Saif al-Adel

Mohamed Salah al-Din al-Halim Zaidan was a colonel in Egypt's special forces until 1987, when the military expelled him over alleged plans to rebuild Egyptian Islamic Jihad and topple Hosni Mubarak. He left for Afghanistan in 1988, joined the mujahideen under Maktab al-Khidamat, and became a founding member of al-Qaeda, heading its media department and producing Osama bin Laden's early videos. By 1992 he sat on the Shura council's military committee, training operatives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia - possibly including fighters in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu - and establishing the Ras Kamboni camp near Kenya. In July 2001, he and two other senior members opposed bin Laden's decision to carry out the September 11 attacks. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, Iran gave him secret asylum under IRGC monitoring; in 2015, al-Qaeda negotiated his return to Afghanistan, but he refused, preferring to stay. From Iran, he micro-managed branch commanders in Somalia, Yemen, and Syria.