CAIRO - For years, Osama bin Laden's charisma kept al-Qaida's ranks filled with zealous recruits. But it was the strategic thinking and the organizational skills of his Egyptian right hand man that kept the terror network together after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and pushed al-Qaida out. With Bin Laden killed, Ayman al-Zawahri becomes the top candidate for the world's top terror job. It's too early to tell how exactly al-Qaida would change with its founder and supreme mentor gone, but the group under al-Zawahri would likely be further radicalized, unleashing a new wave of attacks to avenge bib Laden's killing by U.S. troops in Pakistan on Monday to send a message that it's business as usual. Al-Zawahri's extremist views and his readiness to use deadly violence are beyond doubt. In a 2001 treatise, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," he set down the longterm strategy for the jihadi movement ��" to inflict "as many casualties as possible" on the Americans, while trying to establish control in a nation as a base "to launch the battle to restore the holy caliphate" of Islamic rule across the Muslim world. Unlike bin Laden who found his Jihadist calling as an adult, al-Zawahri's activism began when he was in his mid-teens, establishing his first secret cell of high school students to oppose the Egyptian government of then President Anwar Sadat he viewed as infidel for not following the rule of God. The doors of jihad opened for him when, as a young doctor, a visitor came to him with an offer to travel to Afghanistan to treat Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces. His 1980 trip to the Afghan war zone ��" only a few months long but the first of many ��" opened his eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. What he saw there, he was to write 20 years later, was "the training course preparing Muslim mujahideen youth to launch their upcoming battle with the great power that would rule the world: America." The bond between al-Zawahri and bin Laden began in the late 1980s, when al-Zawahri reportedly treated the Saudi millionaire-turned-jihadist in the caves of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains around them. The friendship laid the foundation for the al-Qaida terror network, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide airplane hijackings that sparked the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan later that year. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden Enemy No. 1 to the United States. But he likely could never have carried it out without al-Zawahri. Bin Laden provided al-Qaida with the charisma and money, but al-Zawahri brought the ideological fire, tactics and organizational skills needed to forge disparate militants into a network of cells in countries around the world. "Al-Zawahri was always bin Laden's mentor, bin Laden always looked up to him," says terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. While bin Laden came from a privileged background in a prominent Saudi family of Yemeni descent, al-Zawahri had the experience of a revolutionary in the trenches. "He spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi from the time he was a teenager, he has been fighting his whole life and that has shaped his world view," Hoffman says
