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By Root 776 0

the tent pole of the Egyptian economy, because it opened the country to Western corruption. The Islamic Group initiated a war on Egypt’s security forces by announcing the goal of killing a policeman every day. They also targeted foreigners, Christians, and particularly intellectuals, beginning with the shooting death in 1992 of Farag Foda, a secular columnist who had suggested in his final article that the Islamists were motivated less by politics than sexual frustration. The blind sheikh also issued a fatwa against Egypt’s Nobel Prize–winning writer, Naguib Mahfouz, calling him an infidel, and in 1994 Mahfouz suffered a near-fatal stabbing. There was a sad irony in this attack: It was Sayyid Qutb who first discovered Mahfouz; later, when Mahfouz was famous, he returned the favor by visiting Qutb in prison. Now Qutb’s progeny were savaging the intellectual circle that Qutb had, to some extent, produced.

Zawahiri thought such actions pointless and self-defeating. In his opinion, they succeeded only in provoking the security forces and reducing the opportunity to make an immediate, total change by a military coup, his lifelong goal. In fact, the government crackdown on militants that followed these attacks nearly eliminated both organizations in Egypt.

Zawahiri had imposed a blind-cell structure on al-Jihad, so that members in one group would not know the identities or activities of those in another; however, Egyptian authorities fortuitously captured the one man who had all the names—the organization’s membership director. His computer contained a database with every member’s address, his aliases, and his potential hideouts. Supplied with this information, the security forces reeled in hundreds of suspects and charged them with sedition. The press labeled the group “Vanguards of Conquest,” but it was actually a faction of al-Jihad. Although the evidence against them was thin, the judicial standards weren’t very rigorous.

“The government newspapers were elated about the arrest of 800 members of the al-Jihad group without a single shot being fired,” Zawahiri bitterly recounted in his brief memoir. All that remained of the organization he had struggled to build were scattered colonies in other countries—in England, America, Denmark, Yemen, and Albania, among others. He realized he had to make a move in order to keep the fragments of his organization together. To do that he needed money.

Despite Jihad’s financial precariousness, many of its remaining members were suspicious of bin Laden and had no desire to divert their efforts outside Egypt. Moreover, they were incensed by the roundup of their colleagues in Cairo and the show trial that resulted. They wanted to strike back. Nonetheless, around this time, most of the members of al-Jihad went on the al-Qaeda payroll. Zawahiri viewed the alliance as a temporary marriage of convenience. He later confided to one of his chief assistants that joining with bin Laden had been “the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization abroad alive.”

ZAWAHIRI HAD CERTAINLY NOT ABANDONED his dream of capturing Egypt. Indeed, Sudan was an ideal spot from which to launch attacks. The long, trackless, and almost entirely unguarded border between the two countries facilitated secret movements; ancient caravan trails provided convenient routes for smuggling weapons and explosives into Egypt on the backs of camels; and the active cooperation of Sudan’s intelligence agency and its military forces guaranteed a sanctuary for Zawahiri and his men.

Al-Jihad began its assault on Egypt with another attempt on the life of the interior minister, Hasan al-Alfi, who was leading the crackdown on Islamic militants. In August of 1993 a bomb-laden motorcycle exploded next to the minister’s car, killing the bomber and his accomplice. “The Minister escaped death, but his arm was broken,” Zawahiri lamely noted.

It was another failure, but a significant one, because with this action Zawahiri introduced the use of suicide bombers, which became the signature of al-Jihad assassinations and later of al-Qaeda “martyrdom