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Self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of dreadful Al-Qaeda terrorist group have been ranked in the recently published Forbes world’s most powerful people list.
Among hundreds of candidates from various walks of life all around the globe measured along four dimensions: power over lots of people, financial resources controlled by each person, powerful in multiple spheres and active use of power, the two notorious terrorist leaders happened to fall into the selection criteria of Forbes.
To calculate the final rankings, Forbes said “a panel of Forbes editors ranked all of our candidates in each of these four dimensions of power, and those individual rankings were averaged into a composite score”.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, 65, emerging 71 on the list, is an Egyptian-born terrorist leader who succeeded Osama bin Laden as leader of al Qaeda.
Al-Zawahiri has been indicted for his role in the August 1998 bombings of United States (US) embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and is believed to have participated in the planning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York.
According to Forbes, despite a contentious relationship between Al-Zawahiri and other terrorist leaders, the terrorist master still has significant symbolic power, and drives many of his followers to violence.
In October, al-Zawahri called on Sunnis living in Iraq to wage a long guerrilla war against Shiite forces as they take back land from the Islamic State in Syria.
45 years old Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on the other hand retained his position on the list, a position he occupied in the 2015 edition of the ranking by Forbes.
The self-declared caliph of the Islamic State (IS), a global terrorist network seeking to establish a radical Islamic empire in Iraq and the Levant, has, in a remarkably short period of time, mobilized ISIS fighters to seize significant portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq.
Al-Baghdadi has commandeered planet earth’s attention with a series of barbaric beheadings and earned non-negligible amounts of cash, largely through black-market oil sales said to total $1 million a day.
Propaganda efforts have also helped ISIS mint new extremists capable of carrying out terror attacks throughout the Western world.
While al-Zawahiri is making the Forbes list for the first time, al-Baghdadi has made the list in 2015 occupying 57th position.
“This year’s list comes at a time of rapid and profound change, and represents our best guess about who will matter in the year to come,” Forbes said.