FBI’s most-wanted terrorist and al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been killed in a precision CIA drone strike in Afghanistan on Saturday. The strike was pin-point as no other person including members of his family was killed.
President Joe Biden said Monday that a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan killed al-Zawahri, the successor of the terrorist network’s slain leader Osama bin Laden.
“Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more,” the president said in a special address at the White House Monday evening.
The strike, which occurred at 9:38 p.m. ET Saturday night, is the first known U.S. attack in Afghanistan since Biden ended America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan last August.
Al-Zawahri, 71, was standing on a balcony of a “safe house” in downtown Kabul that was hit by two missiles, according to a senior administration official, who discussed the attack with reporters on the condition of anonymity, reports USAToday.
The strikes killed al-Zawahri — the most senior leader of al-Qaida since 2011 — and no one else, including civilians, according to U.S. intelligence cited by the official. None of al-Zawahri’s family members were present.
The official credited “careful patience and persistence” by counterterrorism professionals and decisive action by Biden, who was first briefed on al-Zawahri’s location in April and the proposed operation on July 1. Biden signed off on the strike following a July 25 meeting with top advisors.
Al-Zawahri’s death delivers a “significant blow to the group’s ability to operate including against the U.S. homeland,” the official said. The U.S. believes he was continuing to provide strategic direction to the vast terrorist network and was calling for future attacks against the U.S.
It was the United State’s most significant strike against al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Al-Zawahiri replaced bin Laden as the terrorist group’s top leader.
Al-Zawahiri, 71, took over al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death in 2011, when bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2011.
In 1998, he was indicted for his alleged role in the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.
On August 7, 1998, nearly simultaneous bombs blew up in front of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa – 224 people died in the blasts, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,500 people were wounded.
Both he and bin Laden escaped U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Zawahiri’s whereabouts had long been a mystery. Rumors have spread since late 2020 that al-Zawahiri had died from illness.
But he appeared in a new video in April, where he denounced the ‘enemies of Islam.’
He appeared after a school in India banned the wearing of the hijab.
Before April, Al-Zawahiri last appeared in a video last year marking the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, months after thee rumours spread that he was dead.
In that video, he proclaimed ‘Jerusalem will never be Judaized’ and praised al-Qaeda attacks – including one that targeted Russian troops in Syria in January 2021. SITE said al-Zawahiri also noted the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan 20 years after the invasion.
Al-Zawahiri was born in Egypt in 1951 and worked as a surgeon. He grew up in an upper-class neighborhood in Cairo, Egypt, the son of a prominent physician and grandson of famous scholars.
An Islamic fundamentalist, al-Zawahiri joined the outlawed Egyptian Islamic Jihad group as a teenager, being jailed twice for helping plot assassinations of two Egyptian leaders.
He eventually became the group’s leader, which was dedicated to the creation of an Islamic state in Egypt, and in the 1980s he joined Mujahedeen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
There he befriended and joined forces with bin Laden, becoming his personal physician.
He formally merged his group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with al Qaeda in 1998.
The two men later issued a fatwa, or decree, that said: ‘The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.’
