Ayman Al-Zawahiri's Knights under the Prophet's Banner: the al-Qaeda Manifesto

Military Review, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Youssef H. Aboul-Enein

To understand al-Qaeda, one must read the books of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's principal ideologue and chief strategic thinker. After Osama bin-Laden, Al-Zawahiri is the most-wanted Middle Eastern terrorist. The FBI has a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or arrest.

In 2001, Al-Zawahiri published Knights under the Prophet's Banner (Fursan Taht Rayah Al-Nabi) even as the empire he built with Bin-Laden, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar crumbled under the weight of U.S. air, special operations forces, as well as the Northern Alliance assaults. (1) Initially serialized in the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper in 12 installments beginning in early December 2001, Knights under the Prophet's Banner can now be found in the back alleys of any major Arab city. (2) The word "knights" in the title refers to the members of the jihadist movement while evoking the image of the knights of the crusades.

The book begins with Al-Zawahiri saying: "I have written this book ... to fulfill the duty entrusted to me towards our generation and future generations. Perhaps I will be unable to write afterwards in the midst of these circumstances and changing conditions." According to Al-Zawahiri, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks were just an opening salvo against the Christian and Jewish "infidels."

Al-Zawahiri sees the United States, Israel, and Israel's Western and Arab allies as the "first force" and Islamic militant movements that depend on God alone the "second force." He believes the United States is removing Islam from power through rigged elections, brutality, and force. He views treaties, peace negotiations, and bans on weapons as steps in the direct occupation of Muslim land by U.S. forces. To Al-Zawahiri, jihad is an ideological struggle for survival--a war with no truce. He believes the Islamic jihadist movement should strike Islam's enemies, using the Luxor incident of 1997 as the means and as an example) He supports the growth of jihad among youths and numbers his success in the tens of thousands of young men in Arab prisons around the Middle East.

Al-Zawahiri says the jihad has not stopped, and the movement is either attacking or preparing an attack. He asserts Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's replacement of six interior ministers is proof of jihadist success. He also says acts of violence, beginning with the Egyptian Islamic jihad attack on the Military Technical College in 1974 and the agitation in Southern Egypt of the early 1980s, were poorly planned, emphasizing that deriving lessons from mistakes and improving the potency of jihadic operations should be hallmarks of Islamic militant movements.

From a U.S. military force-protection perspective, Part Seven of Al-Zawahiri's book reveals that the 1999 joint U.S.-Arab military exercise, Bright Star, was designed to keep fundamentalists from seizing political power, equating the exercise to the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. (4) He claims the timing of Bright star was not an accident; it was timed to observe the 200th anniversary of the French occupation of Egypt. To him, U.S. troop commitments are evidence of a victory for jihad forces. He combines his interpretation of Islam, Egyptian history, and news reports on U.S.-Egyptian military exercises to weave his own conspiratorial web to encourage youth to embrace his political objectives through violence and terror.

Al-Zawahiri dreams of a future jihad in the southern Russian Republics, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan to unite a nuclear Pakistan and the gas-rich Caspian region to serve jihad. Al-Zawahiri identifies the following targets for al-Qaeda and its affiliates:

* The United Nations.

* Arab rulers.

* Multinational corporations.

* The Internet.

* International news and satellite media.

* International relief organizations, which he believes are covers for spying, proselytizing, attempted coups, and weapons transfers.

Al-Zawahiri urges Islamic militants to take matters into their own hands: "Tracking down Americans and Jews is not impossible. Killing them with a single bullet, stab, or a device made up of an explosive mix or hitting them with an iron rod is not impossible. [S]mall groups could [prove to] be a horror against Americans and Jews." These words bring to mind the actions of Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo, who killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area in a 2002 shooting spree. Mir Amal Kansi was another famous lone-jihadist, who killed two CIA agents in 1993. Kansi was caught in 1997 by the FBI in Pakistan and extradited to the United States.

Al-Zawahiri urges his followers to inflict maximum casualties in the West, advocates a cost-benefit assessment of martyrdom operations, urges attacks on the enemy's power structure, and advocates patience, planning, and maximum damage to cause mass disruption. Although he is not specific about targets, one can deduce he means banks, transportation links, and energy refineries.

The Al-Zawahiri and Bin-Laden tapes that appear on Al-Jazirah television cannot be fully understood without first reading Al-Zawahiri's book. Creating a serious psychological operations campaign without delving into his book would be difficult.