The United States killed the top leader of the jihadist organization Al Qaeda, Ayman Al Zawahiri, in a drone attack in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden confirmed on Monday.
“Justice was served and this terrorist leader is gone,” Biden said. this Monday night on television, hours after White House sources revealed that a “successful” operation was carried out this weekend against an “important” Al Qaeda target.
“On Saturday, under my orders, the United States carried out an airstrike on Kabul, Afghanistan, which killed Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri,” said the head of the White House.
Zawahiri, 71, was one of Washington’s most wanted terrorists, offering $25 million for any information that could help stop him.
He was at the head of Al Qaeda since the previous head of the organization, Osama Bin Laden, was killed in 2011 in Pakistan. by an American command.
Whereabouts unknown for more than 10 years, Zawahiri was considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks that caused nearly 3,000 deaths in New York.
Zawahiri “was bin Laden’s number two during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was deeply involved in organizing the attack that killed 2,977 people a couple of decades ago,” Biden stressed.
Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who played key role in 9/11 attacks, is killed in US operation, officials say https://t.co/sxhqS95zA4
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 1, 2022
The president added that “since the United States delivered justice against Bin Laden 11 years ago, Zawahiri has been the leader of Al Qaeda, in charge of coordinating all the branches of the terrorist group throughout the world.”
“I hope that this decisive action will allow them to turn the page” to the relatives of those victims, Biden wished.
At the end of 2020, the version circulated that Zawahiri had died of heart disease, but soon reappeared in a video.
A few hours before Biden confirmed it on television, a reserved source from the US government had anticipated the operation to the accredited press at the White House.
“Over the weekend, the United States conducted a counterterrorism operation against a major Al Qaeda target in Afghanistan; The operation was successful and there were no civilian casualties. The source advanced, according to the AFP and Europa Press news agencies, and the NBC News television station.
Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul represented a “clear violation” of the agreement that the Taliban signed with Washington in 2020in which they promised not to allow Afghanistan to become a jihadist haven, a US government source said tonight.
“We expect them to respect the terms of the Doha agreement, and Zawahiri’s presence in the center of Kabul was in clear violation of them,” the spokesman said, while Biden gave his speech on television.
Meanwhile, “the Taliban confirmed the attack in Kabul and condemned it as a ‘violation of international principles,'” Qatari television station Al Jazeera said on its website, without further details.
Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi, near Cairo, Egypt, into a bourgeois family, and was a surgeon. His father was a doctor and his grandfather, a great theologian from the Al Azhar mosque in the Egyptian capital.
On Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully conducted an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan that killed the emir of al-Qa’ida: Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Justice has been delivered.
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 1, 2022
At the age of 15, he was already a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization considered terrorist by Russia and Egypt.
In 1981 he was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat, for which he was imprisoned for three years.
He then traveled to Saudi Arabia, the United States and finally to Pakistan in the mid-1980s. There he treated jihadists fighting Soviet troops as a doctor and met Bin Laden.
He was a long-time leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EJI) and joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, according to AFP.
Washington included him on its “black list” for having supported the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
Egypt also sentenced him to death in absentia for numerous attacks, including one in Luxor in 1997, in which 62 people died, of whom 58 were foreign tourists.
Al Qaeda had already suffered another heavy blow in August 2020, when the number two of the organization, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, was assassinated in Tehran by Israeli agents in a secret operation directed by Washington.
The announcement of the operation came almost a year after the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which allowed the Taliban to regain control of the country 20 years after they were ousted.
“When I finished the American military mission in Afghanistan, almost a year ago, I decided that the United States no longer needed to have men in Afghanistan, at that time I promised the Americans that we would continue to carry out effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and we did,” he stressed today. Biden.
In mid-July, the United States announced that it had killed the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, Maher al-Agal, during a drone attack, an operation that “significantly weakened the organization’s ability” to prepare, finance and conduct operations in the region,” said a US military spokesman.
