New Delhi: Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been killed in a US air strike that took place in Afghanistan’s Kabul. The drone strike was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to five people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
His killing comes a year after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
The US President Joe Biden said that justice has been delivered. He said, “No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the US will find you and take you out.”
Who was Al-Zawahiri?
Al-Zawahiri, took over the leadership of Al-Qaeda when he was 71 after the US Forces hunted down Osama bin Laden in Jalalabad of Pakistan.
After the Laden was killed 11 years ag, Zawahiri become an international symbol of the terrorist group. There was a reward of USD 25 million on his head.
He was born in an Egyptian middle-class family of scholars and doctors. He grew up to be a doctor. Al-Zawahiri was the grandson of Rabia al-Zawahiri, the grand imam of Al Azhar, which is the centre of Sunni Islamic learning in the Middle East and one of Islam’s most important mosques.
He has served as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army for three years.
His journey from being an eye surgeon to most wanted global terrorist:
Al-Zawahiri’s journey from becoming an eye surgeon to becoming a most wanted global terrorist started only after he met Laden in 1986. He later joined Laden as his personal advisor and physician.
It was in 1993 that he took over the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt. He become a leading figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to overthrow the government and set up a purist Islamic state. He was found to be involved in the killing of over 1,200 Egyptians.
In 2001, Zawahiri was listed as number two as the “most wanted terrorists” announced by the US government.
It was in 1998 that Zawahiri merged the Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Al-Qaeda.
He was indicted for his alleged role in the bombings of August 7, 1998, when nearly simultaneous bombs blew up in front of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa – 224 people died in the blasts, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,500 people were wounded.
He was also the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and Pentagon which killed nearly 3,000 people.
In 2001, both Zawahiri and bin Laden escaped the US forces in Afghanistan.
In May 2003, his involvement was also found in suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which killed over 23 people, including nine Americans, days after a tape thought to contain Zawahiri’s voice was released.
He had later emerged as one of the prominent speaker of Al-Qaeda, so far he had appeared in 16 videos and audiotapes in 2007, four times as many as Bin Laden, as the group tried to radicalise and recruit Muslims around the world.
About his whereabouts:
For several years Zawahiri’s whereabouts were a mystery, it is said that he was hiding along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In January 2006, the US had tried to kill Zawahiri in a missile strike near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. However, the attack killed four al-Qaeda members, but Zawahiri survived. After surviving the attack he had appeared on video two weeks later, where he had warned US President George W Bush that neither he nor “all the powers on earth” could bring his death “one second closer”.
