Saif al-Adel

Mohamed Salah al-Din al-Halim Zaidan (Arabic: محمد صلاح الدين الحليم زيدان; born April 11, 1960 or 1963) commonly known by his nom de guerre Saif al-Adel (Arabic: سيف العدل, lit. 'sword of justice') is an Egyptian former special forces officer and explosives expert who is widely understood to be the de facto leader of al-Qaeda. Once a colonel in Egypt's El-Sa'ka Force commandos expelled for his suspected Salafi jihadist allegiances, al-Adel fought the Soviets as an Afghan Arab before becoming a founding member of the al-Qaeda organization. He is currently known to live in Iran along with several other senior members of the group.

The Egyptian military expelled Saif al-Adel in 1987 and arrested him alongside thousands of Islamists amid allegations of attempting to rebuild the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and plans to topple Hosni Mubarak. The charges were dismissed, though Saif soon left Egypt for Afghanistan, joining Afghan Arab mujahideen resisting the Soviet invasion under the banner of al-Qaeda forerunner Maktab al-Khidamat in 1988. Saif would go on to become the chief of newly formed al-Qaeda's media department, and was involved in the production of Osama Bin Laden's videos which quickly found audiences worldwide. By the early nineties, Saif is thought to have then traveled to southern Lebanon with Abu Talha al-Sudani, Saif al-Islam al-Masri, Abu Ja`far al-Masri, and Abu Salim al-Masri, where they trained alongside Hezbollah Al-Hejaz. Sometime after, Saif became a member of the AQ Shura council, and by 1992 had become a member of its military committee, then headed by Muhammad Atef. He has provided military and intelligence training to members of al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan, and to anti-American Somali tribes. Shifting to Khartoum in 1992, Saif taught militant recruits how to handle explosives. It is possible that his trainees included Somalis who participated in the first Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. Saif also established the al-Qaeda training facility at Ras Kamboni in Somalia near the Kenyan border.

The 9/11 Commission Report states that in July 2001, three senior AQ Shura council members including al-Adel, Saeed al-Masri and Mahfouz Ould al-Walid opposed Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri's decision to execute the September 11 attacks. Following the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, Saif was given secret asylum in Iran during which he was monitored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In 2015, al-Qaeda made a deal with the IRGC's Qods Force to return Saif to Afghanistan, though he reportedly refused, stating a preference for maintaining Iran as his base of activities. Saif is currently under indictment in the United States, with charges related to his alleged role in the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

Before Zawahiri's assassination in 2022, Saif al-Adel had become the effective micro-manager of field commanders of AQ branches in Somalia, Yemen and Syria from his communication base in Iran. A 2023 United Nations report concluded that Saif al-Adel had been named de-facto leader of al-Qaeda but that he had not been formally proclaimed as its emir due to "political sensitives" of the Taliban government in acknowledging the killing of Zawahiri in Kabul and the "theological and operational" challenges posed by location of al-Adel in Shia-led Iran. With the death of Zawahiri, Saif al-Adel is one of al-Qaeda's few surviving founding members. Saif has been tightening his grip over the AQ branches, promoting a loyalist base of field commanders and increasing his influence in the group's branch in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP, while waiting to be officially declared emir. Saif has made attempts to shift AQ's central command to Yemen, a country where the group has long had a branch.