Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egypt was killed last Saturday in a US drone strike in Kabul.the capital of Afghanistan, announced this Monday the president of the United States, Joe Biden.
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“On Saturday, under my orders, the United States carried out an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which killed al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri,” the president said in a televised address from the White House.
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“Justice has been served and this terrorist leader is no longer”, he added. Ayman al Zawahiri was one of the most wanted men by the United States, which promised 25 million dollars for any information that would allow him to be arrested.
He took charge of the jihadist network in 2011, after the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of a US commando in Pakistan. He had been missing for more than ten years and was considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks that caused almost 3,000 deaths in the United States.
Biden said that his death will allow the families of the victims of those crimes to “turn the page”. attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon headquarters near Washington.
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Hellfire missiles
The drone strike was carried out with two Hellfire missiles and with no US military presence on the ground, an official said, demonstrating the US ability “to identify and locate even the world’s most wanted terrorists and take action to eliminate them.” ”.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was located “several times and for long periods on the balcony where he was finally hit” by the attack in the Afghan capital, it added.
The operation caused “no civilian casualties,” said Biden, who was sick with covid-19 and in strict isolation when he ordered the attack on July 25.
The attacked house has no signs of an explosion and no one was injured in the operation. These two elements suggest that the United States used the Hellfire R9X, a missile with six blades that does not explode when it reaches its target.
Baptized “Flying Ginsu”, the missile has become common ammunition to liquidate jihadist leaders without causing civilian casualties.
The three-story house reached is located in Sherpur, a wealthy neighborhood of the Afghan capital where several residences are occupied by high-ranking Taliban officials and commanders. Several questioned inhabitants thought that the house was empty.
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“We haven’t seen anyone live there for a year”, assured an employee of a nearby office. The house “was always dark, without a single light bulb on.”
The Afghan interior minister over the weekend denied reports of a drone attack in Kabul, saying a rocket had hit “an empty house” in the capital.
However Taliban spokesman Zabibullah Mujahid tweeted on Tuesday that an “air strike” had been carried out by “US drones”, but did not speak of casualties or mention Zawahiri’s name.
Ayman al-Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul is a “clear violation” of the agreements reached with the Taliban in Doha in 2020, under which the Islamists had pledged not to welcome Al Qaeda on their territory, a senior official said. North American.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that by “harbouring and protecting” Zawahiri, the Taliban “grossly violated the Doha agreement” that provided for the departure of US troops from Afghanistan.
Within the framework of this agreement, the Taliban promised not to host jihadists again, but according to experts, the group never broke its ties with Al Qaeda.
reciprocal reproaches
Zabibullah in turn accused the United States of having violated these agreements by carrying out an attack on its territory. But according to a Biden administration official, “senior Taliban officials in Haqqani were aware of the presence” of the al Qaeda chief “in Kabul.”
Afghan Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani heads the Haqqani network, a Taliban insurgent group known for its radicalism and violence over the past 20 years
Afghan Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani heads the Haqqani network, a Taliban insurgent group known for its radicalism and violence over the past 20 years.
US officials describe this network as the right arm of the Pakistani intelligence services.
Zawahiri, on the run since the attacks of September 11, 2001, had grown up in a wealthy family in Cairo, before turning to radical and violent Islam.
He left Egypt in the mid-1980s to settle in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, where the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was based.
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It was around this time, when thousands of Islamist fighters were pouring into Afghanistan, that Zawahiri and bin Laden met.
In 1998, he was one of five signatories to bin Laden’s “fatwa” calling for attacks on Americans.
When in 2011 he inherited an organization in crisis, Ayman al-Zawahiri, 71, had, in order to survive, to multiply his “franchises” and his circumstantial oaths of loyalty, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. .
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This announcement by Biden about Zawahiri’s death comes nearly a year after the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.which allowed the Taliban to regain control of the country twenty years after they were overthrown.
Summary of AFP and EFE agencies
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