Details emerge on how President Biden came to authorize a strike on Al Qaeda leader and 9/11 plotter Ayman al-Zawahiri.
announced Monday night that a U.S. counterterrorism operation over the weekend in Afghanistan killed top Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the plotters behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Intelligence officials created a model of al-Zawahiri’s safe house and used it to brief Biden on the risk to civilians, the senior administration official added. They tried to minimize risk to civilians by not threatening the integrity of the structure during the planned strike. The president wanted to know the type of construction materials the safe house was made of, as well as potential conditions during the strike such as weather and lighting.Government lawyers, meanwhile, determined a legal basis for the operation. Al-Zawahiri was seen as a lawful target given his continuing leadership role in Al Qaeda.
His sign-off allowed intelligence officials to take out al Zawahiri when they determined the time was optimal. In his Monday evening address, Biden described al-Zawahiri as a “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks and said the terrorist leader also played a key role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
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