“基地”组织新领导人扎瓦希里上任

Our foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall is here with me. So Tim, what do we know about him?

Quite a lot. He's probably in his late 50s, born in Egypt to a religious conservative family, quite wealthy, quite a well known family. 1967, first key date, the Israeli smashed the combined Alabama as it trying to invade. At that point, aged just 14, becomes radicalized, thinks how did this happen and searches for answers and finds them in radical Islam, including violence, joins Muslim Brotherhood, then joins Islamic Jihad. The time he gets to Sadat's assassination, (19)81, he's one of the top leaders. After that he's jailed and tortured, goes off to Afghanistan like so many other Arabs to fight against the Soviets, meets Bin Laden, folds his organization into Bin Laden's organization what we now known as al-Qaeda. And he was always the brains, if you like, behind the operation, but not the charismatic leader like Bin Laden was.

Well, yes, and if he's worked so closely with Bin Laden, is it kind of business-as-usual for al-Qaeda or might we see a mark difference in approach?

For the past ten years, business-as-usual for al-Qaeda has being staying alive. The top third echelons have all been killed or captured. The Americans went after them and have been extraordinary successful in getting many of them. And that's changed the character of al-Qaeda and is what gives this man a real problem. He's got a real problem anyway. He's not charismatic. He's very dogmatic. He doesn't speak in a language that ordinary people understand. He hasn't got what Bin Laden had, including the sort of the looks. But the biggest problem is, that because they were...somebody of them were destroyed, the hierarchical organization, when you went to al-Qaeda and said I've got this idea, give me some money and give me an approval, is gone. It's no longer horizontal organization, it's a franchise operation, whereas if you are heading up the Yemen franchise, you might have set up, by the way Bin Laden would gonna do this because he was the figurehead. I'm not sure if you are in Yemen now, you wanna do an operation, you gonna bother to go to this guy, up this hierarchy because it is now much more of a flat organization with each franchise controlling itself.

So in order to try and push his sense of leadership, might he try to enact some kind of big gesture, some attack in order to show who's boss?

Yes, a view in South Africa is taking me to test on Twitter because I venture the opinion that he will try to make his mark through an atrocity. This is not encouraging and it's not, saying it's a good thing, but it's a statement of fact that a new leader, whether you take over a company, or a country, or a political party, or a major terrorist organization, you got to put your stamp on that. He will try to put his stamp on that and the way they put stamp on things is by trying to pull off atrocities. Al-Qaeda and Ayman al Zawahiri is even now thinking what can we do to put ourselves back in the frame, considering the Arab spring has just passed us by. But the last few months, even these few years, they've just been trying to stay alive, but he's got to trying pull off something.

Where is he?

Well, we all said, Bin Laden, including myself, Bin Laden was in the northwest frontier of Pakistan and he, he turned out to be living next door to the army headquarters. But you could venture that he's out there in the northwest frontier somewhere. He's probably in Pakistan, but after the Bin Laden fiasco, I think many of us perhaps have learned not to be too confident about where he is.