Why Ayman al-Zawahiri’s killing won’t have much effect on global terrorism
The United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike this weekend in Kabul. I already kind of miss him. Zawahiri came from an older generation of jihadists—he was 71—and was in many ways the kind of terrorist one wants. For a decade or more he had no known good ideas. He told young upstarts to shelve their own good ideas, and never got around to them. He was a black hole of charisma. Whenever the Islamic State, which eventually defied him and broke off from Zawahiri’s Al Qaida, announced a new video, I got a queasy feeling and hoped I would not see anything that would haunt my dreams. When Zawahiri announced a new video, my Pavlovian reaction was narcoleptic. He was human melatonin. If the Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was a long huff of meth, Zawahiri was a cup of ovaltine.
He was also a creep and murderer. Thousands of people are dead because of him. If anyone deserved to be julienned by a Cuisinart blade dropped from the heavens by the CIA, it was Zawahiri. An Egyptian, he came of age politically around the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Egypt imprisoned every Islamist it could find, and Zawahiri spent years in state prisons, where he was tortured. Years later, in Tahrir Square during the revolution of 2011, I met men who said they had known him in prison. They said they hoped their old friend was well but had not kept up the relationship; a few years in Egypt’s state security prisons was plenty.
