Pavel Stroilov

Moscow’s jihadi

The Russian secret service and the new al-Qa’eda commander

issue 25 June 2011

The Russian secret service and the new al-Qa’eda commander

What do we know about the new head of al-Qa’eda, Ayman al-Zawahiri? Not very much. We know he’s a former ‘emir’ of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad who spent three years in an Egyptian prison after his group assassinated the pro-western President Anwar Sadat.

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