A frail, bespectacled and mumbling Egyptian surgeon with a $25 million (Dh91.8m) US bounty on his head is set to become al Qa'eda's new leader.
Ayman al Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden's long-serving deputy, most trusted mentor and the terror network's organisational brains and chief ideologue.
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But the grey-bearded 59-year-old lacks bin Laden's charisma. And his ability to inspire is highly questionable at a time when the message of jihadi militancy has been drastically undermined and discredited by the Arab Spring, whose democratic and peaceful values have fired the masses in a way that al Qa'eda failed to do.
With al Qa'eda now a diffuse and regionally dispersed network of largely autonomous groups, Zawahiri could find himself challenged - or simply ignored - by the leaders of a younger generation of its affiliates who may consider themselves better suited to assume bin Laden's mantle.
The most lethally potent of these terror "franchises" is the Yemen-based al Qa'eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), US experts say.
Bin Laden's death is a "catastrophe", an AQAP member said yesterday.
"At first we did not believe it, but we got in touch with our brothers in Pakistan who confirmed it," he told Agence France-Press.
AQAP's alarm and dismay are understandable, but exaggerated. Al Qa'eda has already adapted itself to survive and function without its founder, who in recent years was more of a mythic and spectral figurehead than a hands-on leader.
AQAP's leader is Naser Abdul-Karim al-Wahishi, also known as Abu Basir. He born in Yemen in 1976 and once served as bin Laden's secretary.
But its most high-profile figure and key recruiter is Anwar al Awlaki, a radical cleric with fluent English. A dual US and Yemeni citizen, he was born in New Mexico in 1971 and served as an imam in California and Virginia before basing himself in Yemen where he gained a following with his lurid if eloquent internet sermons.
US counter-terrorism officials have branded him one of al Qa'eda's most dangerous leaders and Washington last year took the unusual step of authorising the CIA to kill him after freezing his assets.
Awlaki is said to have inspired a thwarted Christmas Day attack aboard a US airliner in 2009 and an attempt last year to blow up two US-bound cargo planes with toner cartridges packed with explosives.
In Yemen, meanwhile, he was tried by a court in January and sentenced to 10 years in jail for inciting the killings of foreigners, although, of course, he never showed up for the hearings.
Experts, however, say Zawahiri remains al Qa'eda's most likely candidate to replace bin Laden. His hectoring, schoolmasterly manner and lack of charisma are seemingly more than compensated for by his seniority and quarter-century-old relationship with bin Laden.
Zawahiri is said to have ensured al Qa'eda's survival after the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan smashed the organisation's safe haven in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Many of its fighters and leaders were scattered, killed or captured.
Zawahiri rebuilt al Qa'eda's leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region - where he is thought to be hiding - and installed his allies as new lieutenants in key positions.
He was born in 1951, the son of an upper middle-class family of doctors and scholars in the wealthy Cairo suburb of Maadi. His grandfather was the grand imam of Al Azhar, the centre of mainstream Sunni Muslim teaching.
Unlike bin Laden, who found his jihadist calling as an adult, Zawahiri began his activism in his mid-teens, when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed, non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.
He graduated from Egypt's most prestigious medical school in 1974. In the late 1970s, deciding that the Muslim Brotherhood was too moderate, Zawahiri helped found the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was jailed for the unlicensed possession of a pistol after President Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, but released three years later.
He then made his way to Pakistan where he worked with the Red Crescent treating fighters wounded in the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, and first met bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in the mid-1980s.
In 1998, both men signed an infamous fatwa calling for attacks on American targets worldwide. Zawahiri was indicted later that same year for the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
In December 2001, his hatred of the US became deeply personal when his wife, Azza, and three daughters were reportedly killed in a US air strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar.
The last video of Zawahiri with bin Laden was in 2003 when they called for jihad and praised the September 11 hijackers.
As bin Laden faded from public view for long stretches, Zawahiri went on to become al Qa'eda's most prominent spokesman, appearing in some 40 videotapes, most of them virulent rants against the US. In 2008 he held an unprecedented question and answer session online with al Qa'eda sympathisers who repeatedly questioned him over the group's killing of civilians in Iraq.
Zawahiri's most recent videotape was in April when, clearly alarmed that al Qa'eda had been made to look like an irrelevant spectator at the pro-democracy uprisings sweeping the Arab world, he urged Muslims to fight Nato and American forces in Libya.
malqadhi@thenational.ae