Ayman Zawahiri

Al Qaeda's No. 2 figure harshly criticized Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi in an audio recording released Saturday, accusing him of being an enemy of Islam and threatening a wave of attacks against the North African country because it has improved relations with the U.S. In a 28-minute recording titled "Unity of the Ranks," Ayman Zawahiri also said the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was joining ranks with Al Qaeda. "The Islamic nation is witnessing a blessed step. . . .

In the year since President Obama approved a successful raid against Osama bin Laden, public opinion has been shifting. While many Westerners still celebrate the targeted killing - along with the killing several months later of Anwar Awlaki - some are expressing doubts. European politicians, human rights lawyers and members of some East Coast think tanks have posited that these terrorists were actually more dangerous dead than alive. Death, the reasoning goes, martyred the leaders, thus immortalizing their ideas and appeal.

In a surprising twist, the FBI informant in the terrorism case against a Lodi man and his father said in federal court Monday that he encountered Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader in the small Central Valley farm town a few years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Defense attorneys for Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer, said outside court that the statement by the government's key witness raised serious questions about the informant's credibility.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials scrambled Friday to identify and find three men who supposedly planned to travel to the United States from Afghanistan to detonate car bombs on bridges or in tunnels during the Sept. 11 anniversary weekend in New York and Washington, D.C.   Officials said they obtained specific and credible, but uncorroborated, intelligence earlier this week that two or three individuals with close ties to Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan had entered the United States in a plot to disrupt events planned to commemorate the 10 th anniversary of the Sept.

A U.S. airstrike on a suspected Al Qaeda compound in a remote region of Pakistan targeted Osama bin Laden's second in command, U.S. officials said Friday, adding that they were investigating the possibility that the Egyptian militant had been killed. The CIA and other counter-terrorism agencies would not comment officially on speculation that Ayman Zawahiri was among a handful of suspected senior Al Qaeda militants killed in the airstrike in the Bajaur region near the Afghan border early Friday.

In July 2005, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri sent a long letter to the group's lead operative in Iraq, urging him to tone down his activities. In Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi had been orchestrating suicide bombings of Shiite Muslim shrines. His followers frequently videotaped the beheading of hostages. Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who helped organize the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other violence, told Zarqawi he was going too far. "We are in a media battle, in a race for the hearts and minds" of Muslims, wrote Zawahiri, who was named Thursday to succeed Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda's leader.

Al Qaeda's deputy leader said in a video that President Bush's intention to withdraw troops from Iraq meant that Washington had been defeated. "Bush, you must confess that you have been defeated," Ayman Zawahiri said in the video, shown by Al Jazeera satellite television. Bush said Wednesday that reducing troops was possible this year but that any such move would be based on decisions by military commanders.

A suspected U.S. missile strike killed an alleged foreign militant in a Pakistani tribal area considered a haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a suicide bombing left four security personnel dead, officials said. The missile strike hit a house in the lawless South Waziristan region along the border with Afghanistan, considered a likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri. Two Pakistani intelligence officials said that reports from informants and field agents suggested that a foreign militant died in the attack and that another was injured.

A suspected militant hide-out near the Afghan border was destroyed in a missile strike that killed at least five people, Pakistani officials said. Four intelligence officials said the missiles destroyed a compound near Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan tribal region. They spoke on condition of anonymity. Initial reports from the area indicated that between five and 10 people were killed and several others wounded, but there were no details about their identities, the officials said.

Al Qaeda's longest-serving and most senior operative in East Africa has been confirmed dead in Somalia, adding to the leadership vacuum in the global terror organization since the killing of Osama bin Laden last month. The death in Mogadishu of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, is a major disruption of Al Qaeda's efforts to expand its hold on havens in the Horn of Africa, U.S. officials and counter-terrorism experts said Saturday.

In July 2005, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri sent a long letter to the group's lead operative in Iraq, urging him to tone down his activities. In Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi had been orchestrating suicide bombings of Shiite Muslim shrines. His followers frequently videotaped the beheading of hostages. Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who helped organize the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other violence, told Zarqawi he was going too far. "We are in a media battle, in a race for the hearts and minds" of Muslims, wrote Zawahiri, who was named Thursday to succeed Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda's leader.

