Al-Qaeda’s remaining leaders get attention amid terror alert

The Al-Qaeda leadership is drawing attention with the alert of an unspecified al-Qaeda attack in the Western countries including the U.S. The BBC profiled some 10 Al-Qaeda remaining leaders and referred three of them as the second “Osama Bin Ladens.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri is an official number one in Al-Qaeda following Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaeda named Zawahiri its new leader on June 16, 2011, about a month after Bin Laden’s death by the U.S. Special forces.

He was born to a rich family in Cairo, Egypt in 1951, and trained as an eye surgeon at Cairo University. He met with Bin Laden and started a militant battle career after entering Afghanistan to take care of injured Jihadists in a war against the former Soviet Union in 1985. Zawahiri got a reputation as the “top strategist” and the “operational brains of Al-Qaeda” by leading terrorist attacks including the Sept. 11 attacks behind the scenes. He was number two behind only Bin Laden in the 22 “most wanted terrorists” list announced by the U.S. government in 2001 and continues to have a 25 million U.S. dollar-bounty on his head. He was reportedly last seen in the eastern Afghan town in October 2001 and thought to be hiding in the mountainous regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. His wife and children were reportedly killed in a U.S. air strike in 2001.

Saif al-Adel who once served as a temporary successor after Bin Laden’s death is still a “second Bin Laden.” Adel, a former officer of the Egyptian Special forces, is known to have born in 1960 or 1963. Having been obsessed by Islamic fundamentalism at an early age, he left Egypt after fundamentalists assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He is still suspected to have been involved in the assassination. He got to know Bin Laden in Afghanistan and created an Al-Qaeda training program in Somalia. He is suspected to have organized various bombings including the bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003. The U.S. gave a five million-dollar bounty on his head.

Abu Yahya al-Libi is also one of the key Al-Qaeda leadership. He is better known than Zawahiri because he was more visible on Al-Qaeda video clips. He reportedly died in a drone strike in a volatile tribal area of Pakistan in June last year, but his death has not been confirmed by sources in Pakistan. Libi is thought to have been one of Al-Qaeda’s leading theologians and at the same time a field commander. He is claimed to have been captured by Pakistani forces in 2002 and then sent to the U.S. military airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan, where he escaped in 2005 along with three other Al-Qaeda members.

The BBC introduced other 11 al-Qaeda members including Saad Bin Laden, one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons, Khalid al-Habib who is known as al-Qaeda’s field commander in south-east Afghanistan.