even start the story just because of, like you said, how much of a story they tell in themselves. To go back to an earlier point that you made during this podcast, I want to return to the importance of the Egyptian strain of jihadism, and why you deem it to be so important in your book.
SG: The Egyptian strain is significant because it’s ultimately the doctrine that consumed al-Qaeda, that shaped much of al-Qaeda’s thinking from individuals like al-Banna, Qutb, Faraj, and of course, Ayman al-Zawahiri. And if you think about the fact that Ayman al-Zawahiri had led his own terrorist group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—which was working in tandem with al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s, and then formally merged with al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001, before the 9/11 attacks—you get to see that it had a massive bearing and influence upon Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden himself relied and depended on Ayman al-Zawahiri. He needed him as somebody who would check his impulses, guide him, give him the support he needed, but also act as that barometer as to what the sentiments were that existed within the Islamic world, within especially the jihadist movements that were plotting and planning attacks, not just against the West, but also against regimes in the Islamic world, that al-Qaeda were also responsible for killing Muslims as part of their plots and collateral damage. So, the Egyptian narrative has been enduring long-term, and that has also been so significant when it has factored into the calculus of Osama bin Laden and the global jihadist movement.
MA: In your book, you also talk about al-Zawahiri’s experimenting with technology and new media. Could you expand on this point?
SG: The aspect about technology is very important, because Ayman al-Zawahiri was actually a pioneer. He was very innovative in controlling the media narrative to make sure that it reflected and represented what he wanted to convey. And this goes back all the time to the 1970s, where Ayman al-Zawahiri was fascinated in how television media would produce news reports, documentaries. One of his relatives worked as a stringer for several US media networks in Egypt. And al-Zawahiri would talk to him about the editorial standards of news media, how you would film, direction, cutaways, how you would splice in different images. All of this shaped much of his thinking. And as I was mentioning earlier, you saw al-Zawahiri behind the prison cell, galvanising the world’s media in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination.
Media became an important tool for him, almost as important as actually carrying out acts of terrorism or spreading hate, and he was pioneering then in its technological dimension. Ayman al-Zawahiri was the very first terrorist to start using fax machines as conveying statements to the world’s media, claiming responsibility for attacks. Now, of course, today, fax machines may be deemed to be very outdated, but at the time, they were extremely new and innovative. Also, Ayman al-Zawahiri had spoken in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks about how the jihadist movement had to end the ‘media siege’ from the West, that the media was controlled, in his mind, by the West, and that the jihadists had to take ownership of it.
So again, when you see the growth and the advent of the internet, that was something that Ayman al-Zawahiri was very keen to latch onto, creating their own production company for al-Qaeda, as-Sahab, that would have editorial standards, that would create visuals, that would be effective in conveying a message, bite-sized sometimes, or on occasions more detailed, claiming responsibility for attacks. And you saw al-Qaeda’s independence on technology continue to grow, and Ayman al-Zawahiri was very much at the helm of coining and developing that.
MA: And this experimentation extended to other spheres, for example, looking at different types of weaponry. You mention in your book some experimentation with CBRNE, or chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons. Could you also expand that?
SG: One of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s most dangerous obsessions in the 1990s was to make al-Qaeda a very effective terrorist group using biological, chemical, radiological, and even nuclear weapons. He spent a huge amount of time looking at all of these various potential deadly weapons. He was seen as experimenting with chemical weapons; for example, there are videos that were uncovered from the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, where they were experimenting on dogs. And we also know that he had created laboratories, in which he oversaw the production of experiments that were designed to then be used for the purposes of terrorism.
Even when it came to nuclear weapons, just demonstrating how overly ambitious he was, Ayman al-Zawahiri would speak to Pakistani nuclear scientists that were involved in Pakistan’s own clandestine nuclear programme, to see if they could be used to aid al-Qaeda’s quest. That never took off, in large part because 9/11 and the US operation to remove the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan hindered the development of that, but al-Qaeda still looked at chemical, radiological, and biological plots, which they were seeing whether they could be viable.
There was a plot in New York, which Ayman al-Zawahiri ultimately decided not to go ahead with for strategic reasons—and I explain in my book in more detail why—and then there was also a plot in the UK using a radiological device, which thankfully was disrupted by British authorities. So again, you’re looking at somebody that was looking at a very dangerous form of terrorism involving weapons that could have had a massive consequential impact on our lives.
VJ: In terms of identifying the location of al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan, they all ended up being found in the country’s urban centres. But al-Zawahiri chose to hide in the Pakistani tribal areas. Why was that the case?
SG: The logistics are fascinating because a lot of the al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, were found in major urban centres. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the master planners of 9/11 was found in Rawalpindi next to a military garrison. And perhaps that was also very revealing in that even Osama bin Laden was right next-door to Pakistan’s military academy. So a lot of the al-Qaeda figures wanted to be in urban centres, and perhaps they thought that that was a safe place—they had some security guarantees by Pakistani jihadist groups that had those murky ties with the Pakistani military—but because they were in those urban centres, it was easier for the US to eventually find them and track them, especially if they had their own networks in which they could uncover where these people were based.
