Two Hellfire missiles aimed at a balcony in the center of Kabul: this is how the US has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri | International

It is 6:18 a.m. on Sunday, July 31 in Kabul. Two guided missiles hit a building in the Afghan capital. It is a three-storey house in the exclusive diplomatic quarter of Sherpur, an area that officials of the Taliban government tend to frequent. It is a few meters from the embassies of the United Kingdom or France.

At 10,800 kilometers, Joe Biden, confined by coronavirus, follows the operation from the White House, where it is 9:48 p.m. on Saturday. Barely 48 hours later, the president of the United States confirms that the attack was a success: Washington has killed Ayman al Zawahiri, one of the ideologues of the 9/11 attacks along with Osama Bin Laden, whom he succeeded as head of the organization after his death in 2011. The terrorist had taken refuge at least since April in the Afghan capital, in a house that the residents of the area believed to be abandoned.

Taliban authorities

House now covered with plastic screens . Workers nearby tell us they thought house was empty . #Zawahiri #AlQaeda #Kabul pic.twitter.com/2MHQEWb0eK

— lyse doucet (@bbclysedoucet) August 2, 2022

with some tarps hours after the attack, but on its walls there are no burns, remains of explosions or signs of detonation: several analysts suggest that something like this can only be due to the fact that the latest generation of the family of Hellfire missiles, the AGM-114R9X.

The ninja missile, as the R9X model is known, is being used more and more frequently in precision strikes against terrorist leaders. A senior White House official limited himself to explaining Monday in Washington in a call with journalists that the ammunition used was “two” Hellfire missiles, without giving further details.

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The novelty of this missile is that it does not carry explosives: it kills because of its speed and because six blades detach from its body before impact.

It was first used in 2017 and there is a lot of secrecy surrounding how it works. There are no official images of the intact missile, but it has been reconstructed from debris from other attacks. An investigation by the verification experts at Newsly and Bellingcat concluded that, to date, it has been used at least 11 times in countries such as Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan.

His first official appearance was in an article in the Wall Street Journal May 2019, documenting the attack on deputy al Qaeda leader Abu Khayr al Masri’s car in Syria two years earlier. A normal missile would have blasted the car apart with its blast wave, shattering the windows and leaving detonation debris all around. “By using an R9X, much of the vehicle remains intact. The cuts of the blades seem to be the ‘signature’ of the R9X”, described Nick Waters, ex-military and analyst. The part of al Masri’s car that was not directly hit by the shell was left intact.

The missile began to be developed a decade ago, during the Obama Administration, and seems so precise that it does not cause innocent victims. Human Rights Watch has recalled, however, that the accuracy of a guided missile is only as good as the information that guides it. By themselves, they would not prevent the more than 500 civilian deaths that US drones have caused in Afghanistan since 2015 alone. The last were the 10 people who died almost a year ago, within days of the departure of the US military from the country. .

21 years of searching

In his appearance on Monday, Biden repeated twice in seven minutes that the operation had been a success because it had not caused “civilian casualties.” A senior White House official explained that this part was critical to the plan, given that the target was a populated area in central Kabul.

The US intelligence services obtained information in early 2022 that Al Zawahiri was taking refuge in that unnamed building, along with his wife, daughter and grandchildren. For years, reports of him have placed al Qaeda’s ringleader in Pakistan, having already barely survived the battle in the remote Tora Bora region in December 2001.

The operation that ended his life was carried out in secret, and only a small number of members of various agencies located in Washington were aware of it from the beginning, in April. They collected data on the habits of household members. Al Zawahiri never left her during all these months, but he had a habit, which ended up proving fatal, of going out on the balcony to get some air. “Only when we had all the information well defined,” the senior official clarified, “we shared it with the president.”

That moment came in May. On July 1, it was held in a meeting of which a photograph has emerged, distributed this Tuesday by the White House. In it, Biden is seen without a mask, surrounded by some of his closest collaborators, they are masked: the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is seated to the left of him. To his right is William Burns, director of the CIA, the agency that led the attack.

In the center of the long table is a locked suitcase-shaped box with a model of the free house, which, according to the senior White House official, is owned by an aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban government’s interior minister and Leader of the Haqqani network, a notorious terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda. In that meeting, Biden, according to the aforementioned official, was interested in the weather in Kabul at this time of year, in the materials used in the construction of the building or in the consequences that the operation could have for Mark Randall Frerichs, an American who He has been missing in Afghanistan since 2020. Only when he was clear that the attack would not cause collateral damage, on July 25, did he approve it, always according to the White House.

That same day, Biden had confined himself again, after overcoming the coronavirus. After three days of negative tests, she tested positive again, due to the effect of an antiviral drug, Paxlovid, which was administered to her, at the age of 79, to combat the symptoms. Two days later, still isolated, he appeared before the Americans to deliver news that the White House had been wanting to deliver for 21 years and for which the State Department offered a $25 million reward. Al Qaeda’s intellectual column was dead. “Justice has finally been served and this terrorist leader no longer exists,” Biden said.

Jose A. Alvarez participated in the preparation of this information

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