How CIA killed Al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri

Online desk: Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by two Hellfire ‘Ninja’ missiles – fitted with extending blades – fired from CIA drones as he stood on the balcony of his safe house in a wealthy area of downtown Kabul this weekend in a mission that took six months to plan.

His wife, daughter, and grandchildren were living with him but were not harmed, American officials said.

The strike was conducted on a residential house in Kabul’s Sherpur area, a wealthy downtown neighborhood where several Taliban government officials live.

Al-Zawahiri was standing on the balcony of the three-story home when two R9X missiles – a hellfire missile armed with long blades aimed at killing targets with kinetic energy to minimize major collateral damage – struck.

The hellfire missiles were developed for precision drone strikes and are often used against high-value targets.

The UK based Daily Mail in a reports says the strike was carried out in the early morning hours of Sunday Kabul time – 6:18 am there and 9:48 pm Saturday night in the United States after U.S. intelligence officials learned al-Zawahiri moved to Afghanistan in the last year.

‘This year we identified that al-Zawahiri family his wife, his daughter, and her children relocated to a safe house in Kabul,’ a senior administration official told reporters on a background briefing call ahead of Biden’s speech.

Al-Zawahiri was never seen leaving that safe house, the official said.

The official said only al-Zawahiri was killed and that members of the Haqqani network removed his family from the safe house ‘to another location consistent with a broader effort to cover up that they had been living in the space.’

‘Al-Zawahiri family members were present in other parts of the safe house at the time of the strike, and were purposefully not targeted and were unharmed,’ the official said.