Early life

Ayman al-Zawahiri was born June 19, 1951, in Giza,[2][3] in the then Kingdom of Egypt, to
Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and Umayma Azzam.[4]

The New York Times in 2001 described al-Zawahiri as coming from "a prosperous and prestigious
family that gives him a pedigree grounded firmly in both religion and politics".[5] Al-Zawahiri's
parents both came from prosperous families. Al-Zawahiri's father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri,
came from a large family of doctors and scholars from Kafr Ash Sheikh Dhawahri, Sharqia, in which
one of his grandfathers was Sheikh Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri (1887–1944) who was the
34th Grand Imam of al-Azhar.[6] Mohammed Rabie became a surgeon and a professor of
pharmacy[7] at Cairo University. Ayman Al-Zawahiri's mother, Umayma Azzam, came from a
wealthy, politically active clan, the daughter of Abdel-Wahhab Azzam, a literary scholar who
served as the president of Cairo University, the founder and inaugural rector of the King Saud
University (the first university in Saudi Arabia) as well as ambassador to Pakistan, while his own
brother was Azzam Pasha, the founding secretary-general of the Arab League (1945–1952).[8]
From his maternal side yet another relative was Salem Azzam, an Islamist intellectual and activist,
for a time secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe based in London.[9] The wealthy and
prestigious family is also linked to the Red Sea Harbi tribe in Zawahir, a small town in Saudi Arabia,
located in the Badr.[10] He also has a maternal link to the house of Saud: Muna, the daughter of
Azzam Pasha (his maternal great-uncle), is married to Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, the son of
the late king Faisal.[11]

Ayman Al-Zawahiri said that he has a deep affection for his mother. Her brother, Mahfouz Azzam,
became a role model for him as a teenager.[12] He has a younger brother, Muhammad al-
Zawahiri, and a twin sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri.[13] Al-Zawahiri's sister, Heba Mohamed
al-Zawahiri, became a professor of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo
University. She described her brother as "silent and shy".[14] Muhammad was sentenced on
charges of undergoing military training in Albania in 1998.[15] He was arrested in the UAE in 1999,
and sentenced to death in 1999 after being extradited to Egypt.[16][17] He was held in Tora Prison
in Cairo as a political detainee. Security officials said he was the head of the Special Action
Committee of Islamic Jihad, which organized terrorist operations. After the Egyptian popular
uprising in the spring of 2011, on March 17, 2011, he was released from prison by the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces, the interim government of Egypt. His lawyer said he had been held to
extract information about his brother Ayman al-Zawahiri.[18] On March 20, 2011, he was re-
arrested.[19] On August 17, 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested Muhammad al-Zawahiri at his
home in Giza.[20] He was acquitted in 2017.[21]

Youth

Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly a studious youth. He excelled in school, loved poetry, and
"hated violent sports", which he thought were "inhumane." Al-Zawahiri studied medicine at Cairo
University and graduated in 1974 with gayyid giddan, or roughly on par with a grade of "B" in the
American grading system. Following that, he served 1974–1978 as a surgeon in the Egyptian
Army[22][23] after which he established a clinic near his parents in Maadi.[24] In 1978, he also
earned a master's degree in surgery.[25] He spoke Arabic, English,[26][27] and French.[28]

Al-Zawahiri participated in youth activism as a student. He became both quite pious and political,
under the influence of his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, and lecturer Mostafa Kamel Wasfi.[29] Sayyid
Qutb preached that to restore Islam and free Muslims, a vanguard of true Muslims modeling itself
after the original Companions of the Prophet had to be developed.[30] Ayman al-Zawahiri was
influenced by Qutb's Manichaean views on Islamic theology and Islamic history.[31]

Underground cell

By the age of 15, al-Zawahiri had formed an underground cell with the goal to overthrow the
government and establish an Islamist state. The following year the Egyptian government executed
Sayyid Qutb for conspiracy. Following the execution, al-Zawahiri, along with four other secondary
school students, helped form an "underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and
establishing an Islamist state." It was at this early age that al-Zawahiri developed a mission in life,
"to put Qutb's vision into action."[32] His cell eventually merged with others to form al-Jihad or
Egyptian Islamic Jihad.[24]

Marriages and children

Ayman al-Zawahiri was married at least four times. His wives include Azza Ahmed Nowari and
Umaima Hassan.

In 1978, al-Zawahiri married his first wife, Azza Ahmed Nowari, a student at Cairo University who
was studying philosophy.[29] Their wedding, which was held at the Continental Hotel in Opera
Square,[29] was very conservative, with separate areas for both men and women, and no music,
photographs, or gaiety in general.[33] Many years later, when the United States attacked
Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in October 2001, Azza apparently had no idea that
al-Zawahiri had supposedly been a jihadi emir (commander) for the last decade.[34]

