The secrecy that envelops Al Qaeda’s leadership structure makes such estimates speculative, other analysts noted. But one Islamist insider said that in addition to youth and charisma, Libi possessed one skill that Al Qaeda’s leaders had been lacking: religious scholarship. Perhaps with this in mind, Al Qaeda is featuring Libi, who spent two years in Africa studying Islam, in as many of the videos as the group’s top leaders, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.
“Bin Laden is an engineer and Zawahri is a medical doctor,” said Dr Muhammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who lives in London.
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