When the United States hastily withdrew from Afghanistan last year, President Joe Biden vowed not to let the new Taliban regime make the country a safe haven for terrorists.
This made it clear that, for the Biden administration, the protracted war on terrorism was not nearing its end.
Nearly a year later, the president’s top security advisers suggested that intelligence agents might have tracked down the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan.
A high value target
In briefings, government officials told the press that they believed Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan last year, following the collapse of the Western-backed government.
US spies have been paying particular attention to Afghanistan since the withdrawal of its troops, looking for signs that al Qaeda leaders are slowly returning to the country, a Biden adviser said.
Al Zawahiri would have settled with his wife and daughter in a large complex with high protective walls in the center of Kabul.
The neighborhood Zawahiri chose, a relatively affluent area called Choorpur, had been home to embassies and homes for foreign diplomats under the previous administration.
Now, most of the top Taliban officials live in the luxurious facilities in that area.
In early April, CIA officials communicated something important to Biden’s advisers and then to the president himself: they had identified a network that supported the al Qaeda leader and his family, according to various intelligence sources.
The spies studied behavioral patterns of the house’s residents, including the particular mannerisms of a woman they identified as Al Zawahiri’s wife.
The officials claimed to have acknowledged her use of terrorist “skills” in trying to prevent people from entering her husband’s safe house in Kabul.
They noted that, since he arrived at the house, Al Zawahiri never left the premises and was in the habit of leaning out, from time to time and for short periods of time, on a balcony facing the walls of the property.
How the operation was planned
For Biden, the opportunity to kill one of America’s most wanted men was fraught with risk.
Al Zawahiri lived in a densely populated residential neighborhood.
Biden was probably mindful not to repeat certain mistakes, such as the drone strike that accidentally killed 10 innocent people in Kabul – including an aid worker and seven children – in the final days of the US presence in Afghanistan.
In May and June, the US leader focused on the war in Ukraine and pushing landmark legislation on gun control and climate change.
But secretly, a “very small and select” group of senior intelligence officials were preparing various options to show them.
Biden had tasked intelligence agents with making sure no civilians, including Zawahiri’s family and Taliban officials, were killed in the attack.
On July 1, the US president brought together top officials, including CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, for a briefing.
Biden and his advisers evaluated a scale model of Zawahiri’s home that intelligence agents had built and brought to the White House.
He inquired about the structure of the building, and in particular how it would be hit by a shell, before flying to Camp David for a weekend break.
In the following weeks, the officials met in the White House crisis room, a bunker-like command center under the building intended for the president to control extreme situations at home and abroad.
They methodically planned the operation, trying to anticipate any questions the president might ask.
In parallel, a small team of lawyers met to assess the legality of the attack and concluded that Al Zawahiri was a legitimate target due to “his continued leadership role in Al Qaeda, and his participation in and operational support for the group’s attacks.”
On July 25, after convening his team for the last time and asking for the opinion of his top advisers, Biden authorized the attack.
The extreme difficulty of the plan
After the operation, US authorities revealed that they had enough information to know Zawahiri’s “pattern of life”, which includes his habit of going out on the balcony.
This suggests that American spies had been watching the house for weeks or months.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official, told the BBC that it is likely that various methods of intelligence were used, from spies on the ground to signals intelligence.
Others believe that US drones or planes would have watched the place for weeks or months without being heard or seen from the ground.
Zawahiri’s attack, according to Polymeropoulos, was the product of decades of US intelligence experience tracking al Qaeda members and other terrorist targets.
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, assessed that the attack on Al Zawahiri was probably “much more difficult” to execute than previous ones due to the absence of US government assets in and around the site.
Previous drone strikes in Pakistan, for example, were carried out from Afghanistan, while those carried out in Syria would have been carried out from friendly territory, in Iraq.
In those cases “it was much easier for the United States to reach those areas. He had assets on the ground. This has been much more complicated »said.
“This has been the first attack against Al Qaeda or the Islamic State in Afghanistan since the United States left. It’s not common.”
What are Hellfire missiles like?
At 06:18 local time (1:38 GMT), two Hellfire missiles fired by a drone hit the balcony of Zawahiri’s home, killing the al Qaeda leader. Members of his family were unharmed, intelligence authorities reported.
After the impact the windows of the house appeared to be destroyed, but surprisingly no further damage was observed.
Many analysts believe that a little-known version of the Hellfire missile was used, without an explosive warhead.
This variant – called the AGM-114R9X – has six blades that unfold on the surface of the missile as it approaches the target.
The kinetic energy caused by the speed of this weapon is what causes destruction, as it shatters everything it hits and minimizes collateral damage.
The Hellfire is a type of air-to-surface missile common in US anti-terrorist operations abroad since the attacks of September 11, 2001. These projectiles can be fired from various platforms such as helicopters, ground vehicles, ships, aircraft or unmanned drones, as in this case.
The United States used Hellfire in operations to kill Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in early 2020 and jihadist “Jihadi John” in Syria in 2015, experts say.
When these missiles are launched from a drone, the drone transmits live images of the target via satellite to a weapons operator in a control room, usually in the US The operator can fix the target on his screen and aim a laser to him.
By pressing the fire button, the missile follows the trajectory until it hits the target.
Unrest among the Taliban
Thousands of miles away, in Washington, the president was informed of the success of the operation.
On Sunday, the Taliban Ministry of the Interior told the local media outlet Tolo that a rocket had hit an empty house without causing any casualties. He did not provide additional details at the time.
Shortly thereafter, however, the Biden administration announced that fighters from the Haqqani network, an ultraviolent wing of the Taliban, had removed Al Zawahiri’s family from the scene and tried to cover up their presence.
When a journalist from the BBC went to the house on Monday morning, a Taliban cordon stopped him, pointing rifles at him and insisting that “there was nothing to see.”
US officials claimed that “multiple” intelligence sources had confirmed al-Zawahiri’s death, but stressed that there are no US personnel on the ground in Kabul.
They declined to give further details on how the success of the attack could be confirmed.
The body
Intelligence agencies jealously guard the identities of their spies. James Clapper, former director of national intelligence during the presidency of Barack Obama, explained to BBC that former US allies in Kabul may have provided some information.
It is unclear what happened to Al Zawahiri’s body after the attack.
According to sources in the Biden administration, US authorities did not attempt to recover Al Zawahiri’s remains, unlike the operation in which Osama Bin Laden was killed.
On that occasion, special forces recovered Bin Laden’s body to confirm his identity before throwing it into the sea to prevent his grave from becoming a sanctuary for Islamists.
As Biden broadcast the news to the world from the White House, Taliban leaders strongly condemned the US incursion into their territory.
But in their comments they did not mention Al Zawahiri.
Now it’s time to ask to what extent the senior Taliban leaders knew about Al Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul and what help they could have been toasting.
An Afghan who lives in the area assured BBC that Taliban fighters had been monitoring the street and that the presence of “non-Afghan residents” was an open secret among the neighbors.
This hypothesis is likely to raise some uncomfortable questions for the Taliban leadership.