There are some strong links between these militant Islamist
organizations in Egypt and the events leading up to and fol-
lowing the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.,
in September 2001. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the onetime physician
who became the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden in the
al-Qaeda organization, was jailed for his role in the Islamic
Jihad’s assassination of President Sadat. Islamic Jihad’s spiritual
leader, a blind cleric named Omar Abd al-Rahman, was con-
victed and imprisoned in the United States for his involvement
in the first attack on New York’s World Trade Center, in 1993.
The actions of these men suggest that to some extent, Egypt
was successful in exporting its Islamist problem abroad, by
deporting the militant leaders or allowing them to relocate. As
early as the 1980s, some went to Afghanistan to join the ranks
of the “Afghan Arabs” who helped locals fight and eventually
expel the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan. The Islamist vic-
tory against a powerful enemy gave much confidence to the