Al-Qaeda has appointed Ayman al-Zawahiri as leader following the death of Osama Bin Laden, the organisation's general command says in a statement. Bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in early May. In the statement, al-Qaeda "announces that Sheikh Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, may God guide him, assumed responsibility as the group's amir [leader]".
It warned it would continue to fight a jihad or holy war against the US and Israel under his direction. The statement posted on a militant website was attributed to al-Qaeda's General Command and was disseminated by the al-Fajr Media Centre, the media wing of al-Qaeda Central.
Egyptian-born Zawahiri was for years Bin Laden's deputy and had been widely anticipated to replace him at the helm.
'Jihadist renaissance'
Thought to be in his late 50s, Zawahiri is believed by some experts to have been the "operational brains" behind the 9/11 attacks on the US.
Ayman al-Zawahiri
• Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1951
• Trained as an eye surgeon
• Helped found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant group
• Known as Osama Bin Laden's right-hand man and the chief ideologue of al-Qaeda
• "Operational brains" behind the 9/11 attacks
• $25m (£15m) bounty on his head
Zawahiri warned just over a week ago that Bin Laden would continue to "terrify" the US from beyond the grave.
In a video message posted on the internet on 8 June, Zawahiri said al-Qaeda would continue to fight.
"The sheikh has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice," Zawahiri said. "Today, and thanks be to God, America is not facing an individual or a group, but a rebelling nation, which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance."
For years, security analysts have suggested Zawahiri is most likely to be hiding in the Afghan-Pakistan border region. However, Bin Laden and other key militant leaders who were also believed to be concealed there have instead been discovered in Pakistani towns and cities.
Bin Laden's killing by US special forces in a covert operation in the garrison town of Abbottabad on 2 May strained Washington's relations with Islamabad.
US President Barack Obama said "someone" was protecting Bin Laden, but Pakistan has denied any knowledge of Bin Laden's whereabouts and has arrested alleged CIA informants.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13788594

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Egyptian-born doctor and surgeon Ayman al-Zawahri has assumed command of al-Qaeda following the US killing of Osama bin Laden. "We ask God for this to be a new era for al-Qaeda under the leadership of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an era that will purify Muslim land of every tyrant and infidel," al-Qaeda said in a statement posted on a website frequently used by the terrorist group. Zawahri has been the brains behind bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and at times its most public face, repeatedly denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages.
In a message monitored by the Site Intelligence Group in April, he urged Muslims to fight Nato and American forces in Libya. "I want to direct the attention of our Muslim brothers in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the rest of the Muslim countries, that if the Americans and the Nato forces enter Libya then their neighbors in Egypt and Tunisia and Algeria and the rest of the Muslim countries should rise up and fight both the mercenaries of Gadafy and the rest of Nato," Zawahri said.
Born into an upper-class family of scholars and doctors in an upscale Cairo neighborhood, the cerebral Egyptian in his late-50s was second after bin Laden on the FBI "most wanted terrorists" list. Both bin laden and Zawahiri eluded capture when US-led forces toppled Afghanistan's Taliban government in late 2001 after al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks on US cities.
Bespectacled, with grey hair and a grey beard, Zawahri won prominence in November 2008, when he attacked then US President-elect Obama as a "house Negro," a racially-charged term used by 1960s black American Muslim leader Malcolm X to describe black slaves loyal to white masters.
In a subsequent video, in September 2009, Zawahri returned to the attack on president Obama, saying he was no different from his predecessor George W. Bush. "America has come with a new deceptive face , It plants the same dagger as Bush and his predecessors did. Obama has resorted to the policies of his predecessors in lying and selling illusions," said Zawahri, clad in white robe and turban.
Like bin Laden, Zawahri has long been thought to be hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border. The last video of Zawahri and bin Laden together was broadcast by al Jazeera on September 10, 2003. It showed them walking in mountains, calling for jihad and praising the September 11 hijackers. Analysts have described Zawahri as al al-Qaeda's chief organiser and bin Laden's closest mentor. "Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body," said Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who once represented Zawahri.
In a video after the September 11 attacks, Zawahri called them a "great victory" achieved "thanks to God". He has not always been so ebullient. As US-led forces drove out the Taliban in 2001, Afghan sources described him flying into a fury at the nonchalance of Taliban fighters playing badminton behind the front lines while US bombs rained from the skies. Zawahri and bin Laden met in the mid-1980s when both were in the Pakistani city of Peshawar to support guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and worked closely thereafter. But the alliance was not Zawahri's first foray into militancy.

Born in 1951, he was the son of a pharmacology professor and grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world. He graduated from Egypt's most prestigious medical school in 1974 and complete a second degree in surgery. By then he was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state. When the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1973, he joined. When members posed as soldiers and assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, he was among 301 people arrested. He went on trial but was cleared. He did, though, spend three years in jail for having an unlicensed pistol. On his release, Zawahri made his way to Pakistan where he worked with the Red Crescent treating fighters wounded in the Afghan war.
Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, he was a key figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state there, in which more than 1,200 Egyptians died. In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. He has also been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Days after those bombings, he telephoned a Pakistani reporter, denying responsibility, but urging Muslims to "continue their jihad against the Americans and Jews". An hour later, US cruise missiles hit al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Both bin Laden and Zawahri escaped injury.
Zawahri's wife, Azza, and three daughters were reported killed in a bombing strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban, in early December 2001. He has appeared regularly in a series of video or audio messages since then, criticising the US war in Iraq, praising the Taliban and the suicide bombers who attack London in 2005 and urging Muslims to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan. He has occasionally shown he is aware of criticisms by Muslims who dislike the group's indiscriminate violence.
In a 2005 letter to Iraq al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Zawahri suggested it was time to end beheadings of captives and start acting as more of a political leader in anticipation of the eventual US withdrawal from Iraq. In 2008, Zawahri held an unprecedented question and answer session online with al-Qaeda sympathizers who repeatedly questioned him over the group's killings of civilians in Iraq.
Zawahri in his responses denied killing innocents, and said that if any died in attacks it was through error or necessity, for example if they were being used as human shields. Zawahri has repeatedly called for al-Qaeda to seize control of a state, a goal the group has never come close to despite its alliance with Afghanistan's late 1990s Taliban rulers.
"Confronting the enemies of Islam and waging a jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on Muslim territory that raises the banner of jihad and rallies Muslims around it," he wrote in a 2001 essay, Knights Under The Prophet's Banner. "If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small scale harassment."

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0616/breaking7.html