Who is the new leader of Al-Qaeda to succeed Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed by the United States with a missile fired by a drone, while he was standing on the balcony of a house where he was hiding in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in late July? Despite the hesitation of many candidates for the leadership of Al-Qaeda, the choice has not been decided yet.
According to Egyptian researchers specialized in fundamentalist affairs, “the absence of a known leader of (Al-Qaeda) for 6 months indicates one of two possibilities:
- The first is that the leaders of the organization feel that there is a penetration into the organization, and a defect in its security structure that makes the leakage of information about the whereabouts of the new leader easy, and therefore there is a danger in declaring his identity;
- The second is that the current leaders of the organization are afraid to take over the leadership, even they are not subject to liquidation.
They added that it is expected that the name of the new leader of the organization has been identified, but the (Al-Qaeda) members avoid revealing his identity in order to secure him further, especially if it is taken into account that they are not used to decentralization of decisions, and therefore they cannot remain without the head of the organization .
Here, observers suggest that the organization may suffer from disagreement over some potential figures of the (Al-Qaeda) leadership, especially since some of these candidates leaders are in certain countries, which raises suspicions that these countries may be in control of the organization.
According to previous statements by an official in the US administration, "the operation to locate and kill Al-Zawahiri was the result of a careful and diligent work by counter-terrorism and intelligence agencies." However, the spokesman for the Taliban movement, Zabihullah Mujahid, stated recently that "the movement did not find Al-Zawahiri's body."
Specialized observers believe that the Egyptian Muhammad Salah Zaidan, alias Saif Al-Adl, is the most prominent candidate to succeed Al-Zawahiri. He is about 60 years old, and thanks to his military and terrorist experience, he is almost considered a veteran of the international terrorist organization. In a letter he wrote under his alias, Saif Al-Adl addmited that “his presence in Iran came based on a coalition of interests and getting out of it was equivalent to "jumping from the ship to the grave,” he said.
In 2014, a document appeared that identified the personalities nominated for the “succession of Al-Zawahiri”, and they included Abu Al-Khair Al-Masry, Abu Muhammad Al-Masry, Saif Al-Adl and Abu Basir Al-Wuhayshi, but among them only Saif Al-Adl survived.
Egyptian observers mentioned that “the chances of Saif al-Adl assuming the leadership of Al-Qaeda still exist, because he is the most famous, and therefore he will be able to gather the scattered elements of the organization and convince them faster than other less well-known leaders.” During the past months, other names of candidates for the leadership of Al-Qaeda were mentioned, such as Omar Ahmed Diri, known as Ahmed Omar or Abu Ubaid, who is the leader of the Somali Al-Shabaab Movement, and Abu Hammam Al-Shami, the emir of the Guardians of Religion organization, the Al-Qaeda branch in Syria, and Khaled Batarfi, the leader of the Al-Qaeda branch in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Ubaidah Yusuf al-Anabi (known as Yazid Mubarak), who is the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and Muhammad Abati, known as Abu Abd Al-Rahman Al-Maghribi, and was the closest figure to Al-Zawahiri.