The US says it has killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in an attack in Afghanistan.

“Justice has been served, this terrorist leader is no more.” US President Joe Biden announced Monday, August 1, that the leader of al-Qaeda terrorist group Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in an airstrike in Kabul (Afghanistan). His death “Allowing families affected by September 11″ To turn the page, he added during a televised address. Ayman al-Zawahiri is believed to be the mastermind of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.

I am addressing the nation on a successful anti-terror operation. https://t.co/SgTVaszA3s

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 1, 2022

Ayman al-Zawahiri was spotted “He was finally beaten on the balcony again and again and for a long time”, a senior US official said, quoted by AFP. The operation over the weekend did not take place “No civilian casualties”Joe Biden said during his speech. “No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, America will find you and destroy you.”Hammer the President of the United States.

Born in 1951 into a bourgeois family near Cairo (Egypt), Ayman al-Zawahiri, easily recognizable by his forehead bump and large glasses, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 15. Involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, he spent three years in prison before traveling to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the mid-1980s, where he treated jihadists fighting the Soviets and met Osama bin Laden.

A long-time leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (JIE), he joined al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. Ayman al-Jawhiri was one of the key figures in the Jihadi Nebula. In 1998, he became Osama bin Laden’s deputy but also his doctor, logically before taking over in 2011, when he was killed by a US commando in Pakistan. From the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, Ayman al-Zawahiri theorized that the jihadist right would mobilize according to the allegiance of the circumstances.

Issued by the State Department Up to $25 million (in English) A reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of an al-Qaeda leader who has not been located for more than ten years. At the end of 2020, sources once gave credit to rumors that he died of heart disease, but he reappeared in a video. In June 2021, the United Nations team estimated In a statement (in English) That he is “Somewhere in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahib said on Twitter “Air Raid” A house in Kabul’s Sherpur district was hit by a US drone. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan strongly condemned the attack.He further called for a strike “A flagrant violation of the principles of the international Doha Agreement”, signed between the US and the Taliban in late February 2020. Washington, for its part, sees Ayman al-Zawahiri’s presence in the Afghan capital as one “Breach Claire” These contracts.

Joe Biden’s announcement comes nearly a year after the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to regain control of the country. The Al-Qaeda group had already lost its number two, Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, who was killed by Israeli agents on the streets of Tehran (Iran) in August 2020 during a Washington-sponsored covert operation, as information was revealed at the time. talk The New York Times (in English).

In mid-July, the United States announced that Maher al-Aqal, the leader of the Islamic State group in Syria, had been killed in a drone strike. According to a US military spokesman, the operation was carried out “Weakened the capacity significantly [du groupe terroriste] Prepare, finance and conduct its operations in the region”.