Ayman al-Zawahiri adopted a different approach. He chose to be based also in Pakistan, but in the tribal areas. And he was insulated, protected, by not just Pakistani jihadist groups, but also by the Taliban, and in particular entities like the Haqqani Network. So even though he was probably in a much more spartan environment, tougher, difficult conditions, he nevertheless focused on his personal safety and security, and also had the backing of the Taliban. And that is why during the whole duration of the war on terrorism, he was never captured or killed. There were many efforts to get him, and I talk about in my book where there were close moments where the US thought they might be able to target him, but at the last moment, Ayman al-Zawahiri kept escaping, kept eluding being captured.
VJ: That’s all very interesting. Also, I wanted to ask you, what kind of strategic mistakes would you say al-Zawahiri made as the leader of al-Qaeda?
SG: There were several. And it’s also important to point out that no terrorist is the perfect assassin or murderer. They will make mistakes too, and Ayman al-Zawahiri made mistakes. And it’s important to look at that because that also tells the story of an individual.
One of those perhaps was that he was never successful in countering the perception that he had killed the Jordanian-Palestinian ideologue Abdullah Azzam. They were rivals; they formed a tense relationship in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the country, and whilst they were based in Pakistan, they had a falling out. That falling out was largely down to the direction of where the Arab fighters would go after the Soviets were defeated. Abdullah Azzam wants to focus on Israel-Palestine; Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to look at the Arab regimes such as that of Hosni Mubarak. Abdullah Azzam mysteriously died, and in my book, I unpack potentially who was responsible for killing him. The strong perception within the jihadist community was that Ayman al-Zawahiri was responsible, and in many ways, even though he was successful in getting rid of a rival, and then using that opportunity to further develop his ties with bin Laden, it also hindered Ayman al-Zawahiri too, because there were many jihadists in some parts of the Arab world that resented Ayman al-Zawahiri for that.
The other perhaps strategic mistake was the fact that he chose to support Osama bin Laden over the 9/11 attacks. Ayman al-Zawahiri did not prioritise 9/11 as essential. He had no love for the United States, he hated America as much as bin Laden. He was fine with plotting attacks against US interests, such as the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania or targeting the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. But he was hesitant about going off to the US mainland, because he was concerned that that would lead to massive blowback, as it eventually did. And it also resulted in him having a massive falling out within his own Egyptian cadre of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who were opposed to the 9/11 attacks. So, he ended up having a fracture within his own terrorist group.
Perhaps the third strategic mistake was in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. Ayman al-Zawahiri was unable to address the differences of strategic opinions by various jihadists such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would end up becoming the leader of ISIS, and Abu Mohammed al-Golani. These two individuals had a very poor relationship, and Ayman al-Zawahiri failed to find a solution in that. And these I think are examples of where perhaps on reflection he may have wanted to do things differently. But he was never ever acknowledging his mistakes. He was adamant that everything he did was ultimately correct. But these things certainly created setbacks for him, and also, I guess, left a challenge in terms of what direction he could go down in the future.
VJ: In your opinion, what has been the most consequential decision that al-Zawahiri made during his decades-long career in terrorism?
SG: Very often when we look at terrorism, we look at the attack, we look at the number of fatalities, people injured, we look at the visuals of it. And each attack, of course, has a consequence. But I would say in many ways, his contribution has been more the disruption, because not every plot he had wanted to carry out was successful. But the plot itself caused a massive impact on the way we see and feel about security. It required counter-terrorism agencies to have to recalibrate. It required governments to pass new laws when it came to prosecuting terrorists, also enhancing security methods and procedures at critical national infrastructure sites, including at airports. It caused a massive amount of disruption to our daily lives. It became an upheaval; it became more irksome.
One example, which I talk about in the book, was the 2006 airline liquid bomb plot, in which al-Qaeda planned to blow up several transatlantic flights from the UK to the US and Canada. Thankfully, the British authorities along with their American colleagues were able to stop that from happening. But that has had long-term ramifications. It created the ban on liquids that we could take on board a plane as hand luggage—we can only do it through those plastic bags with 100 ml bottles. That is one of the legacies of Ayman al-Zawahiri. And in 2023, most airports still have those bans. So, you can see that disruption, in many ways, was one of his consequences.
I would also say that he has left the imprint of the Egyptian ideological strain for others to continue, he has passed that mantle on for others to pick up and carry through for the future for when groups like al-Qaeda and other jihadist entities are able to be at an operational ability to start plotting and planning deadly attacks again.
MA: I think this is a very apt place to conclude the first part of this two-part special with yourself, Sajjan. So, thank you very much for your time, and we’ll return to look at the legacies and modern-day implications of al-Zawahiri’s life.
SG: Sounds good
MA: Thank you for listening to part 1 of our 2 part special with Sajjan Gohel discussing his new book Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist, The Life and Legacy of Al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Join me and Victoria for part 2 in the new year, where we continue our discussion on the legacy of al-Zawahiri’s life. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views, information, or opinions expressed in the NATO DEEP Dive series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of NATO or DEEP.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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