Actually, #1 is still Osama bin Laden.
Read the thread. The current #1 is al-Zawahiri, and he’s been associated with the organization, and the wider cause of militant Islam, for as long as bin Ladin has. This has infact, been reported on CNN.
Did you see the link in the OP? It’s an article from this week.
I really can’t think of a better time to link this youtube video (sfw) from Pink Floyd’s “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up”…complete with stuff blowing up from the movie “Zabriskie Point”.
I’m a little confused by the OP, but as far as the serious part of the discussion goes: I thought Abu Yahya al-Libi was the latest guy to occupy a sort of field leadership position for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden and Zawahiri can hide out and stay almost unreachable for long stretches of time, but someone has to be more active and reachable and coordinate between them and other people in Pakistan and elsewhere who are trying to plan things. That’s by nature a more dangerous position, so the guys who hold that role get killed more often, and this one is the latest. That was how I understood it, anyway.
“Al-Qaeda #2 killed”. Yes, I saw that headline, I’ve been seeing it every month since 2005. Along with the witticism about haven’t we killed enough of them yet, yadda yadda.
I assume anyone who cracks that joke doesn’t own a television and does in fact need the situation explained to them, but I guess you’re different.
(excuse me , but if you’ll please let me get a little nitpicky…)
It is perfectly logical to have more than one person called “number2” .
Look at a golf competition, where the players are ranked on the leaderboard by their scores. There might be one person at the #1 spot, then 4 others all tied for the #2 spot, then the next spot on the list is #6.
There is no formal organization known as Al Qaeda. It is a nebulous group, without a well-defined hierarchy. It consists of hundreds of totally separate cells, in dozens of countries, and no formal command structure. It is reasonable to call a guy “number 2” if he is the top man in a certain cell, who knows (well, knew 
) Bin Laden, but may not even know about the existence of other cells, whether nearby or far away.
So there could be a hundred “number 2’s”, because each one was the only guy in his cell who was able to send or recieve communications from the number one guy in Pakistan.
It used to be the #3s that got killed all the time, while 1 (Osama) and 2 (Ayman, who’s been a well-known figure right from the beginning) were both alive. Now that it’s just Ayman, it’s the #2s who have the life expectancy of Spinal Tap’s new drummer.
Sorry if I told a joke on a subject you’ve grown tired of. I’ll try to amuse you in a more trendy fashion next time.
Sorry if I came on as harsh, it was supposed to be a minor throwaway snark, but it soured under the burden of explanation.