Following US President Joe Biden's announcement Monday that al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri was assassinated in a US drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, some two weeks ago, the question now shifts to the identity of his successor.
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The top candidate, according to various reports, is Saif al-Adel, a mysterious, low-key former colonel in the Egyptian special forces and a high-ranking member of the terrorist organization.
The United States is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his arrest.
There are just a couple of purported photographs of him in existence. He is said to have faked his death in his twenties. According to CNN, he resides in Iran although his status there has also been unclear: sometimes detained, sometimes under house arrest, sometimes free.
Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and author of "Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State," described al-Adel as the ultimate insider, someone well-connected across many countries, and a shrewd military tactician.
"When he acts, he does so with ruthless efficiency," Soufan told CNN. "Above all, he is a pragmatist – a man who would have known that despite the hateful necessity of living under a [Shia] government anathema to Sunni [al-Qaida], his best chance of survival, and therefore of continued effectiveness in the jihad, lay in a return to Iran."
Al-Adel was suspected of involvement in the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and left the country in 1988 to join the mujahideen fighting Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.
One of al-Qaida's leading military chiefs, and often called the third-ranking al-Qaida official, al-Adel helped to plan the bomb attacks against the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam in 1998, and set up training camps for the organization in Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the 1990s.
In 2004, al-Adel's diary was recovered during a raid in Saudi Arabia. His role in the organization has been as a trainer, military leader, and member of Osama bin Laden's security detail.
Before joining al-Qaida he was a member of Egypt's Islamic Jihad organization, which was bent on toppling the state.
Al-Adel was linked to the killing of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, US investigators said in a report.
The findings by investigators of the Pearl Project revealed al-Adel had discussed Pearl's abduction with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, also known as KSM, the accused mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
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