Moroccan Operative Emerges as Potential Al-Qaeda Leader After Zawahiri’s Death

Who will succeed the leader of Al-Qaeda? The Moroccan Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi, the Algerian Yezid Mebarek, known as Abu Ubaydah Yusuf al-Anabi and the Egyptians, Saif al-Adel, a former lieutenant colonel of the Special Forces and a figure of the old guard of Al-Qaeda, and Abou Abdelkarim al-Masri, a leader of the Houras al-Din group in Syria, are among the potential successors to Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Among this group, the Moroccan has an advantage over the others. He is not only a senior Al-Qaeda official, but he is also al-Zawahiri’s son-in-law. He was director general of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moreover, the FBI is actively searching for Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi, reports France24. According to the US organization, the Moroccan studied software programming in Germany before settling in Afghanistan where he headed Al-Qaeda’s main media wing. According to documents recovered during the raid that killed Bin Laden, the Moroccan has been presented as a rising star of the group for many years.

On Monday, US President Joe Biden announced the death of Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, killed in a US drone strike in Kabul on the night of Saturday to Sunday, July 31. The man considered one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, was killed by a drone strike.