'You lying failure," the man in the video said, addressing the President of the United States and shaking a finger for emphasis. "Why can't you be brave for once in your life and inform your nation of the disasters being suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq?"
Sporting his thick, greying beard, a black turban and metal-rimmed glasses, it was the seventh video that Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda founder and right-hand jihadist to Osama bin Laden, has recorded since June, a period during which Mr. bin Laden has made no public statements at all.
That, experts and acquaintances say, likely means something's gone awry inside al-Qaeda. Some speculate the world's second-most wanted man, a pioneer in the use of suicide bombings and martyr videos, has become the group's new No. 1.
Recorded at the end of last month in what looked like the den of a comfortable home, the video was the latest in a long string of al-Qaeda propaganda videos featuring Mr. al-Zawahiri — a man whose angry, hectoring visage is becoming almost as familiar to television viewers in the West as Mr. bin Laden's.
Here in the Cairo area, among those who know Mr. al-Zawahiri personally, and those who have studied his rise through the world of militant Islam, there's a belief that given the choice he would rather remain in the shadows, letting someone else be the public face of his organization.
"Ayman al-Zawahiri prefers to be the second man; he feels it's the most effective position," said Mohammed Saleh, editor-in-chief of Egypt's al-Hayat newspaper and an expert on political Islam. "He put Osama bin Laden in front, until now. Osama might be sick, dead or look different. The circumstances obviously require [Mr. al-Zawahiri] to be in the spotlight."
While there are few recent clues as to Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts, Diaa Rashwan, a terrorism expert at the al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said that hints contained in recent tapes suggest that Mr. al-Zawahiri is likely still in the Pakistani province of Waziristan, along the Afghan border, where Pakistani soldiers and armed tribesmen clashed regularly until a peace agreement last month gave the rebels effective control of the province.
"During the Waziristan battles, al-Zawahiri gave five or six speeches. In all of them he attacked [Pakistani President] Pervez Musharraf, threatening him with death. I had the impression he was very close to the battlefield," Mr. Rashwan said.
Mr. bin Laden hasn't appeared on video since November of 2004, shortly before the last U.S. presidential election. Though his voice has been heard on several audio tapes since then, most recently in June, rumours have abounded that the Saudi-born extremist has died or become somehow incapacitated.
A leaked French secret-service memo claimed that he died in Pakistan on Aug. 23 from a serious case of typhoid. Several other intelligence agencies have since said they have no information that Mr. bin Laden is dead, although the suggestion that he may have contacted a water-borne illness lingers.
But if Mr. bin Laden is dead or gravely ill, and Mr. al-Zawahiri is replacing him, few believe it would greatly affect the way al-Qaeda works.
"Ayman al-Zawahiri is in charge, even in the presence of Bin Laden, to cut a long story short," said Montasser El-Zayyat, a lawyer who got to know Mr. al-Zawahiri while the two were in adjacent jail cells for 2½ years in the early 1980s. They were among hundreds of people arrested after former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic militants in 1981.
"Of course Osama Bin Laden has his status and all, and is photogenic, but al-Zawahiri is Osama's brain. He is the one to plan and organize everything. So, the absence of Bin Laden will not constitute a problem."
Before joining al-Qaeda, the 55-year-old played the same role, leading from behind, while he was arguably the most important figure inside the Egyptian militant group Jamaa Islamiya in the 1980s and early 1990s. Others were better known, but Mr. al-Zawahiri was the key recruiter and organizer, leading an extremist wing known as Islamic Jihad. Mr. El-Zayyat, who regularly defends members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad, calls his former prison mate a friend and describes him as "very humble, very easily admired and quite amiable." But he was also consumed by hate for those he considered the enemies of Islam: Israel, the West and the pro-Western regimes of the Arab world.
"He believes and always said that freeing Jerusalem begins in Cairo. He had an opinion that the Arab leaders are tails of the U.S. and Israeli dog. He wanted to get rid of [the pro-Western Arab regimes] first, free our countries first, then face the bigger ones."
Mr. El-Zayyat recalls Mr. al-Zawahiri, who was tortured while in prison, as a very quiet person who spoke only rarely, making it that much stranger that he now puts out videos addressing the entire world.
