Successor to Osama lacked the charisma to inspire attacks

Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Osama bin Laden as AlQaeda leader after years as its main organiser and strategist, but his lack of charisma and competition from rival militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria hobbled his ability to inspire sizeable attacks on the West.

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In the years following Osama’s death in 2011, US air strikes killed a succession of Zawahiri’s deputies, weakening the veteran Egyptian militant’s ability to coordinate globally.

He had watched as Al-Qaeda was sidelined by the 2011 Arab revolts, launched mainly by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to decades of autocracy.

Despite a reputation for being inflexible and combative, he managed to nurture loosely affiliated groups around the world that grew to wage devastating insurgencies, some of them rooted in turmoil arising from the Arab Spring.

The violence destabilised a number of countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

But Al-Qaeda’s days as the centrally directed, hierarchical network of plotters that attacked the United States on Sept 11, 2001, were long gone.