Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri

Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri was born into a prominent Egyptian medical and scholarly family in Maadi, Cairo. He graduated from Cairo University medical school in 1974, specializing in general surgery. Drawn to Islamist extremism in his teens, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and later merged militant groups to lead Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), serving prison time in Egypt following the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

In the late 1980s, Zawahiri joined the anti-Soviet jihad in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he became Osama bin Laden's personal physician and intellectual mentor. In 1998, they formally merged their groups to issue the declaration forming the "World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," orchestrating the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Following bin Laden's death in Abbottabad in May 2011, Zawahiri assumed leadership of al-Qaeda. On July 31, 2022, after a decade in hiding, Zawahiri was killed on the balcony of a safehouse in Kabul, Afghanistan, by a precision US drone strike using non-explosive Hellfire R9X "knife" missiles.