KABUL — A US drone strike killed Al-Qaeda
chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri at a hideout in Kabul, President
Joe Biden said Monday,
declaring “justice had been delivered” to the families of the 9/11 attacks.
اضافة اعلان
Zawahiri’s assassination is the biggest blow to
Al-Qaeda since US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, and calls into
question the Taliban’s promise not to harbor militant groups.
It was the first known over-the-horizon strike by
the US on a target in Afghanistan since Washington withdrew its forces from the
country on August 31 last year, days after the Taliban swept back to power.
The Taliban condemned the drone strike Tuesday, but
made no mention of casualties nor did they name Zawahiri.
“Justice has been delivered and this terrorist
leader is no more,” Biden said in a somber televised address, adding he hoped
Zawahiri’s death would bring “closure” to families of the 3,000 people killed
in the US on September 11, 2001.
Zawahiri was believed to be the mastermind who
steered Al-Qaeda’s operations — including the 9/11 attacks — as well as bin
Laden’s personal doctor.
A senior administration official said the
71-year-old Egyptian was on the balcony of a three-story house in the Afghan
capital when targeted with two Hellfire missiles after dawn Sunday.
The house is in Sherpur, one of Kabul’s most
affluent neighborhoods, with several villas occupied by high-ranking Taliban
officials and commanders.
The Taliban’s interior ministry previously denied
reports circulating on social media of a drone strike, telling AFP a rocket
struck “an empty house” in Kabul, causing no casualties.
Early Tuesday, however, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah
Mujahid tweeted that an “aerial attack” was carried out.
“The nature of the incident was not revealed at
first,” he said.
“The security and intelligence agencies of the
Islamic emirate investigated the incident and found in their preliminary
investigations that the attack was carried out by American drones.”
‘Grossly
violated’
Although Biden did not
mention the Taliban in his televised address, Secretary of State Antony Blinken
said “by hosting and sheltering” Zawahiri, the Islamist group had “grossly
violated the Doha Agreement” which paved the way for America’s withdrawal.
Zabihullah, in turn, accused Washington of breaking the
2020 deal.
“Such actions are a repetition of the failed
experiences of the past 20 years and are against the interests of the
US,
Afghanistan, and the region,” he said.
News of his death comes a month before the first
anniversary of the final withdrawal of
US troops from Afghanistan, leaving the
country in the hands of the Taliban insurgency that fought Western forces for
two decades.
Under the Doha deal, the Taliban promised not to
allow Afghanistan to be used again as a launchpad for international Islamist
extremism, but experts believe the group never broke ties with Al-Qaeda.
“What we know is that the senior Haqqani Taliban
were aware of his presence in Kabul,” the senior US official said.
Afghan Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani also
heads the feared Haqqani Network, a brutal subset of the Taliban blamed for
some of the worst violence of the past 20 years, and which has been described
by US officials as a “veritable arm” of Pakistani intelligence.
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