Al Qaeda's longest-serving and most senior operative in East Africa has been confirmed dead in Somalia, adding to the leadership vacuum in the global terror organization since the killing of Osama bin Laden last month. The death in Mogadishu of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, is a major disruption of Al Qaeda's efforts to expand its hold on havens in the Horn of Africa, U.S. officials and counter-terrorism experts said Saturday.

For a week people have been asking, "Why won't the president release Osama bin Laden's photo?" That's the wrong question. We should be asking, "Why was Barack Obama in such a hurry to tell us Bin Laden was dead?" The White House says the information in Bin Laden's compound is the equivalent of a "small college library," potentially containing incalculably valuable and unique data on Al Qaeda operations, personnel and methods. "It's going to be great even if only 10% of it is actionable," a government official told Politico's Mike Allen.

Al Qaeda is having a very bad year. And from the terrorists' standpoint, the death of Osama bin Laden isn't even the worst of it. The biggest potential blow is the spread of democratic politics in the Arab world. If it succeeds, Al Qaeda will be deprived of its reason for being. Bin Laden's death at the hands of American commandos produced strikingly little outrage in the Muslim world. In 2001, when he held the United States and Europe in a state of terror, Bin Laden was a hero to a sizable fringe of Muslims frustrated by their countries' stagnant politics.

It might seem churlish to second-guess a military operation that removed a master terrorist from the face of the Earth. But conflicting statements from the White House about whether Osama bin Laden was armed during the raid on his compound raise the question of whether the United States ever intended to do anything other than kill him, and if not, whether we should find that troubling. In his statement to the nation Sunday, President Obama said Bin Laden was killed after a firefight, the implication being that he exchanged gunfire with American commandos.

U.S. intelligence agencies are racing to exploit a trove of documents and computer files that U.S. Navy SEALs collected from Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan before other Al Qaeda groups or leaders can change their communication methods or move their safe houses. Many of the files are written in multiple languages, and some appear in code, U.S. officials said. "At first blush, there appears to be some value," said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of House Intelligence Committee, who was briefed on the effort Wednesday.

Seventeen days after a U.S. airstrike in eastern Pakistan missed Al Qaeda's second in command, a feisty and angry Ayman Zawahiri showed up in a videotape with a fresh taunt for President Bush. "Bush, do you know where I am?" Zawahiri said in the tape aired Monday on the Al Jazeera satellite TV channel. "I am among the Muslim masses, enjoying God's blessing of their support, care, generosity and protection."

Osama bin Laden's second-in-command criticized both sides of the Palestinian power struggle in a videotape aired Wednesday, calling the Palestinian president "America's man" but also lashing out at the Islamic group Hamas. Egyptian-born Ayman Zawahiri scoffed at the plan to hold early elections in the Palestinian territories, saying that voting would lead only to defeat and that the right policy was armed struggle. The footage was broadcast by Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based satellite channel.

As Americans watch the stunning and, potentially, ominous transformation now underway in Egypt, they're going to hear a great deal about that country's Muslim Brotherhood and what its participation in a post-Hosni Mubarak regime may portend. It's a crucial question and reminds us, once again, how important it has become to gain an understanding of the fundamentalist Muslim theological current called Salafism and of its contemporary expression through political Islam, since the Brotherhood grows out of the former and is the modern godfather of the latter.

Al Qaeda has just released the latest in its series of how-to guides for jihadists in the West who want to murder without the bother of flying to Pakistan to be trained. This time, the offering is an English-language manual explaining in detail how to build a bomb, and it demonstrates how nimbly Al Qaeda has adapted to become the world's first truly global terrorist organization, able to recruit and train fanatics on the Internet as well as on the ground. Almost 10 years after the most devastating attack on the American homeland by a foreign power since the British army burned Washington in 1814, Al Qaeda remains alive and deadly.