| Al-Ayiri | |
| Birth Date: | 24 April 1974 |
| Birth Place: | Dammam, Saudi Arabia |
| Death Place: | Mecca, Saudi Arabia |
| Native Name: | العييري |
| Other Names: | al-Battar |
Yusuf ibn Salih al-Ayiri (Arabic: يوسف بن صالح العييري|translit=Yūsuf ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAyīrī; 24 April 19742 June 2003), known simply by his nisba al-Ayiri, was a Saudi Islamic scholar. An influential Islamist, he wrote many internet-published books and was an associate of al-Qaeda.
Al-Ayiri was born on 24 April 1974 in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Belonging to an upper-middle-class family, al-Ayiri was known for taking part in illegal street racing.[1] At age 18, al-Ayiri dropped out of secondary school and travelled to Afghanistan in 1991. In Afghanistan, he received training at the al-Faruq camp, eventually becoming a trainer at the camp. For a certain time, al-Ayiri served as a bodyguard of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, with whom he traveled to Sudan in 1992. Ayiri was also known as al-Battar, conventionally rendered "Swift Sword" in English.[2]
According to Somali militant Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr, al-Ayiri played an important role in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu by providing training and participating in the battle directly.[3]
Following the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, Saudi authorities arrested and tortured al-Ayiri. He was released two years later and was tasked by Osama bin Laden with organizing al-Qaeda's branch within Saudi Arabia.
According to Ron Suskind's One-percent Doctrine, he was the mastermind of a planned cyanide gas attack on both the New York City Subway and the PATH (both of which were canceled shortly before they were to happen).
Before his death, he also wrote a number of strategic documents on al-Qaeda. According to Ron Suskind's One-percent Doctrine,
First, it was discovered that this al-Ayeri was behind a Web site, al-Nida, that U.S. investigators had long felt carried some of the most specialized analysis and coded directives about al Qaeda's motives and plans. He was also the anonymous author of two extraordinary pieces of writing -- short books, really, that had recently moved through cyberspace, about al Qaeda's underlying strategies. The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, written as the United States prepared its attack, said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Qaeda, stoking extremism throughout the Persian Gulf and South Asia, and achieving precisely the radicalizing quagmire that bin Laden had hoped would occur in Afghanistan. A second book, Crusaders' War, outlined a tactical model for fighting the American forces in Iraq, including "assassination and poisoning the enemy's food and drink," remotely triggered explosives, suicide bombings, and lightning strike ambushes. It was the playbook.[4]
At age 29, al-Ayiri was killed in 2003 by Saudi police forces.
He was married to the sister of the wife of Shaykh Sulayman al-Ulwan with whom he had three daughters.
The Dutch researcher Roel Meijer described al-Ayiri as "a well-informed, clear headed, and down to earth analyst". He furthermore says that "what immediately strikes the reader of the works of Ayiri is their scope, depth, and length" as "between 1998, when he was released from prison, until his death [in 2003], he managed to publish hundreds of pages" on different topics. The Palestinian-born British journalist Abdel Bari Atwan said of him that he was "al-Qa'ida's first webmaster and an influential ideologue who wrote thirty books."[5]