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The United States has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Al Qaeda, an organization in which he succeeded Osama Bin Laden and “the most wanted terrorist in the world”, in a drone attack carried out in Kabul at dawn last Sunday. This was confirmed this Monday afternoon by President Joe Biden in a television appearance. The operation “caused no further civilian casualties,” he added. Biden, who has been confined again since last Saturday due to a relapse due to coronavirus, has spoken on television from the White House: “We have administered justice”, he has sentenced from one of the terraces of the complex with the monuments of Washington and Jefferson in the background . “This terrorist will no longer be able to act again. It doesn’t matter how much time passes, or how much they try to hide. The terrorists who threaten the United States must know that we will find them and kill them.”
The murder was planned for months. The moment the intelligence services were waiting for came at 9:48 p.m. Eastern Time Saturday, when it was 6:18 a.m. Sunday in Kabul. Biden personally led the “precision counterterrorism operation,” according to a senior White House official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.
When his time came, Al-Zawahiri was on the balcony of the house in a wealthy neighborhood of Kabul where he had lived with his family since last year, according to US intelligence services. He was hit by two high-precision missiles, which did not affect the structure of the house.
The president approved action against him last week. “The operation was carefully planned to minimize the risk to the lives of other civilians,” said Biden, who has reviewed all the pending accounts of the Al Qaeda leader with the United States: “He was deeply involved in the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 of our compatriots died”, he recalled. “He was also the mastermind of several attacks on Americans, including the attack on the aircraft carrier USS Cole [en Yemen], which killed 17 sailors, and played a key role in the attacks on the embassies of Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people”. For all these reasons, he added, the US president had taken it personally to liquidate Al-Zawahiri. “When we knew that the conditions were optimal, we decided to act. None of his family members have been injured.”
The announcement of this success in the fight against terrorism comes two weeks before the one year anniversary of the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, an exit that allowed the Taliban last summer to regain control of the country 20 years after their overthrow. That failed operation marked the lowest point of Biden’s presidency to date, a blow from which in a certain way he has not yet managed to rise in terms of reputation and citizen acceptance. This weekend’s operation demonstrates that the United States has the capacity to carry out high-impact counterterrorism operations despite not having a presence on the ground.
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Biden has taken the opportunity to defend his criticized performance last August: “I made the decision that, after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of troops on the ground in Afghanistan to protect the United States from terrorists seeking hurt us. I promised the American people that we would continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. And that is what we have done”. The president has recalled two other assassinations carried out in Syria in February and last July against two prominent members of the Islamic State, the other great terrorist threat to the United States.
Al-Zawahiri assumed the leadership of Al Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden, liquidated in May 2011 in the town of Abottabad (in northern Pakistan) by a special command of the US Army, and under the watchful eye of from the White House of the then president, Barack Obama, and his former vice president, Joe Biden. Until his death on Sunday, Al-Zawahiri was at the top of Washington’s wanted terrorist lists. The FBI was offering $25 million for information leading to his capture. Pentagon officials have assured that this weekend’s attack was not carried out by the military, so everything indicates that it was a CIA thing. Agency sources refused to immediately confirm that point. It was a declared goal for the Pentagon to once again behead Al Qaeda.
Al-Zawahiri, 71, had avoided returning to Afghanistan for years for security reasons. His reappearance in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, suggests that he had relaxed his precautions and that the Taliban are not keeping their commitment to keep Al Qaeda out of the Central Asian country. His government has reacted with a statement confirming that the attack took place in a house in the Sherpur area, a central high-society neighborhood frequented by Taliban government officials. In a series of tweets, spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said on Monday: “The nature of what happened was not clear from the start.” “The Islamic Emirate’s security and intelligence services investigated the incident and initial findings determined that the attack was carried out by a US drone.”
Strong condemnation of the Taliban
Mujahid added that Afghanistan “strongly condemns this attack under any pretext and considers it a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreements.” For the Taliban, these agreements exclude the legitimacy to conduct a drone attack in Kabul, which is why, according to security experts in Washington, the operation has been attributed to the CIA, to avoid the problems that a participation of the Taliban would have entailed. Army.
The fallen terrorist, a doctor by profession and with a past as a poet, comes from a distinguished Egyptian family with political and intellectual pedigree. His grandfather Rabia’a al-Zawahiri was an imam at Al Azhar University in Cairo. His great-uncle, Abdel Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary of the Arab League.
He achieved international fame after the 9/11 attacks. “Those 19 brothers went out and gave their souls to almighty Allah, and almighty God has granted them the victory that we are enjoying now,” Al-Zawahiri said in a video message posted in April 2002. He meant, of course, to the 19 terrorists who participated in the attacks with commercial airplanes full of passengers that hit the Twin Towers, in New York, and the Pentagon, on the outskirts of Washington. That was the first of the messages that the leader sent over the years from remote, unidentified places, from which he challenged the US authorities.
By the time 9/11 arrived, Al-Zawahiri was already a militant veteran. Egypt accused him in 1981 of participating in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. He spent three years in jail, a time in which, according to what he denounced, he suffered torture. After being released from prison, he moved to Pakistan, where he used his medical knowledge to treat mujahideen fighters, wounded while fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. There he met Bin Laden and the two became inseparable in a common mission: “Killing and fighting Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, an obligation for all Muslims.” To this he dedicated himself in the following years in scenarios where he sowed terror, from Kenya to Tanzania, and from Yemen to New York.
Since 2001, he was permanently on the run. In the years following the US invasion of Afghanistan, she survived an attack in the rugged and mountainous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. His wife and several of his children died in that operation.
The attack that has ended his life two decades after Washington put him in its crosshairs is a triumph for the Biden Administration in anti-terrorist matters. The president has the lowest popularity levels in memory for a leader with such a short time in the White House. But in recent weeks he has chained several blows of effect, such as the agreement with his rebel senator, Democrat Joe Manchin, to promote his political and economic agenda, or the approval in the Senate of a law that encourages the manufacture of American microchips before fierce Chinese competition.
In mid-July, the United States announced that it had killed Maher al-Agal, the leader of its other major faceless enemy in the region, the Islamic State (IS) group, in Syria during a drone strike, an operation that “significantly weakened the capacity” of the organization “to prepare, finance and carry out operations in the region”, according to a US military spokesman.
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