The United States takes revenge by killing Al-Zawahiri

If there is one constant in the behaviour of the United States, whoever is at the helm of the country, when it suffers an attack or a simple grievance, it is its firm determination that the perpetrator or perpetrators should not get off scot-free. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and the US administration has demonstrated its unwavering determination to ensure that its enemies know that their actions will not go unpunished. 

The latest on the list to have experienced this is Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's companion, adviser and successor as head of Al-Qaeda. According to all reports of the commando who executed him in his safe haven of Abbotabad in Pakistan, not even the ashes were left; neither the Pentagon nor the White House wanted a corpse that could be buried and his grave made a place of pilgrimage for Islamist haters of the West and its allies. 

On the contrary, according to information provided by President Joe Biden (isolated in his office because of COVID) and other officials, al-Zawahiri was executed with a Hellfire surface-to-air missile launched from a drone, hitting the body of the al-Qaida leader at 0616 hours on 31 July at his home in Kabul. The Americans do not believe that the body has volatilised, so they even suspect that his followers could hide it and even fabricate videos to make people believe that he is still alive. This time, however, the only victim this time was Al-Zawahiri himself, while his family was unharmed. This is the opposite of what happened in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan at the beginning of the US invasion when it was Al-Zawahiri who escaped unharmed from the attack on his safe house while his wife and children perished.

"Justice has been served, and we have taken down this terrorist leader," Biden proclaimed in his White House address, then remarked on the immovable principle of revenge: "No matter how much work it takes, no matter where he hides, if someone is a threat to our people, America will find him and take him out". 

Included on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists, Al-Zawahiri's head had a reward of 25 million dollars, roughly the same as in euros at the current exchange rate, which is likely to be shared by the informants who tracked his movements and tracked his whereabouts in Kabul itself. He had arrived in the Afghan capital after twenty years of hiding in the mountains of neighbouring Pakistan, taking advantage of the stampede of the departure of international troops and the hasty final evacuation of US troops. 

If printed on paper, Ayman al-Zawahiri's dossier would take up entire wardrobes. Researchers who have retraced his steps almost unanimously consider him to be the real mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, which killed almost 3,000 people. In reality, that simultaneous attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, which in reality also targeted the Capitol and the White House, was the culmination of a strategy, attributed to Al-Zawahiri himself, of systematic attacks on American interests. This strategy began with the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left 200 dead and 5,000 wounded, and continued with the daring attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which left another 17 Marines dead.

The "success" of 9/11 prompted Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to continue with their strategy, which took the form of multiple attacks on Madrid and London just three years later. Zawahiri himself referred to all of them in a video, dated late 2005, in which he explicitly referred to Madrid, London, New York and Washington as "scenarios where we have succeeded in destroying the enemy". 

The Al-Qaeda leader's last appearance, also in a video, came earlier this year, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, in which he singled out the United States for blame for the war. It was the latest partial indictment in the general blaming of the West as the supposed cause of the ills afflicting the Arab world. For that war, it was also Zawahiri himself who united Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad. His subsequent weakness in the face of Daesh led him to grant Al-Qaeda franchises in the Sahel, the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia, although today it is Daesh that has imposed its primacy in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan itself.  

Thus ends the eventful life of Al-Zawahiri, born in Egypt in 1951 into a wealthy and influential family, so much so that his grandfather was imam of the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, the main focus of intellectual projection of Sunni Islam, and his great-uncle Abdel Rahman Azzam was the first secretary of the Arab League. 

For his part, with this execution Biden has his own trophy on the list of presidents who have exacted their revenge. Most recently, his own predecessors: Barack Obama was responsible for announcing Bin Laden's death in 2011, and Donald Trump, in 2019, that of Daesh leader Abubakr al-Baghdadi.