JOHN HAYWARD
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri reportedly met his end on Sunday morning while enjoying the view from the balcony of his safe house, which was located in an upscale Kabul neighborhood inhabited by top Taliban officials.
A U.S. drone blew Zawahiri off the balcony with a precision missile that left the other occupants of his home uninjured.
Reuters found some irony in the wily 71-year-old terrorist boss surviving for years in Afghanistan’s “rugged mountains” and the harsh Pakistani tribal region while dodging a $25 million bounty from the United States, only to be liquified while enjoying the comforts of a Taliban bed-and-breakfast. He was literally living in a little pink house in Sherpur, a Kabul burb featuring leafy streets, swimming pools, and private gardens.
The BBC described Sherpur as “notorious” for its “garish multi-storey villas,” which are regarded with derision by other Kabul residents as the decadent spoils of corrupt government officials and warlords. The name of the neighborhood is often deliberately mispronounced as “Choorpur,” which means “town of thieves.”
Numerous locals insisted to BBC reporters that Zawahiri’s safe house was “empty,” possibly on orders from the Taliban. Taliban guards swiftly flooded Sherpur, threatening to shoot reporters who asked too many questions.
“We’ve seen non-Afghan residents in this neighborhood in the past couple of months. They don’t speak the local languages. We don’t know who they are,” a local journalist remarked.
Other Taliban sources said the group gave the “highest-level security” to Zawahiri in Kabul but he was largely inactive operationally and needed the Taliban’s permission to move.
A Kabul police official described Sherpur as Kabul’s “most safe and secure neighborhood” and that the drone strike there was a “great shock”.
He said influential people from the former governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani had built spacious houses in Sherpur. Senior Taliban leaders and their families now lived there, the official said.
UNDATED PHOTO Osama bin Laden (L) sits with his adviser Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian linked to the al Qaeda network, during an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir (not pictured) at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. (Visual News/Getty Images)
A U.S. official said American intelligence knew Zawahiri’s wife, daughter, and grandchildren have been living at the house for some time. They confirmed Zawahiri’s presence later, after months of surveillance.
The National quoted U.S. officials who said Zawahiri employed “long-standing terrorist tradecraft” to conceal his true location.
A view of Sherpur neighborhood where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri killed by U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 02, 2022. (Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Apparently, al-Qaeda tradecraft does not include advice such as “don’t stand on a balcony where everyone can see you,” because The National’s sources specifically mentioned observing him on “numerous occasions” for “sustained periods of time.”
Planners said the long interval of surveillance was necessary to ensure there would be no collateral damage when a strike was eventually launched. The modest damage endured by the house during the strike – little more than a few broken windows – suggests the drone that killed Zawahiri used a Hellfire R9X “flying Ginsu” missile, which deploys blades from its fuselage to slice targets to ribbons instead of exploding.
The Taliban condemned the Zawahiri strike as an “act against the interests of Afghanistan and the region” and warned that “repeating such actions will damage the available opportunities,” a cheeky stance given the Taliban’s reported promises not to harbor al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan.
The New York Times (NYT) on Monday quoted a Biden administration official who said members of the Haqqani network were spotted attempting to “conceal that Mr. Zawahiri had been at the house and restrict access to the site.”
The Haqqani network is a terrorist gang that is deeply tied to the Taliban, despite frantic claims to the contrary by the Biden administration after the fall of Kabul. Several senior members of the Taliban government are Haqqanis.
The UK Daily Mail on Monday cited unconfirmed reports that Zawahiri’s safe house was owned by a top aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani network and the Taliban’s Interior Minister.
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