President Joe Biden said in a speech that he gave the final approval to kill Zawahri, who was planning attacks against the U.S. He said that the terrorist leader is no longer. A senior administration official told reporters about how Zawahri was hunted and killed.
The official said that Zawahri's family relocated to a safe house in Afghanistan. Through multiple streams of intelligence, we were able to identify Zawahri at the location in Kabul. The U.S. was able to confirm the leader's identity by observing him on his balcony.
According to a senior official, the president received updates on the target throughout May and June and on July 1 he received a proposal from the White House. The directors of the CIA and National Intelligence were in that meeting.
The strike took place at 9: 48 pm. On July 30th, an aerial vehicle was in the air. The official said that only Zawahri was killed in the attack.
The leader of al Qaeda was an Egyptian named Ayman Zawahri. Egyptian Islamic Jihad merged with al Qaeda in the late 1990s. He was indicted for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies.
The United States withdrew from Afghanistan a year after the 9/11 attacks.
One of Biden's worst stretches as president was when the U.S. was forced to evacuate more than 100,000 people from Afghanistan after the Taliban took control. Questions are being asked about the relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda after the US insisted that the Taliban not allow terrorist groups to use Afghan soil.
It is the first U.S. strike in the Afghan capital in almost a year. The CENTCOM chief told reporters that the strike was ordered because the aid worker was planning to carry out an attack on the airport.
Ahead of a grim anniversary, the administration has some good news to trumpet. When it comes to intelligence on terrorist activity in Afghanistan, the U.S. still has what it calls an "over the horizon" capability.
The intelligence committee was briefed on the strike. Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the operation should be a message to terrorists that if they plot to kill Americans, they will be found and killed.
The killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri is a success. Mick Mulroy is a former Pentagon official and retired CIA paramilitary operations officer.
Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama administration official, told POLITICO that the killing shows that Biden didn't need to keep troops in Afghanistan.
A South Asian official said that he was shocked that Zawahri was in Kabul.
For a long time, terrorism researchers and others thought that Zawahri was hiding in Pakistan. Some people thought Zawahri might be in the city of Karachi.
The South Asian official said that the strike would distract from issues like how the Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster.
Even without Zawahri, al Qaeda is still strong in Afghanistan.
The person said that the Biden administration allowed the Taliban to come to power because they hosted senior al Qaeda leaders. The Biden administration is paying a lot of money.
It was not known who would succeed Zawahri.
One of the big questions of Daniel Byman's leadership was how he would give control to the next al Qaeda leader. He said that there is no obvious successor with Zawahri's broad name recognition and respect within the jihadi world.
An Egyptian who goes by the name of "Saif al-Adl" has been mentioned as a possible successor. The experienced jihadist is thought to have spent a lot of time in Iran.
An air strike was carried out on a residential house in the city.
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is now with the Hudson Institute, said that there is a question of whether the Taliban enabled Zawahri's elimination or the U.S. did it without assistance.
Andrew Desiderio made a report.
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