In an August 1 speech at the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that the United States killed al-Qaida leader Ayman Zawahiri in a drone strike in Kabul, afghanistan, on July 30. As a senior al-Qaida figure, Zawahiri was "deeply involved" in planning the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and was one of the masterminds of the 2000 USS Cole bombing attack and the 1998 US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In May 2011, after bin Laden, the former leader of al-Qaida, was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, Zawahiri, who was close to bin Laden and known as the "brain" of al-Qaida, was appointed leader of the group in June of the same year.
Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri (right)
Missile precision strikes
Biden, who tested positive for the new coronavirus again, said in an August 1 speech during quarantine that after years of searching, U.S. intelligence officers locked down Zawahiri's hiding place in Kabul earlier this year. Subsequently, U.S. intelligence personnel began months of intelligence gathering and whereabouts monitoring. In April, Biden allegedly gave his first briefing on Zawahiri's activities at a residence in Kabul, where U.S. intelligence officers monitored and found that Mr. Zawahiri would appear regularly on the balcony of his residence and begin to draw up plans for raids.
In early July, Biden again briefed on the operations in the White House War Room, which included The President's National Security Adviser Sullivan, National Intelligence Director Haynes, CIA Director Burns, and military generals. On July 25, Biden, who was confirmed to be infected with the new crown virus, was briefed on the final operations during the quarantine and authorized the precise airstrikes on Zawahiri. On the morning of July 30, two Improved Hellfire R9X missiles hit Zawahiri, who was on a balcony, agency AFP reported. According to U.S. officials, the attack did not injure their families or cause civilian casualties.
Hellfire missiles
Once again, the United States has used this terrible missile to target extremist group leaders with precision. The Hellfire anti-tank missile is one of the important weapons of the US military's ground attack, which is equipped with a large number of attack helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles, which is powerful and extremely lethal. Such a missile is used to kill a single target, which is easy to cause a large number of unnecessary casualties, so the US military has improved the missile, replacing the original warhead of the missile with 6 steel knife-shaped wings, and the improved R9X missile can cut through the target but will not explode.
According to public reports, the R9X missile first appeared in March 2017, when the U.S. military used drones to launch an attack in Syria and killed Abu-Hair Masri, the high-ranking leader of al-Qaida. Later, in January 2019, the United States used drones to launch R9X missiles in Yemen to kill another high-level leader of al-Qaida, Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali Badawi, one of the masters of the bombing of the US guided-missile destroyer Kohl in the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, which killed 17 American sailors and injured 39 others. In addition, in January 2020, the United States killed Qasim Sulaimani, then commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through a drone strike outside the International Airport in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and is believed to have also used the R9X missile.
Get to know Bin Laden
According to the New York Times, Zawahiri was born in Egypt in June 1951 to a well-known family, his father was a professor of pharmacology, and his grandfather was a religious scholar at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, which is an Egyptian Islamic institution of higher learning and one of the oldest higher education institutions in the world; His uncle, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azam, was the first Secretary-General of the League of Arab States (ALA). As a teenager, Zawahiri was deeply influenced by the Sunni revival movement and joined the Muslim Brotherhood (Muslim Brotherhood) in middle school.
Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood is a Sunni-dominated religious and political group headquartered in Egypt with a large membership that has been dissolved by the Egyptian government many times in history and has branches in syria and other Middle Eastern countries. In 2011, after the ouster of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood formed the Freedom and Justice Party to participate in the Egyptian political arena, and the party's chairman, Morsi, was elected president of Egypt. In July 2013, the Egyptian military deposed Morsi, and in December of the same year, the Brotherhood designated Egypt as a "terrorist organization."
Morsi's supporters
In 1952, the "Freedom Officers' Organization" headed by Nasser used the power of the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Farouq dynasty in Egypt, and Nasser became Egypt's second president, who later turned against Nasser because of its dissatisfaction with the distribution of power. When Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1965, the group was strongly suppressed by Nasser's government. In 1966, he participated in the formation of an underground militant group against the Egyptian government, which later merged with other anti-government groups. After graduating from high school, Zawahiri entered Cairo University to study medicine, after which he worked as a surgeon in the Egyptian army for three years.
In 1979, Egypt was the first among the Arab countries in the Middle East to reconcile with Israel. Dissatisfied with Egypt's signing of a peace treaty with Israel, extremists plotted the assassination of Egypt's third president, Sadat, in 1981, and Zawahiri was arrested and imprisoned for his involvement before being released in 1984.
