'Justice has been served': Hellfire missiles take out Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul
According to a senior administration official, Zawahiri was on the balcony of a house in Kabul when he was targeted with two Hellfire missiles an hour after sunrise on July 31, and there were no US boots on the ground in Afghanistan at the time.
FollowUS President Joe Biden on Monday announced that Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world's most wanted terrorists and the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, had been killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan's Kabul.Â
In a television address, Biden said that he gave the final approval for the high-precision strike that successfully targeted Zawahiri in Afghanistan's capital over the weekend.
"Justice has been served, and this terrorist leader is no more," Biden said, adding that he hoped Zawahiri's death would bring 'closure' to the families of the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11.
According to a senior administration official, Zawahiri was on the balcony of a house in Kabul when he was targeted with two Hellfire missiles an hour after sunrise on July 31, and there were no US boots on the ground in Afghanistan at the time.
"We have no evidence that he ever left the safe house. We saw Zawahiri on multiple occasions for extended periods on the balcony where he was eventually struck," the official said.
According to the official, the president authorised the strike on July 25 while recovering in isolation from Covid-19. According to Biden, there were no civilian casualties during the operation.
The US official described Zawahiri's presence in Kabul as a 'clear violation' of a deal signed by the Taliban with the US in Doha in 2020 that paved the way for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It was the first known over-the-horizon US strike on an Al-Qaeda target in Afghanistan since US forces left the country on August 31, 2021.
Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who grew up in a comfortable Cairo family before turning to violent radicalism, had been on the run for the past two decades since the 9/11 attacks.
After US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, he took over Al-Qaeda and had a $25 million US bounty on his head.
The Afghan interior ministry denied reports on social media of a drone strike in Kabul over the weekend, telling AFP that a rocket struck 'an empty house' in the capital, causing no casualties.
However, early Tuesday in Kabul, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted that an 'aerial attack' had been carried out on a city's Sherpur district residence.
"The nature of the incident was initially unknown. The Islamic Emirate's security and intelligence agencies investigated the incident and discovered in preliminary investigations that American drones carried out the attack," he tweeted.
The news comes just one month before the first anniversary of the final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, handing over control of the country to the Taliban insurgency that had fought Western forces for the previous two decades.
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