The killing of al Qaeda’s chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was America’s greatest counterterrorism victory in years. Like Che Guevara, Zawahiri was a doctor who traded saving lives for uplifting others to take them. Throughout medical college and as a younger surgeon in Cairo, he joined a collection of radical teams within the Nineteen Seventies and was jailed for his involvement within the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. The lesson he realized in jail, in accordance with his autobiography, “Knights Beneath the Prophet’s Banner,” was that he wouldn’t have been caught if he may have handpicked his confederates.
He not often talked about poverty or class oppression, however his autobiography reveals that he studied Lenin’s strategies carefully. He believed {that a} small group, a vanguard of enlightened extremists, ought to direct society whereas preserving their actual goals a secret, and that folks, particularly in democracies, needed to be stampeded by terror to go in his desired instructions, not persuaded by cause and proof.