Sadat Infographic
In the year egypt normalized relations with Israel, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and many armed groups rebelling against the Soviet Union appeared in the area — some of which later turned into terrorist organizations — and the United States secretly contacted various local armed factions to counter the Soviet Union. At the time, bin Laden was operating in Afghanistan. After his release, Zawahiri traveled to Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, which became a turning point, where he met Bin Laden. According to the New York Times, Zawahiri is believed to have shared a residence with bin Laden during his time in Afghanistan. Zawahiri followed bin Laden and gradually became his personal physician and most trusted person.
Terrorist attack planner
By the end of the 1990s, Zawahiri was an important figure on bin Laden's side. He is allegedly the mastermind of al-Qaida's attacks. According to the Spanish newspaper Le Monde, it was Zavahiri who convinced bin Laden of the need to attack the United States, a "distant enemy." The Washington Post reported that Zawahiri had visited the United States at least once in the 1990s.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks planned and carried out by al-Qaida in 2001 shocked the world and killed nearly 3,000 people. Prior to that, Al Qaeda had orchestrated two large-scale terrorist attacks against U.S. targets — bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 2,024 people and injuring more than 4,500 others; In 2000, the USS Aegis destroyer Kohl was hit by a suicide bomber in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 people and injuring 39, and the hull was blown out of a large hole. The 9/11 terrorist attack was the worst attack on the U.S. mainland after World War II, and the George W. Bush administration subsequently launched the War in Afghanistan on the grounds that the Afghan Taliban regime was shielding al-Qaida.
After 2001, Zawahiri made public appearances, appearing regularly in videos and audio recordings released by al-Qaida, CNN reported. On May 12, 2003, three suicide bombings in riyadh, the Saudi capital, killed 34 people and injured nearly 200 people, including nine Americans, just days after a recording of Zawahiri was released. The U.S. State Department offered him a $25 million reward for his arrest, and Zawahiri allegedly evaded U.S. targeted killing operations at least four times since 2001.
Zawahiri Infographic
There are reports that Zawahiri is more radical than bin Laden, giving the impression of being stubborn, aggressive, but reticent, and considered obsessed with "control, secrecy and division." With his early experience in leading underground militant groups, zavahiri used this to push al-Qaeda to establish more subordinate and branch organizations, forming a terrorist network. Because of this, Zawahiri is known as the "brain" of al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida remains dangerous
On May 1, 2011, bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, and Zawahiri was subsequently named leader of al-Qaida. However, in the period since, al-Qaida has fallen into decline as some of its top members have either been wiped out in the war on terror or chosen to go into hiding, and with the rise of the extremist group Islamic State around 2014.
There are reports that Zawahiri has been in poor health in recent years and has occasionally released some book manuscripts and videos. Last June, a United Nations report said Mr. Zawahiri might be somewhere along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, possibly too weak to appear in the video. But there have also been reports that Mr. Zawahiri made a rare appearance last September, delivering an hour-long speech that mostly refuted rumors that he was dead.
Zawahiri Infographic
Eleven years after bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, his successor, Zawahiri, has also been eliminated by the United States, but al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization, still poses a threat to global security. Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow on counterterrorism and homeland security at the U.S. Think Tank council on Foreign Relations, argued in an article titled "The Resurrection of Al Qaeda" in March 2018 that al-Qa'idah has five branches in Syria, Yemen, and North Africa, and that the Somali extremist group Al-Shabaab is also closely associated with al-Qa'idah, and that there may be tens of thousands of militants loyal to al-Qaida and its branches.
However, some analysts pointed out that al-Qaeda currently relies mainly on branches to create terrorist attacks, and the "Islamic State" that rose in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2015 and frequently launched terrorist attacks in European and American countries around 2015 and 2016, the "al-Qaida" organization is being weakened. In Somalia, for example, the Al-Shabaab and Islamic State branches are divided into north and south, hating, hostile and confronting each other. Because of the fragmentation of al-Qaida, it is necessary to be vigilant that it can continue to function after leaders like Zawahiri have been eliminated.
Terrorist attacks by the Somali "Al-Shabaab" in Africa Infographic
While it is unclear who will be Zawahiri's successor, an Egyptian under the pseudonym "Saif Al Adel" was mentioned in some reports, who is said to be experienced and could be a potential "successor". After bin Laden was killed 11 years earlier, he had been listed in a report in the German newspaper Le Monde as a potential candidate for the new al-Qaida leader. Saif Al Adel, then 47, whose real name was Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, was reportedly an Army colonel in Egypt who was expelled on suspicion of sympathy with terrorist groups and jailed in 1987. Later, he traveled to Afghanistan and became acquainted with bin Laden. He was active in Sudan in the 1990s before returning to Afghanistan in 1996 to participate in the planning of al-Qa'idah's operations and became al-Qa'idah's military leader in November 2001.