The sun was freshly up on Sunday July 31, 2022 over Kabul. Ayman al-Zawahiri, 71, one of the most hunted men on the planet, took the air on a balcony in Sherpur, an upscale district of the Afghan capital “annexed” by Taliban dignitaries after their victorious return to Kabul a year ago. two missiles Hellfire R9Xveritable flying choppers fired by a CIA drone, left the leader of al-Qaida no chance.
Eleven years after the founder Osama bin Laden, eliminated in 2011 during a raid in Pakistan, his right arm and successor, the Egyptian Zawahiri, died in turn. The White House waited 36 hours, the time for verification, to announce this elimination – without having had access to the remains. Justice has now been done,”
said Joe Biden, monday 1is August, during a speech.
Zawahiri, whom the Americans had previously “missed” on several occasions, was one of the main architects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. With his death, there is every reason to think that al-Qaeda has been decapitated for good: it is the generation of the founders of the jihadist international that is dying out. No new emir will have this legitimacy.
Meticulous preparations
This liquidation punctuates a meticulous investigation. The CIA, which presumed Zawahiri was ill and holed up on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, learned in April that he was living with his family in the heart of Kabul, in an opulent villa near many embassies. She patiently observed her habit of taking the air in the early morning, always on the same balcony of her villa, a model of which had been presented to Biden on 1is July.
The US president gave the go-ahead to the execution plan on July 25, convinced by intelligence that Zawahiri was still quietly issuing his directives, even though the international jihad’s parent house had been weakened since Ben’s death. Laden, then dissent (and competition) from the Islamic State group from 2014. No matter how long it takes, no matter where you are hiding, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and eliminate you.”
a averti Biden.
This success is timely for the American president, three months before the midterm elections. It demonstrates the ability of the United States to strike, a year after the pitiful withdrawal of its soldiers from the Kabul airport surrounded by the Taliban, in August 2021. The images of Afghan civilians abandoned on the tarmac and of the bloody attack in front of the enclosure, had precipitated the fall of Biden in the polls.
The Taliban caught in the act of duplicity
Above all, Zawahiri’s death makes the Doha (Qatar) agreement, concluded in 2020 between the Trump administration and the Taliban, appear like a fool’s bargain. In exchange for the departure of the Americans, the Afghan Islamists had undertaken not to harbor any more terrorists, as they had done with al-Qaeda until 2001. The agreement was grossly violated”,
noted, yesterday, the American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.
Proof of the duplicity – or division – of the Taliban, the leader of al-Qaida was, according to senior American officials, hosted by an aide-de-camp of Sirajuddin Haqqani, Minister of the Interior and leader of the most powerful and most radical, the one that has reigned over the Afghan capital for a year.
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