Mr. al-Zawahiri's path to extremism was a somewhat unconventional one, although hardly unique in Egypt, a country where the government's grip on power has for decades been challenged by a rising tide of politicized Islam. Born into a prominent family — his grandfather was a sheik at Cairo's influential al-Azhar mosque — Mr. al-Zawahiri grew up in Maadi, a leafy suburb south of Cairo that today is home to a mixture of upper-middle class Egyptians and foreign diplomats who work in the capital.
His family still lives in the Cairo region, reportedly under the constant surveillance of Egyptian security services.
His father, Rabieh was a professor of pharmacology, and Mr. al-Zawahiri would himself eventually get a medical degree from the University of Cairo. But by then, he had already fallen under the sway of radical Islam.
The imam at his local mosque in Maadi preached an angry, anti-Western variety of Islam, and by the time he was 14, Mr. al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist group that seeks a caliphate stretching across the entire Middle East and North Africa.
By the time he was in his late 20s, he was one of the leading recruiters and organizers in Jamaa Islamiya, a radical offshoot of the Brotherhood that was created after the Brotherhood renounced violence as a means of achieving its goal. Mr. El-Zayyat said his former prison mate's thinking was heavily influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual and Islamist who wrote that the world was divided into two camps: Islam and those ignorant of the religion. Mr. Qutb had lived in the United States and considered it an impure and unstable society. Humanity, Mr. Qutb wrote, could only be saved if Islam came to dominate the world.
After he was released from jail in 1984, Mr. al-Zawahiri travelled to the Pakistani city of Peshawar to work as a doctor in the camps set up for refugees fleeing the Soviet Union's occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan. It was there that he met Mr. bin Laden, who was raising money for the Afghan "holy warriors" battling the Red Army. Under the tutelage of Palestinian militant Abdullah Azzam, the two men began a partnership that would eventually lead to the birth of al-Qaeda.
"After his alliance with bin Laden, he changed, and moved from jihad against the near enemy [the Arab regimes] to jihad against the farther enemy [the West]," Mr. El-Zayyat said. But the aim, he said, remained the same: "Get rid of those infidel governments and replace them with Islamic governments who will implement Islamic sharia."
Mr. al-Zawahiri later called the Afghanistan war "a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahedeen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States."
On his return to Egypt, Mr. al-Zawahiri took part in a sharp radicalization of the Jamaa Islamiya that culminated in 1997, when gunmen from the group killed 62 tourists who were visiting the pharaonic ruins at the Egyptian city of Luxor. Mr. al-Zawahiri was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death for his role in masterminding those killings.
He pioneered the use of suicide bombings, breaking with powerful religious taboos. Under his leadership, Islamic Jihad used suicide car bombers even when other militant groups spurned them as un-Islamic because they involved the murder of innocents. It has been reported that the videotapes of suicide bombers speaking of their desire to become "martyrs," made just before they carry out their deadly final acts, are Mr. al-Zawahiri's invention.
Mr. Saleh, the newspaper editor, said that Mr. al-Zawahiri's rejection of his affluent background gives him authority within jihadist circles. "People know he could have been a very rich man by now, so he's seen as a real believer in his cause. He has very strong credibility; what he said actually happens."
After Luxor and a string of other attacks that left hundreds dead, Mr. al-Zawahiri was a man on the run. The attacks, which crippled the country's crucial tourist industry, also eroded his support base in Egypt. Like Mr. bin Laden, he is believed to have taken refuge, first in Sudan, and then returned to Afghanistan, where he accepted the protection of the ruling Taliban.
In 1998, he merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al-Qaeda and issued a fatwa, or religious edict, cosigned with Mr. bin Laden, entitled "World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders" that many believe marked the formal beginning of their holy war against the West.
It was followed by the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole as it sat in a Yemeni port, and the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mr. Saleh said the spectacular attacks were Mr. al-Zawahiri's "style," and were likely masterminded by him.
In the aftermath, a tape surfaced showing a pallid Mr. bin Laden and a hale Mr. al-Zawahiri sitting together on a blanket, discussing the Sept. 11 attacks. "This was not just a human achievement; it was a holy act. These 19 brave men who gave their lives for the cause of God will be well taken care of. God granted them the strength to do what they did," Mr. al-Zawahiri said.
Since that time, the number of videos issued by Mr. bin Laden has declined as Mr. al-Zawahiri's public profile has risen.
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