U.S. Drone Strike Kills Ayman al-Zawahri, Top Qaeda Leader

The White House said Monday that a U.S. missile launched from a drone in Afghanistan killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, a founding member of the jihadist movement and one of the key strategists behind an international campaign of terror that culminated in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Kabul, Afghanistan, 

American intelligence agencies tracked down al-Zawahri in Kabul earlier this year and then spent months determining that it really was him hiding out in a house in a crowded section of the Afghan capital. After receiving authorization from Mr. Biden a week ago, the C.I.A. fired two Hellfire missiles and killed al-Zawahri on a balcony of the house without killing anyone else, including members of his family or any nearby civilians, American officials said.

The death of one of America’s most vocal enemies after a long and maddening search that stretched out over a generation was a major victory for Mr. Biden at a time of domestic political trouble. But it raised immediate questions about the terrorist leader’s presence in Afghanistan a year after Mr. Biden withdrew all American forces, clearing the way for the Taliban to recapture control of the country. Al-Zawahri moved back to Afghanistan earlier this year, evidently believing he would be safe there, officials said.

The success of the first strike since the withdrawal without American forces actually on the ground will bolster Mr. Biden’s argument that the United States can still wage war against terrorist organizations without the major deployments of ground forces that characterized the first two decades after Sept. 11.

But one of the premises of the American withdrawal was undercut by the disclosure that al-Zawahri found shelter in Afghanistan even though the Taliban had committed not to provide a safe haven for Al Qaeda to launch further attacks against Americans as part of an agreement first struck by President Donald J. Trump and accepted by Mr. Biden.

Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian-born surgeon-turned-jihadist who assumed the leadership of Al Qaeda after the killing of Osama bin Laden and who died at 71 in a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, over the weekend, according to U.S. officials, led a life of secrecy, betrayal, conspiracy and violence, most murderously in the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States in 2001.

With his white turban and gray beard, his bruised forehead denoting piety from frequent prayer, al-Zawahri had little of Bin Laden’s charisma and none of his access to fabled family wealth. But he was widely depicted as the intellectual spine of Al Qaeda — its chief operating officer, its public relations executive and a profound influence who helped the Saudi-born Bin Laden grow from a charismatic preacher into a deadly terrorist with global reach.

During al-Zawahri’s leadership of Al Qaeda, the organization’s global influence waned as the Islamic State rose. But the group remained a threat, with affiliates in several countries carrying out attacks. And al-Zawahri, to whom they all swore allegiance, was still one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists at his death.

From his teenage years in an affluent suburb of Cairo, al-Zawahri led a cat-and-mouse life, serving prison terms in Egypt and Russia and hunted by adversaries, including U.S. counterterrorism authorities, who placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Yet he seemed always to stay one step ahead, hiding out in the craggy redoubts of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas.
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An Afghan soldier at a cave in the Tora Bora region in 2002, where the trail of Mr. al-Zawahri and bin Laden ran cold.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Over time, his aims and ideology evolved from a visceral hatred of secular rule in Egypt, where he was among those tried for conspiracy in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, to a virulent campaign to strike at the so-called “far enemy,” the United States, Al Qaeda’s target of preference.

The group’s tactical strength lay in its ability to launch spectacular assaults, starting with the simultaneous attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the suicide bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, and culminating in the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 that led to the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the following decade, American counterterrorism authorities pursued Bin Laden and al-Zawahri, his deputy and chosen successor. Drone strikes decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership in a sustained effort to degrade the organization and avenge the Sept. 11 attacks. On at least one occasion, al-Zawahri was said to have died, only to resurface in the sporadic video and audiotapes that spread his message.

In May 2011, a Navy SEAL team killed Bin Laden in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. For a more than a month, Al Qaeda was silent on its future leadership.

Then al-Zawahri put out a 28-minute video of himself. With a rifle in the background and making a chopping motion with his hand, he promised that Bin Laden would continue to “terrify” America after his death.

“Blood for blood,” he said.

By that time, a newer generation of jihadists had grown, first in the chaos of Iraq after the American invasion, and then spreading to Syria after civil war broke out there in 2011.

In the ensuing mayhem, the Islamic State rose to prominence as a new beacon of jihadist zeal, attracting tens of thousands of followers with its media-savvy, internet-age messages, its slick videos of beheadings and its capture of huge swaths of territory in which it declared a new caliphate for the world’s Muslims.

Shorn of its iconic leader, Al Qaeda, by contrast, had been forced to abandon its centralized command structure while its affiliates, particularly in Yemen and Syria, pledged allegiance to al-Zawahri in a sharpening and bloody feud with the Islamic State, which, paradoxically, had begun as an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
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Islamic State fighters near Tikrit, Iraq, in 2014.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Both groups were rooted in Sunni Muslim extremism. But the distinctions between them were legion. While the Islamic State sought hegemony among jihadist groups and thirsted for territorial expansion, Al Qaeda’s affiliates showed increasing readiness to cooperate with other groups and little appetite for occupation.

al-Zawahri castigated the Islamic State and its leaders for their practice of killing Shiite Muslim civilians, fearing that such killings would taint the jihadist cause among Muslims. And while Islamic State disciples reinforced the group’s reputation for brutality through videos of the decapitations of Western hostages and other acts of savagery, al-Zawahri opposed such displays, apparently to avoid alienating potential supporters.

Sajjan M. Gohel, a specialist in international terrorism based in London, wrote that al-Zawahri was happy to let the Islamic State face attacks by U.S.-backed coalition forces in Iraq and Syria, giving Al Qaeda the space to “reconstitute its infrastructure and networks across the Islamic world” and revive its long-term goal of striking targets in the West.

In 2015, al-Zawahri played what he calculated would be a winning card in his group’s revival, introducing to followers Hamza bin Laden, a son of the Al Qaeda founder, and describing him in an audio recording as a “lion from Al Qaeda’s den.” In the broadcast, Hamza bin Laden exhorted jihadists to carry out “the highest number of attacks” on Western cities. A year later, in a message aimed at America titled “We are all Osama,” Hamza bin Laden issued a personal appeal to avenge his father.

“Yours will be a harsh reckoning,” he said. “We are a nation that does not rest over injustice.”


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The aftermath of the raid that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.Credit...Warrick Page for The New York Times

Hamza bin Laden had been among a group of Bin Laden relatives who took refuge in Iran after the Sept. 11 attacks, held under house arrest arrangements of varying severity. Some analysts believed that he was no more than a figurehead whose utterances were intended to lure younger jihadists from the Islamic State.

According to Mr. Gohel, Hamza bin Laden had at least two wives, including a daughter of al-Zawahri’s who bore two children, linking the two families in a “strategic marriage alliance.”

Hamza bin Laden was killed in a counterterrorism operation in Afghanistan sometime in 2017 or 2018, American officials said.