Unless you had been living under a rock you would have heard by now that the US eliminated al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri recently. This has been reported and confirmed by several major media outlooks like CNN (link). Original details were sparce, other than that a drone attack conducted by the CIA was used to kill Zawahiri and that no civilians were hurt or killed in the strike. So how did they do it?
Well, it is easy to confirm the drone strike angle as it is no secret that the CIA and U.S. Joint Special Operations Command are conducting drone strikes against high-value targets to counter-terrorism in countries like Afghanistan (this mission is dubbed Operation Enduring Sentinel). Zawahiri could definitely be considered a “high-value target” as he was the leader of al-Qaeda and had been a senior member of the terrorist group from 1998. He was personally close with Osama bin Laden serving as his personal physician at one point (Zawahiri is a doctor and a surgeon). He is also responsible for several terrorist attacks including the USS Cole bombing, several US embassy bombings, and 9/11. There pretty much wasn’t a higher target on the list and if you asked any US military member no expense or amount of ordnance would be considered “too much” to eliminate Zawahiri.
But how did they track him down in the first place to launch the strike? Well, a senior security advisor told Reuters (link) they gathered intelligence that confirmed the male was Zawahiri that was hiding out at a Kabul safe house. They then continued to collect intelligence and “build a pattern of life through multiple independent sources of information”. This was critical to the operation as it allowed officials to confirm 100% the male was indeed Zawahiri and it also gave them a window of when it would be best to strike. This would allow the CIA to get their man without having to put troops on the ground and to minimize the toll on civilian life.
When the CIA and JSOC were satisfied they had they man they were faced with a difficult decision on how to eliminate him. They could easily strike with a variety of missiles that would turn Zawahiri and the building into rubble. But of course it would also turn any “innocent civilians” inside into rubble too. While, officially the most that anyone officially could realize regarding the strike was that it was a “small-munition Hellfire with the explosive force of a hand grenade”. Unofficially though, it sounds like the munition was a Hellfire R9X missile. This missile will shout out six blades just before impact and will use those blades to cut the target up. This is a far more likely scenario with Zawahiri
Good riddance.
