Al-Zawahiri's Demise: We Mean It This Time!
Americans rightfully cheer the demise of Al Qaeda mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It contrasts with Biden's 2021 Afghan debacle. Many oddities and unanswered questions remain.
Make no mistake. Ayman al-Zawahiri was evil, the Al Qaeda mastermind involved in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, and embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. News of his demise, no matter the cause, is welcome. Everyone who implemented or was behind the decision to take him out should be thanked and congratulated.
Qasem Soleimani has a new roommate. “You let Biden take you out?” I imagine Soleimani greeting Zawahiri after a few-million-elevator-floors-descent into a Very Warm Place. “I’d rather be a Trump trophy. Bin Laden still whines that he’s an Obama trophy. He’s next door to us, by the way, with al-Baghdadi, another Trump trophy.”
The Associated Press has the most detailed reporting of the missile strike thus far, here and here.
But I will confess my first thoughts upon hearing the news were, “is this true?” So much about the attack struck me as odd but also harkened back to comparisons between the May 2011 demise of Zawahiri’s then-boss, Osama bin Laden and last August’s Afghanistan shameful surrender and debacle. And all media reports of Zawahiri’s demise rely on the Biden Administration's veracity, which it isn’t exactly known for.
First, this is not the first time the reportedly 71-year-old Zawahiri’s death has been reported and “confirmed.” From a report days after the 2020 elections:
Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri died of natural causes one month ago, according to reports.
Journalist and NYT (New York Times) Best Selling Author Hassan Hassan broke the news on Twitter after reportedly "corroborating" with sources close to Al-Qaeda.
“Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda leader & Osama bin Laden successor, died a month ago of natural causes in his domicile. The news is making the rounds in close circles,” he said.
Fox News Fred Fleitz raises other questions that also crossed my mind.
The timing of this attack, coming one year after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and three months before the November midterm elections, is incredibly coincidental. Moreover, given the tendency of this president and his senior officials to make statements on national security that have proved too implausible or inaccurate and later need to be walked back, I want to see Congress fully investigate this attack…
Why did this strike happen now? With no Western press on the ground, how can the American people be sure exactly what happened? Can we verify the U.S. actually got Zawahri and that there were no civilian casualties? (Emphasis added)
And, as noted by the website theconservativetreehouse.com, “about half the terroristic attribution Joe Biden made in his primetime speech is associated with the ‘Blind Sheik’ Omar Abdel-Rahman, not Ayman Al Zawahiri.”
I was struck by a drone-delivered attack of two Hellfire “Ninja” missiles in a crowded, upscale neighborhood in downtown Kabul. These 100-pound missiles don’t explode but dispatch a series of blades that can precisely destroy a 71-year-old man sitting on his back porch at sunrise without hurting others in the house or the neighborhood (but we have no verification). They’ve been used before, in Syria. From NationalInterest.org:
These missiles are seldom used. They lack an explosive warhead, and instead of blowing up, they use several pop-out blades to take out targets kinetically—hence the ninja nickname. The missile is designed to reduce civilian casualties, especially in dense urban environments. Thus far the missile seems to have been favored against individuals in cars, and is said to have the ability to target individual seats preventing other passengers from being killed.
Washington Post columnist and AEI Senior Fellow Marc Thiessen raised other concerns. Thiessen worked and wrote speeches for President George W. Bush before and after the attack on 9/11.
Here is a question: What was Zawahiri doing in “downtown Kabul”?
Following the United States’ catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer, Biden assured us that al-Qaeda was “gone” from that country. “Look, let’s put this thing in perspective,” Biden said last August. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al-Qaeda gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. … And we did.” That same month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan as “remnants” posing no serious danger to the U.S. homeland.
Nearly a year later, even as we celebrate the strike against Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and successor, questions abound: Zawahiri showed up not in some remote cave in the Hindu Kush mountains but in the very heart of Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled capital. What was he doing in Kabul? Who invited him? With whom was he meeting? And what does his presence signal about al-Qaeda’s return to the country from which the terrorist group planned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?
During his address to the nation on Monday night, Biden said that Zawahiri had been tracked to the Afghan capital “earlier this year” after he had “moved to downtown Kabul to reunite with members of his immediate family.” U.S. officials told Politico that he was known to be in the Afghan capital in May. Think about what that means. Within months of Biden’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, Zawahiri’s family and the al-Qaeda leader himself had relocated to Kabul.
I can’t end this post any better than Thiessen ended his:
Some lessons of this incident are clear: Al-Qaeda is back in Afghanistan. Yes, it is good that we killed Zawahiri — and Biden deserves credit for the strike. But he also deserves blame for creating the conditions that allowed the world’s most-wanted terrorist to move to downtown Kabul and set up operations in a city that had been liberated from al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies with the blood of courageous American service members. If the president had listened to his military advisers last year, Zawahiri might never have been in Kabul this year. Killing Zawahiri is Biden’s greatest foreign policy triumph. The fact that al-Qaeda’s leader was in Kabul is Biden’s greatest foreign policy disgrace. (Emphasis added)
One last point. We have thousands of US Army and National Guard troops stationed in East Africa to help contain Al Qaeda’s affiliate, Al Shabaab. There are elections next week in Kenya, home to many al Shabaab terrorists and revolutionaries who have attacked US assets there in the past. One of those soldiers is my son. Pray for their safety.