Smock enjoyed starting his day overlooking the Afghan capital, just like the world’s most wanted terrorist, from the villa they both called home, years apart. “The reports said that the CIA had information that he liked to stand on the balcony, and I thought, ‘Of course he would, it was a nice balcony,’” Smoak said in a telephone interview. “When the smog of Kabul lifts, you can see the mountains in the morning, and it’s next to an open field,” he said. He installed a bamboo mattress as a privacy screen, which was still there when an American drone hit Ayman al-Zawahiri, so the terrace was not overlooked. “I felt like you could hang out without anyone noticing who it was, unless someone really did. And clearly (this year) someone was.” The cream house, with sandy-orange detailing and green mirrored balcony walls, was in a neighborhood notorious for land grabs by warlords and the technocrat elite of the Afghan republic, which collapsed last summer. As the war escalated, many of the villas crammed onto small plots of land were rented by NGOs and contractors, such as Smock’s employer. Smock’s old home had a distinctive exterior grid between floors that he first noticed in photos posted on social media over the weekend when it was hit by a suspected US drone strike. He was a little surprised and worried when he saw the windows broken. “When I saw it I thought this is my old home,” he said. “These villas are beautiful but unique and this one in particular, was built on such a tight footprint.” Then on Monday night, US President Joe Biden told Americans that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri was the target. And Smock, a US military veteran of the Iraq War who also spent years working as a civilian in Afghanistan, realized he had lived in the same space as one of the men who planned the 9/11 attacks. “It’s an incredibly surreal thing. Things change and things change fast, but at this level? That’s a bit intense. You have public enemy number one, with a $25 million bounty on his head, literally living in the same space you lived in before,” he said. “I keep running through the reality that he was in the same rooms I was.” The CIA created a detailed model of the house, US media reported, to understand how a strike might affect the structure and whether Zawahiri could be killed without harming others. The reason the area appealed to US government contractors is probably the same reason it was considered a good place to host the al Qaeda leader. It is essentially a quiet, gated neighborhood near the seat of power. “Under the [Ghazanfar] bank and Spinneys [supermarket], there are two entrances on either side. If you control those, you control the whole neighborhood,” Smock said. He described a tall, relatively narrow house, behind the security wall behind a paved garden with shrubs. The main doors opened onto a staircase that ran through the center of the house, with strange acoustics. “If you said something on the ground floor, it reverberated through all the floors. It was like living in a speaker, even if you weren’t talking out loud.” Smock moved in with about half a dozen colleagues — for safety reasons foreigners took jobs without families and were regularly housed in shared houses. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST At the time there was a kitchen on the ground floor, three bedrooms on the upper floors and a small apartment space at the top, with a lounge and en-suite bathroom. Opposite was the door to the balcony where Zawahiri was killed. Biden hailed the drone strike as a triumph against terrorism, but to Smock that Zawahiri was there at all underscored how terribly Washington and its allies had failed in Afghanistan. After billions of dollars spent and years of promises to improve the lives of Afghans while making the US safe, Afghan girls are being kicked out of high school, the economy is collapsing, and the head of al Qaeda has run his business from the heart of it. capital city. “[The western mission] it failed so spectacularly that the people who took over Kabul could do an Airbnb for the CEO of Al Qaeda in a house that was run by USAid with dollar contracts for a decade plus,” Smock said. “It made me very sad. The news brought the full weight of understanding to me. After all these efforts, the rock has completely rolled down the hill.”