“Last Saturday, on my orders, the United States launched an airstrike in Kabul that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda,” US President Joe Biden told a White House press conference.
Considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Zawahiri assumed leadership of the terrorist organization in 2011 after the death of Osama bin Laden.
“He was deeply involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks [de 2001]. For decades he was responsible for planning attacks against American civilians. Now, justice has been served and this terrorist leader is no more,” Joe Biden said in a statement from the White House on Monday.
Joe Biden said the world no longer needed to fear this “ruthless killer,” highlighting the families of the 9/11 victims in particular.
“I hope this decisive action will allow another side to the families who lost someone in 9/11”, he said of the attacks organized by al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, with Ayman al-Zawahiri as ‘number two’.
The official also emphasized that the United States continues to demonstrate its ability to protect American citizens from those who seek to harm the country.
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes, or where you hide, if you are a threat to the American people, we will find you and destroy you,” he added, adding that “everyone around the world who seeks to harm America.”
He is one of the most wanted terrorists in the world by the United States, which has offered a $25 million reward for any information leading to his arrest or conviction.
No civilian casualties
A senior US government official told reporters that a “counterterrorism operation against a major al-Qaeda target” took place in Afghanistan over the weekend.
US media immediately claimed that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was the target of a “successful” Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone strike in Kabul.
Joe Biden revealed that US intelligence agents found al-Zawahiri hiding with his family in a house in central Kabul.
The US president approved the move last week, Monday, and it was carried out on Sunday morning, he added.
According to the White House, only the al-Qaeda leader died in the operation and there was no collateral damage, not even to family members of the terrorist organization’s leader, the same information sent by Biden.
A US official told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the operation took place without any military presence on the ground.
Born in Egypt in 1951, Zawahiri assumed leadership of the terrorist organization after Osama bin Laden was killed in a US military operation in Pakistan in 2011.
The US State Department offered a $25 million (€24.3 million) reward for information leading to the capture of the al-Qaeda leader.
The attack against al-Zawahri allows us to remove the man who shaped al-Qaeda, first as Osama bin Laden’s ‘deputy’ since 1998 and later as his successor.
The two men used the weapons of the ‘jihadist’ movement to attack America, planning the deadliest attack on American soil since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon made bin Laden ‘America’s number one enemy’, but these would never have happened without his right-hand man.
Bin Laden provided al-Qaeda with influence and money, but al-Zawahri brought the tactical skills and organizational skills needed to build the militants into a network of cells in countries around the world.
The move comes nearly a year after the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which allowed the Taliban to regain control of the country after 20 years.
Al-Qaeda has already lost its ‘number two’, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who was killed by Israeli agents in Tehran in August 2020, backed by Washington, the New York Times said at the time.
On February 3, Joe Biden announced that the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qurachi, had died during an operation in northern Syria.
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