The co-planner of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had acquired a taste sitting on the balcony of his safe house in Sherpur, an affluent diplomatic enclave of Kabul. He especially liked to go out to the balcony after morning prayers so he could watch the sun rise over the Afghan capital. According to a US official who briefed reporters on Monday, it was such tactical behavior that allowed intelligence agents, possibly the CIA, to put together what they called “a life model” of the target. That in turn allowed them to launch what the White House called a “tailored airstrike” with two Hellfire missiles fired from a Reaper drone that reportedly hit the balcony, with Zawahiri on it, at 6.18am. of Sunday. It was the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the Egyptian surgeon, who by the time he was killed had a $25 million bounty on his head. Zawahiri, 71, was held responsible not only as bin Laden’s second-in-command for 9/11, which killed nearly 3,000 people, but also for many of al-Qaeda’s deadliest attacks, including of the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors. The mission to hunt down the al-Qaida leader was sparked, US officials said, in early April when intelligence sources received word that Zawahiri and his family had moved from their mountainside hideouts to Kabul. After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan last August, and with the support of the Taliban’s Haqqani network, Zawahiri and his wife, along with their daughter and grandchildren, had moved into the Sherpur home. Map In recounting the events, US officials tried to emphasize that under Joe Biden’s instructions the mission was carried out carefully and precisely to avoid civilian casualties. The US president was first informed of Zawahiri’s whereabouts in April, and for the next two months a tight-knit group of officials sifted through the information and hatched a plan. A scale model of the Sherpur house was built, showing the balcony where the al-Qaeda leader liked to sit. As talk of a possible strike intensified, the model was brought to the White House Situation Room on July 1 for Biden to see for himself. The president “scrutinized the model of al-Zawahiri’s house that the intelligence community had built and brought to the White House situation room for briefings on this matter,” a senior administration official told reporters. The White House made further claims to bolster its argument that the attack was legal, flawless, and that the loss of life was limited to Zawahiri. Officials said engineers were brought in to analyze the safe house and assess what would happen to it structurally after a drone attack. Likewise, lawyers were consulted on whether the attack was legal. They advised that it was, given the target’s prominent role as the leader of a terrorist group. Biden, now in quarantine due to Covid, received a final briefing on July 25 and gave the go-ahead. It was a decision in stark contrast to the advice he gave Barack Obama in May 2011 against sending in the special forces that killed bin Laden in a raid on his safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On Monday night, Biden stood on his own balcony — the one at the White House with the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial as a backdrop — to address the nation. “I allowed the precision strike that would have removed him from the battlefield once and for all,” Biden said. “This measure was carefully designed, strictly, to minimize the risk of harm to other civilians.” Biden’s insistence that no one but the al Qaeda leader was killed in the attack was repeatedly reinforced by US officials. The narrative given by the White House was that Zawahiri was removed purely through the application of modern technological warfare. Skepticism remains, despite protests. Over the years drone strikes have often proved anything but accurate. In August last year, one such US drone strike in Kabul was initially hailed by the Pentagon as a successful mission to eliminate a would-be terrorist bomber who was planning an attack on the city’s airport. Only after the New York Times published an exhaustive investigation showing that the strike had indeed killed 10 civilians, including a humanitarian and seven children, did the US military admit that the mission had gone tragically wrong. Perhaps mindful of the doubts that are sure to swirl around Zawahiri’s killing for days to come, the White House said the Sherpours’ safe house where the drone strike took place had been kept under surveillance for 36 hours after the attack and before Biden spoke to the nation. Officials said Zawahiri’s relatives were seen leaving the house escorted by the Haqqani Taliban, proving they had survived the strike.
