Ayman al Zauahiri, one of the founders of Al Qaeda, designer of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the most wanted terrorist since the disappearance of his boss, Osama bin Laden, in 2011, was not hidden in Tora Bora, in the mountains of Afghanistan. US intelligence services located him in a house in central Kabul.
At no time were they aware that he left that shelter that he shared with his family. But they did find a gap. Al Zawahiri liked to go out on the balcony, and there he was hunted last weekend with two Hellfire missiles launched from a drone.
The CIA detected that his wife, his daughter and her son were in a residence in the Afghan capital. Al Zauahiri would feel so protected by the Taliban government that he also moved last April, when President Joe Biden was informed. “Justice has been done,” Biden told the nation on Monday when announcing his death.
Prior to the attack, videos were taken of the target on the balcony as proof that it was him. This does not mean that this Tuesday there was speculation from the South Asian country about the truth of whether that person was the deceased.
"We don't have DNA evidence, we don't need it," responded John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “We have total confidence that we have killed the one we say. We have visual evidence and other sources confirming this,” he added. The operation took place at 10:48 p.m. ET on July 30, or 6:18 a.m. on July 31 in Afghanistan.
Everything indicates that Al Zauahiri was hiding in Pakistan, although official US sources did not want to comment on it. Once detected in Kabul, the researchers established a pattern of the family through the contribution of different sources.
For months, studies were carried out on the construction of the house, of which a model was even made to take it to the White House and show it to the president. The goal was to launch the attack without undermining the structure of the building and minimizing the risk to other residents.
In fact, the sources stressed that when the bombing and death of Al Zauahiri took place, three other members of his family were inside, in other rooms, without being harmed.
An independent team of analysts was in charge of reviewing the documentation and confirming the identity of those who occupied the house. Only a small group of officers were aware of what they were carrying because it was "highly sensitive material." The certainty was reached that those people were Al Zawahiri and his family.
Then a strategy and its alternatives were developed to be delivered to the president. On July 1, the meeting with Biden took place in which they proposed what they considered the best plan. These sources reiterated that no Americans were on the ground in the preparations.
The president convened the meeting on July 25 to finalize the final details. Biden wanted to have guarantees that collateral risks were minimized, so he was interested in knowing what was behind the doors and windows of the third floor, which was Al Zauahiri's refuge. Five days later, the operation was launched, and these sources insisted that they had no knowledge of civilian deaths. Instead, they stressed that, after the operation, members of the Afghan Haqqani network tried to hide that Al Zawahiri had lived there, closed access to the area and evacuated the family. Biden recognized, in the euphoria, that this will not be the end of Al Qaeda, but it will be a serious blow.
