Ayman al-Zawahiri | From Cairo physician to al-Qaeda leader

Ayman al-Zawahiri, top al-Qaeda leader, was killed in a U.S. drone strike

Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Osama bin Laden as al-Qaeda leader after years as its main organiser and strategist, but his lack of charisma and competition from rival militants Islamic State hobbled his ability to inspire sizeable attacks on the West.

al-Zawahiri, 71, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, U.S. President Joe Biden said on live television on Monday evening. U.S. officials said the attack took place on Sunday in the Afghan capital Kabul.

In the years following bin Laden's death in 2011, U.S. air strikes killed a succession of al-Zawahiri's deputies, weakening the veteran Egyptian militant's ability to coordinate globally.

He had watched as al-Qaeda was effectively sidelined by the 2011 Arab revolts, launched mainly by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to decades of autocracy.

Despite a reputation as an inflexible and combative personality, al-Zawahiri managed to nurture loosely affiliated groups around the world that grew to wage devastating insurgencies, some of them rooted in turmoil arising from the Arab Spring. The violence destabilised a number of countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

But al-Qaeda's days as the centrally directed, hierarchical network of plotters that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were long gone. Instead, militancy returned to its roots in local-level conflicts, driven by a mix of local grievances and incitement by transnational jihadi networks using social media.

al-Zawahiri's origins in Islamist militancy went back decades.