sabrina taverniseĪnd what do they do? What starts to happen? eric schmitt And so I think it’s there where you see Zawahiri, again, is this intellectual spine of al-Qaeda, basically giving religious justification for the killings of Americans and other Westerners. And certainly, by the mid - and late-1990s, Zawahiri writes a very important document that’s intended to kind of unite militant groups in the common cause of killing Americans anywhere. So when they form al-Qaeda, in many ways, their goal is to ultimately create a religious state by getting rid of the secular governments in their own region, in places like Egypt, but also driving out the Westerners, the Western troops that existed at the time in places like Saudi Arabia, to drive them out as well. What was their plan? What did they hope to accomplish? eric schmitt So bin Laden and Zawahiri found al-Qaeda together. And it’s shortly after that that they form al-Qaeda in the late 1980s. And the two of them become a very powerful pair. and helped bin Laden begin thinking about specific ways how to hurt the Western powers and the Middle Eastern governments that the West supported. And it was there they struck up this friendship, and Zawahiri became bin Laden’s personal physician - sabrina tavernise And then he’s drawn back again into this very kind of hard-line, conservative Sunni Islam movement, and he finds himself in Pakistan in the late ‘80s.Īnd interestingly enough, bin Laden sometimes lectured at the hospital where Zawahiri worked in Pakistan. And he’s jailed for that and spends several years in jail before he’s released. And then by the early 1980s - 1981, to be exact - he is involved in a plot to assassinate the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. So he has this duality to him growing up. But he was also starting classes at medical school. As a teenager, he was drawn to some of the very hard-line, conservative Islamic thinkers of the day, so he had this very political side of him. He was born in an upscale Cairo neighborhood in Egypt but was radicalized pretty early. sabrina taverniseĪnd how did he get drawn into Islamic politics and then to terrorism? eric schmitt If you think of bin Laden as kind of the front man who’s the glitzy, glamorous guy who brought prestige and money to al-Qaeda, Zawahiri was really the man who was the ideologue, who was the chief operating officer, if you will.Īnd of this pair, he was really the more hard-line of the two. He was also the intellectual spine for al-Qaeda. He was the long-time number two to bin Laden, but he was more than that. Well, first and foremost, what you need to know about Zawahiri was he succeeded Osama bin Laden when bin Laden was killed in a Navy SEAL raid in 2011. What do we need to know about this man, Zawahiri? eric schmitt President Biden just finished a surprise address to the nation, and he told us about a successful counterterrorism operation in Afghanistan. So Eric, we’re talking to you at 8:15 on Monday night. My colleague Eric Schmitt on Ayman al-Zawahiri and what his death means for Afghanistan’s relationship with the United States and for the threat of global terrorism. We make it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out. On Monday, President Biden announced that the United States had just killed the leader of al-Qaeda, one of the key masterminds behind the September 9/11 attacks, in a drone strike in Afghanistan. My fellow Americans, on Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. sabrina taverniseįrom The New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. Who was he and what impact will his death have? Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 Transcript The Killing of bin Laden’s Successor Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, has been killed by a U.S.
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