Zawahiri new head of Al Qaeda

The USA: “We will kill him too”

DUBAI – Ayman Al Zawahiri is the new head of Al Qaeda. This was announced by Al Arabiya TV, taking up a communiqué released via the internet. The Egyptian was number two of Osama Bin Laden, killed on last May 2  in a blitz by US special forces in Pakistan, in Abbottabad, not far from Islamabad. “The general command of Al Qaeda announces, after consultations, the designation of the sheikh Ayman Al Zawahiri to lead the organization”, reads the statement published on Islamist sites. The text reaffirms that the network of terror will carry on the holy war against the United States and Israel. “We will kill him as Bin Laden”, is the promise of Admiral Mike Mullen, chief of inter-American joint staff.

The “doctor”, as he is nicknamed Al Zawahiri, is the greatest ideologue of the group. On 8 June he had appeared in a 28-minute video in which he swore to continue the jihad “defying everyone”, that is, the entire West and “the invaders of Muslim lands”, in the name of “a rebellious nation that she awoke from sleep “. The message was interpreted as the first public reaction of Al Qaeda to the death of Bin Laden.

However, until now the actual succession to the sheik of terror had been postponed: it was rumored that a part of the organization’s base did not trust the former Egyptian doctor, from someone even considered as the one who betrayed Bin Laden. In place of this interim appointment of a compatriot of Al Zawahiri, the fifty-year-old Saif al-Adel, a former ‘leatherheads’ officer in Cairo, considered the orchestrator of the bloody attacks of August 1998 at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which cost in a total of 98 deaths and more than a thousand wounded.

In recent days, in Somalia, another heavy blow was inflicted on the organization founded by Bin Laden: in Mogadishu Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, head of Al Qaeda for East Africa, was accused of having played a leading role in the attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. On his body a list of possible targets for terrorist actions was found, including the Eton College in Britain and the Ritz Hotel.

The British security services immediately summoned a summit with the London government and alerted the school. Even the American colleagues have issued an alarm to the main international hotel chains.

Mohammad was on the list of the 26 most wanted terrorists in the United States, and a five-million-dollar bounty hung on him for his role in the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, when two vehicles packed with explosives massacred and killed 224 people and injuring over 5,000.

(June 16, 2011)