Joe Biden speaking from the White House as he announces that a US airstrike has killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s foreign office did not respond to questions about Zawahiri’s reported movements in and out of the country. He said Zawahiri kept a low profile there but went in and out of Pakistan’s border regions several times. The house in the relatively prosperous Sherpur neighbourhood appeared two to three storeys tall and ringed by trees.Ī senior Taliban leader said Zawahiri spent most of his time in the mountains of Helmand province’s Musa Qala district after the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 in a US-led invasion. Unverified pictures on social media of what was described as the target of the attack showed shattered windows of a pink building, its fences topped with rolls of barbed wire. The safe house used by al-Zawahiri is now empty.” “We have identified a concerted effort to restrict access to the safe house in the surrounding area for hours after the strike. The official said they were able to watch members of the Taliban try after the strike to conceal Zawahiri’s former presence at the location, swiftly removing his wife, daughter and her children to another location. We took every possible precaution to avoid civilian harm.” “We have no indications that civilians were harmed in the strike. They added that Zawahiri’s family members were present in other parts of the safe house at the time of the strike, were not targeted and were unharmed. We are confident through our intelligence sources and methods, including multiple streams of intelligence, that we killed al-Zawahiri and no other individual,” the official said. “Two Hellfire missiles were fired at Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed. It was carried out at 9.48pm ET on Saturday by an unmanned aerial vehicle. The president eventually ordered a strike on the safe house at a meeting of key cabinet members and national security officials on 25 July. “He was particularly focused on ensuring that every step had been taken to ensure the operation would minimise that risk and he wanted to understand the basis on which we had confidence in our assessment.” Importantly, he examined closely the model of al-Zawahiri’s house that the intelligence community had built and brought into the White House situation room for briefings on this issue”, the official said.īiden sought explanations of lighting, weather, construction material and other factors that could influence the operation and reduce the risk of civilian casualties, the official added. The president “asked detailed questions about what we knew and how we knew it. Ayman al-Zawahiri, left, pictured with Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998.
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