A US military operation over the weekend in Afghanistan killed top al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to military officials in Washington.
The attack in Kabul was carried out using drones and is, as far as is known, the first military action by Washington in the Central Asian country since the withdrawal of troops just under a year ago, in August last year, after 20 years of occupation. .
“Over the weekend, the United States conducted a counterterrorism operation against a key al-Qaida target in Afghanistan. The operation was successful and there were no civilian casualties,” a US official told reporters. President Joe Biden will make an official statement on the case in the coming hours.
Zawahiri is a radical veteran. The Egyptian spent a good part of his 70 years in the militancy. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager and founded the Islamic Jihad terrorist group in 1979. He was arrested for planning an attack on then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He joined his group with Al Qaeda in the 1990s, projecting his name even further. At the time of the 9/11 attack, he was already one of the main leaders of the group, and was wanted by the US government. His whereabouts have been unknown since late 2021.
A spokesman for the Taliban, a group that has controlled Afghanistan since August last year, confirmed that a drone attack took place in Kabul on Sunday (31) and said that the episode “is a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement”. [que estabeleceu em 2020 a retirada de tropas americanas do país]”. According to the group, the attack took place in a residential area. “The nature of the incident was not revealed at first. The Islamic Emirate’s security and intelligence agencies investigated the incident and found that the attack was carried out by US drones,” the Taliban said. “Such actions are a repeat of the failed experiments of the last 20 years.”
Although he did not have the same charisma as his predecessor, Osama bin Laden, who died in 2011, nor the appeal of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the al Qaeda branch in Iraq who died in 2006, his position in the organization’s hierarchy made him the United States offered a $25 million bounty on his head.
It was under Zawahiri’s dysfunctional rule, in fact, that in the last decade al Qaeda lost ground to the Islamic State, a terrorist organization that came to control parts of Syria and Iraq.
