The United States killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's successor and mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Sylvie Claire / August 2, 2022
U.S. President Joe Biden announced on live television Monday the death of al-Qaida leader, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed Saturday night in Afghanistan by a drone strike, a new blow to the terrorist organization.
On Saturday, on my orders, the United States carried out an airstrike on Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed al Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, he said in a short speech from the White House.
Justice has been served and this terrorist leader is no more, Biden said.
The al-Qaeda leader was killed at 71 on Saturday night by a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahiri had taken over the leadership of the jihadist group following the death of his predecessor, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan in 2011.
He was one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. The United States promised $25 million for any information leading to his recovery.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi, near Cairo, into a middle-class family. His father was a famous doctor and his grandfather a leading theologian at the Al-Azhar mosque in the Egyptian capital. Ayman al-Zawahiri followed the same path as his father and became a surgeon.
His convictions were precocious: he joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager.
In 1981, he was notably involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat. After being imprisoned for three years, the Egyptian joined Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the mid-1980s, where he treated jihadists fighting the Soviets. It is also at this time that he met Bin Laden.
After leading the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, he joined al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. The United States put him on its blacklist for having supported the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. He was also sentenced to death in absentia in Egypt for numerous attacks, including the one in Luxor in 1997 which resulted in the death of 62 people including 58 foreign tourists.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri was considered to be one of the designers of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 people. He was Bin Laden's right-hand man and also his doctor.