US President Joe Biden said in a statement on Monday night that US forces killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in an air raid over Afghanistan over the weekend.
Zawahiri, an Egyptian national and 71 years old, died in a drone bombing of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Zawahiri was the replacement for Osama bin Laden, who died during a US operation in Pakistan in 2011, and was one of the US’s most wanted terrorists.
Both Zawahiri and Bin Laden supervised the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Egyptian was No. 2 in Al Qaeda when the terrorist group carried out the attacks that killed 2,977 people.
Biden claimed in his speech that Zawahri’s death was a demonstration that the United States remains determined to fight terrorism.
“Now, justice has been served and this terrorist leader has been eliminated,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and eliminate you.”
Criticized for the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after nearly 20 years of occupation, Biden said the weekend’s operation would prove that the US’s ability to fight terrorism was not undermined by the Asian country’s withdrawal.
“When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan nearly a year ago, I made the decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of troops in Afghanistan to protect the US from terrorists seeking to harm us. And I made a promise to the American people that we would continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. We did just that,” he said. Biden dedicated the operation to the victims of 9/11.
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