Keeping Al-Qaeda in His Grip

Zarqawi pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda two years ago, but analysts and officials suspect that their alliance is a marriage of convenience. Before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi kept his distance from the group, operating his own training camps. He has also held different strategic objectives: the overthrow of the monarchy in his native Jordan and war against Israel, neither of which have been priorities for al-Qaeda.

"There's nothing in common between these two guys," said Diaa Rashwan, a researcher at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "They were two different people from different places with a different history. I have my doubts about whether the two guys are really with the same organization."

In October, U.S. intelligence officials released a letter they said was written by Zawahiri to his "gracious brother" Zarqawi. Some independent analysts have questioned its authenticity and have charged the U.S. government with inflating al-Qaeda's role in Iraq for political reasons. Several former Zawahiri associates interviewed for this article said they believe the letter is genuine and accurately reflects some of al-Qaeda's internal conflicts.

In the letter dated July 9, 2005, Zawahiri warned Zarqawi that gory tactics that had made him famous in Iraq -- the videotaped beheadings of hostages and bombings of Shiite holy sites -- risked alienating ordinary Muslims. Although the Egyptian said he agreed such acts were religiously justified, sustaining public support was more important. His advice: Kill hostages by gunshot instead, and concentrate attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

"You shouldn't be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the sheikh of the slaughterers," wrote Zawahiri, who like Zarqawi is a Sunni Muslim. "We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And this media battle is a race for the hearts and minds of our people."

Enemies Near and Far

If subsequent events are any indication, Zarqawi's response to the advice has been mixed. The number of decapitations has declined, and there is evidence that Zarqawi has taken a lower profile to give Iraqi insurgents a more visible leadership role.

At the same time, attacks on Shiite mosques have increased. In November, his organization asserted responsibility for coordinated suicide bombings that killed 60 people at two hotels in Amman, Jordan, half of them members of a wedding party.

Public reaction was as Zawahiri predicted: More than 100,000 Jordanians took to the streets, the largest mass protests in the Muslim world against an al-Qaeda-sponsored terrorist attack.

About the same time, Zawahiri produced another videotape, although it did not surface publicly until this week, posted on a radical Islamic Web site.

Perhaps mindful of reports of internal dissension, Zawahiri defended the Jordanian insurgent as "my beloved brother" and urged Muslims to rally behind him. "I have lived with him up close and seen nothing but good from him," Zawahiri said. "The Islamic nation must support the heroic holy warriors in Iraq, who are fighting on the very front line for the dignity of Islam."

Zawahiri's sensitivity to public opinion can be traced to his days as chief of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Its target since the 1960s was what it calls "the near enemy," the Egyptian government, which they consider corrupt and un-Islamic.

In 1993, group members trying to assassinate an Egyptian official accidentally killed an 11-year-old girl. An angry public response, combined with a renewed government crackdown on radicals, severely weakened the network.

This and other setbacks helped drive Zawahiri into exile in Afghanistan. "His organization inside Egypt was almost completely eliminated," said Kamal Habib, the former Islamic Jihad leader, who abandoned the group after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 1998, Zawahiri sought to rescue Islamic Jihad by creating a formal alliance with bin Laden's nascent al-Qaeda network called the International Islamic Front Against Crusaders and Jews. The new target would be "the far enemy," the United States and other Western powers seen as protectors of secular Arab governments.

The decision sparked a rebellion in the ranks of Islamic Jihad. Zawahiri had failed to consult with other senior members of the group before ordering a drastic shift in its core mission.

"Many people said, 'Why would I want to fight the White House and Tony Blair?' " said Yasser al-Sirri, another Egyptian exile in London who has known Zawahiri for more than a decade. "But it was his only choice then, to be allied with bin Laden. He hadn't been successful in Egypt because he had made mistakes and surrounded himself with the wrong people. They were always fighting and arguing among themselves."

The internal feuding continued even as the new al-Qaeda under Zawahiri and bin Laden gained prominence for sponsoring the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years later. E-mails recovered from an al-Qaeda computer in Kabul after the invasion of Afghanistan show a steady stream of bitter message traffic between Zawahiri and his followers during this period, with running arguments over money, ideology and authority.

The Sept. 11 plot's success brought the squabbling to a temporary halt. But Zawahiri seems to have realized that the feuding would eventually resume and challenge his ideological authority, said el-Zayat, the lawyer who reported receiving in 2003 the admonishing e-mails from the al-Qaeda theoretician. Intelligence analysts said they believe the e-mails are genuine but that it is impossible to confirm with certainty that Zawahiri was the author.

"I'm sure he has the vision to bring the network back together, but I don't think he will be able to do that," Zayat said. "He hasn't changed. It's as if I'm listening to him in a prison cell in 1981. Except for some white hair, he is the same."