AL-ZAWAHIRI'S LEGACY: HOW THE U.S. BECAME AL QAEDA'S TOP ENEMYBy RANE Worldview by Stratfor, Ryan Bohl After the announced killing of al Qaeda's emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, much ink has been spilled on the state of the group and its likely next leader.While important questions, much less attention has been given to al-Zawahiri's key ideological contribution to al Qaeda's global brand and whether his vision for the group — and jihadist ideology more generally — will survive. Just as much as his deceased predecessor Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri helped mold al Qaeda into the most notorious global terrorist group of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely because of his advocacy for taking the fight from the Islamic world directly to the streets of the West. But al- Zawahiri is widely considered to have faded from operational prominence long ago and al Qaeda itself had in recent years turned away from this strategy, seemingly both by choice and by way of Western counterterrorism pressure. With his death, therefore, has al-Zawahiri's vision died, too?From Surgeon to Mastermind Compared with bin Laden — who in the West came to symbolize not only al Qaeda as a group but the face of modern jihadism — al-Zawahiri is a far less known individual, even though his influence is arguably just as important. Born in 1951 into a well-educated, politicallyconnected, deeply conservative family in Cairo, al-Zawahiri turned to radical ideology at a young age. Influenced by the writings of the extremist thinkers of the time, in 1966, he organized a group of friends into an even more radical group that eventually became known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) — dedicated to overthrowing Egypt's secular government and imposing Islamic rule. While al-Zawahiri initially did not exert complete control over the group, he led a vital faction. And during this time, he did not give up on his studies, earning a master's degree in surgery in 1978.Perhaps ironically, it was his medical career that first brought him to the battlefield. In 1980, he left Egypt for the first of many trips to Peshawar, Pakistan, to treat refugees and mujahideen fighters battling the Soviets across the border in Afghanistan. It was there that he first met bin Laden, though it would not be approximately two decades before the two formally crafted the al Qaeda we know today. In the interim, al-Zawahiri's revolutionary priorities continued to focus on Egypt — afixation that would bring him both disappointment and eventually cement his legacy.Arrested in Egypt in 1981 in the crackdown that followed the murder of President Anwar Sadat, for which al-Zawahiri and the EIJ were implicated, his ideological furor hardened under repeated torture while imprisoned. Upon his release in 1984, he left Egypt, eventually settling in Peshawar where he again crossed paths with bin Laden, this time at the hospital where al-Zawahiri worked. Their relationship grew as al-Zawahiri became bin Laden's personal physician, but al-Zawahiri remained focused on Egypt, which he continued to see as the key regional lynchpin. Upon gaining full control of EIJ in 1991 after an internal split, he oversaw a series of high-profile attacks against Egyptian targets that culminated with the killings of 62 people, mostly foreign tourists, at an archaeological site in Luxor in 1997. While questions remain over al-Zawahiri's precise involvement in the massacre, it outraged Egyptians, including those who had previously been sympathetic to the EIJ. The combination of a collapse in popular support and a ramped-up government crackdown forced al-Zawahiri out of the country and back to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where he once again linked up with bin Laden — this time for good.“ While accounts differ on al-Zawahiri's precise involvement in the operational planning of the 9/11 attacks, there is no doubt that he provided the ideological vision for them.  In 1998, al-Zawahiri's EIJ joined other terrorist groups, including bin Laden's al Qaeda, to form the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. Under the group's banner, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden co-signed a fatwa, or religious edict, urging Muslims across the globe to kill Americans and their allies, a message that provided an early indication of al-Zawahiri's most enduring legacy: focusing on the United States as the so-called ''far enemy.'' Driven by repeated failures to turn his native Egypt into a theocracy, al-Zawahiri had become convinced that the only way to spark change in the Islamic world was to go after what he believed to be the proverbial bottom layer of a house of cards, which, if removed, would send the rest falling.It was this belief and al-Zawahiri's personal influence that truly transformed bin Laden's calculus. Before fusing with the EIJ and others to form the World Islamic Front, bin Laden's original fatwa in 1996 had a narrower scope in calling for the removal of foreign troops from Muslim lands. While certainly provocative and violent, this goal was still inherently focused on the Islamic world and less ambitious than al-Zawahiri's more expansive focus on directly attacking the ''far enemy'' as the main priority. To be sure, bin Laden had already been evaluating a similar strategy, but he was also receiving advice from other well-known jihadists who wanted to concentrate on ''near enemy'' countries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Al-Zawahiri's embrace of the ''far enemy'' strategy, coupled with the trust he had gained from bin Laden, thus made him the key ideologue pushing bin Laden's violent vision decisively toward the West.Working with bin Laden, al-Zawahiri quickly made good on this lethal threat. He helped plan the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000 and a score of other disrupted plots. In 2001, the EIJ formally merged with al Qaeda to create the group we know today. Later that year, the 9/11 attacks on the United States would achieve the tragic apex of the group's focus on the ''far enemy'' — taking the battlefield from attacks against U.S. targets elsewhere in the world directly to the homeland. While accounts differ on al-Zawahiri's precise involvement in the operational planning of the 9/11 attacks, there is no doubt that he provided the ideological vision for them.Underscoring his desire to further strike the United States, al-Zawahiri also directly plotted a series of additional attacks on U.S. soil and even oversaw a biological weapons development program — all of which failed to materialize amid the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which forced al-Zawahiri, bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders out of the country and into hiding.Between Rhetoric and Reality Despite the loss of its safe haven in Afghanistan, al Qaeda had built its proverbial brand on taking the jihadist fight directly to the United States and other Western countries. This meant it was incumbent on the group to make good on this threat, which in the years after 9/11, translated into successive attacks against Western targets in Muslim countries, often with the support of local groups aligned with al Qaeda. Stretching from Africa to Southeast Asia, al Qaeda oversaw a wave of destruction that left hundreds of people dead and many more wounded, not including the countless attacks in Iraq, which became the group's primary battlefield to target U.S. personnel and interests after the United States invaded the country in 2003.But as appalling as this violence was (and as much as it kept al Qaeda in the headlines), the group carried out comparatively few successful attacks in the West itself. The 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings were of course horrifically tragic outliers, but local networks of al Qaeda supporters appear to have largely planned and conducted those attacks, even if the group's central leaders were happy to claim the credit. Notably, the United States also did not see additional mass attacks in the wake of 9/11. But it wasn't for a lack of trying on al Qaeda's part, as all of the other most audacious plots linked to the group — like the transatlantic plane bomb plots in 2006 and 2010 — were disrupted. This left al Qaeda's biggest successes in the West as instilling plenty of fear among numerous thwarted plots, but practically speaking it managed only a series of smaller and often less strategically impactful acts of violence carried out by single individuals or small cells.Thus, by the time of bin Laden's killing in 2011, the gap between al Qaeda's ambitions and its capabilities was already stark. Despite claiming to be the vanguard of attacking the ''far enemy'' in the West, a decade of relentless counterterrorism pressure had significantly curtailed al Qaeda's ability to do so. Instead, the group was left with a series of globallydispersed franchises with varying levels of success and connection to central leadership. This was what al-Zawahiri would inherit when he took over as emir upon bin Laden's death.The second part of this series, will explore al-Zawahiri's 11-year tenure as al Qaeda's leader and whether his ideological vision will outlive him. You can read it online at: Stratfor Worldview