US kills Al-Qaeda chief in Kabul drone strike
President Joe Biden announced on Monday that the United States had killed Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world's most wanted terrorists and a mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, in a drone strike in Kabul. In a sombre televised address, Biden said he gave the final go-ahead for the high-precision strike that successfully targeted Zawahiri in the Afghan capital over the weekend. "Justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more," Biden said, adding that he hoped Zawahiri's death would bring "closure" to families of the 3,000 people killed in the United States on 9/11. A senior administration official said 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 that there had been no US boots on the ground in Afghanistan. "We are not aware of him ever leaving the safe house. We identified Zawahiri on multiple occasions for sustained periods of time on the balcony of where he was ultimately struck," the official said. According to the official's account, the president gave his green light for the strike on July 25 – as he was recovering in isolation from Covid-19. Biden said there were no civilian casualties in the operation. The US official called Zawahiri's presence in the Afghan capital Kabul a "clear violation" of a deal the Taliban had signed 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 strike by the United States on an Al-Qaeda target in Afghanistan since American forces withdrew from the country on August 31, 2021. Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who grew up in a comfortable Cairo household before turning to violent radicalism, had been on the run for 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. He took over Al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011, and had a US$25 million bounty on his head. (AFP)