An American drone strike killed Ayman al-Zawahri, an essential plotter of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist raids which took over as the leader of Al Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden, at a metropolitan safe house in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden disclosed on Monday night.
Biden said.
“I authorized a precision strike that would remove him from the battlefield, once and for all,”
Zawahiri, who had just clocked 71, had stayed a visible international character of the group 11 years after the US killed Osama bin Laden.
At a point, he served as bin Laden’s doctor.
Zawahiri was harbouring downtown Kabul to meet his family, Joe Biden said and was killed in “a precise tailored airstrike” with the use of two Hellfire missiles.
The drone strike was executed at 9:48 p.m. ET on Saturday and was approved by Biden after weeks of meetings with his Cabinet and essential advisers. No American personnel were on the ground in Kabul at the time of the strike, the official said on Monday.
Senior Haqqani Taliban figures were fully aware of Zawahiri’s arrival in the area, the official said, in “clear violation of the Doha agreement,” and even took steps to hide his presence after Saturday’s successful strike,
limiting access to the safe house and rapidly relocating members of his family, including his daughter and her children.
They were purposely not targeted during the strike and stayed untouched. The US didn’t alert Taliban officials ahead of Saturday’s strike.
In a sequence of tweets, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said, “An air strike was held on a residential building in Sherpur area of Kabul city.
He said, “The nature of the incident was not apparent at first.” Still, the security and intelligence services of the Islamic Emirate investigated the incident and “initial findings determined that an American drone carried out the strike.”
