Saif al-Islam al-Masri

Saif al-Islam al-Masri (also known as Abu Islam and Abu Islam al Masry) is the name of an Egyptian lawyer who joined Al-Qaeda, the Jihad Wal training camp near Khost, Afghanistan in 1992. He was then a member of Al-Qaeda's military committee.

At some point in the early 1990s, according to Jamal al-Fadl, there was a meeting in the Riyadh neighbourhood of Khartoum, Sudan including Osama bin Laden (who lived nearby), a Sudanese scholar named Ahmed Abdel Rahman Hamadabi, and an Iranian scholar named Nomani, who was an emissary of his government. Al-Fadl testified that a joint orientation of Sunni and Shia Muslims toward fighting the West was discussed. According to the 9/11 Commission, discussions in Khartoum "in late 1991 or 1992" led to an agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda to cooperate "in providing support-even if only training-for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States."

Subsequently, Saif al-Islam, Saif al-Adel, two other operatives known as Abu Jaffer al-Masry and Salem al-Masry (all four being definitively or impliedly Egyptian), and one Abu Talha al-Sudani were trained by Hezbollah, in Lebanon, in the use of explosives, including "how to explosives [sic.] big buildings."

He was in Grozny, Chechnya by 1998, or according to another report that summer, Al-Islam was one of fifteen men captured in the Pankisi Gorge, Georgia, in a joint operation by Georgian and American Special Forces. Saif al-Islam had been a member of al-Qaeda's majlis al-shura (consultative council) and its military committee. It is not clear what happened to him since.

The operation in which al-Masri was captured was one of the final acts of the Pankisi Gorge crisis.