Al-Zawahiri and his wife, Azza, had four daughters, Fatima (born 1981), Umayma (born 1983),
Nabila (born 1986), and Khadiga (born 1987), and a son, Mohammed (also born in 1987; the twin
brother of Khadiga), who was a "delicate, well-mannered boy" and "the pet of his older sisters,"
subject to teasing and bullying in a traditionally all-male environment, who preferred to "stay at
home and help his mother."[35] In 1997, ten years after the birth of Mohammed, Azza gave birth
to their fifth daughter, Aisha, who had Down syndrome. In February 2004, Abu Zubaydah was
waterboarded and subsequently stated that Abu Turab Al-Urduni had married one of al-Zawahiri's
daughters.[36]

Ayman al-Zawahiri's first wife Azza and two of their six children, Mohammad and Aisha, were
killed in an airstrike on Afghanistan by US forces in late December 2001, following the September
11 attacks on the U.S.[37][38] After an American aerial bombardment of a Taliban-controlled
building at Gardez, Azza was pinned under the debris of a guesthouse roof. Concerned for her
modesty, she "refused to be excavated" because "men would see her face" and she died from her
injuries the following day. Her son, Mohammad, was also killed outright in the same house. Her
four-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, Aisha, had not been hurt by the bombing, but died
from exposure in the cold night while Afghan rescuers tried to save Azza.[39]

In the first half of 2005, one of Al-Zawahiri's three surviving wives gave birth to a daughter, named
Nawwar.[40]

In June 2012, one of al-Zawahiri's four wives, Umaima Hassan, released a statement on the
internet congratulating the role played by Muslim women in the Arab Spring.[41] She is also
known to have written a leaflet explaining women's role in jihad.[42]

Medical career

Ayman al-Zawahiri worked as a surgeon. In 1985, al-Zawahiri went to Saudi Arabia on Hajj and
stayed to practice medicine in Jeddah for a year.[43] As a reportedly qualified surgeon, when his
organization merged with bin Laden's al-Qaeda, he became bin Laden's personal advisor and
physician. He had first met bin Laden in Jeddah in 1986.[44] According to other sources, they met
the first time in 1986 at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan.[45]

In 1981, Ayman al-Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar, where he worked in a Red Crescent hospital
treating wounded refugees. There, he became friends with Ahmed Khadr, and the two shared a
number of conversations about the need for Islamic government and the needs of the Afghan
people.[46][47]

In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States, where he addressed several mosques in
California under his Abdul Mu'iz pseudonym, relying on his credentials from the Kuwaiti Red
Crescent to raise money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines—he
raised only $2000.[48]
Militant activity

Assassination plots

Egypt

In 1981, Al-Zawahiri was one of hundreds arrested following the assassination of President Anwar
Sadat.[49] Initially, the plan was derailed when authorities were alerted to Al-Jihad's plan by the
arrest of an operative carrying crucial information, in February 1981. President Sadat ordered the
roundup of more than 1,500 people, including many Al-Jihad members, but missed a cell in the
military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Sadat during a
military parade that October.[50] His lawyer, Montasser el-Zayat, said that al-Zawahiri was
tortured in prison.[51]

In his book, Al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him, Al-Zayat maintains that under torture by the Egyptian
police, following his arrest in connection with the murder of Sadat in 1981, Al-Zawahiri revealed
the hiding place of Essam al-Qamari, a key member of the Maadi cell of al-Jihad, which led to Al-
Qamari's "arrest and eventual execution."[52] He was released from prison in 1984.[53]

In 1993, al-Zawahiri's and Egyptian Islamic Jihad's (EIJ) connection with Iran may have led to a
suicide bombing in an attempt on the life of Egyptian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi, the man
heading the effort to quash the campaign of Islamist killings in Egypt. It failed, as did an attempt to
assassinate Egyptian prime minister Atef Sidqi three months later. The bombing of Sidqi's car
injured 21 Egyptians and killed a schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim. It followed two years of killings
by another Islamist group, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, that had killed over 200 people. Her funeral
became a public spectacle, with her coffin carried through the streets of Cairo and crowds
shouting, "Terrorism is the enemy of God!"[54] The police arrested 280 more of al-Jihad's
members and executed six.[55]

For their leading role in anti-Egyptian Government attacks in the 1990s, al-Zawahiri and his
brother Muhammad al-Zawahiri were sentenced to death in the 1999 Egyptian case of the
Returnees from Albania.[17][16]

Pakistan

The 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, was carried out by the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad under al-Zawahiri's leadership, but Bin Laden had disapproved of the operation. The
bombing alienated Pakistan, which was "the best route into Afghanistan".[56]

In July 2007, Al-Zawahiri supplied direction for the Lal Masjid siege, codename Operation Silence.
This was the first confirmed time that Al-Zawahiri was taking militant steps against the Pakistani
Government and guiding Islamic militants against the State of Pakistan. The Pakistan Army troops
and Special Service Group taking control of the Lal Masjid ("Red Mosque") in Islamabad found
letters from al-Zawahiri directing Islamic militants Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who
ran the mosque and adjacent madrasah. This conflict resulted in 100 deaths.[57]

On December 27, 2007, al-Zawahiri was also implicated in the assassination of former Pakistani
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.[58]

Sudan

In 1994, the sons[who?] of Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mohammed Sharaf were executed under
al-Zawahiri's leadership for betraying Egyptian Islamic Jihad; the militants[which?] were ordered to
leave the Sudan.[59][60]