He was considered the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in Afghanistan over the weekend in a US drone strike, the
Washington Post
and CNN reported, citing a senior US official.
Joe Biden is due to speak from the White House at 7:30 p.m. (1:30 a.m. this Tuesday Paris time) about a "successful counterterrorism operation".
Zawahiri, considered the architect of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, took over as head of the terrorist organization after the death of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. The State Department offered up to $25 million in rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the al-Qaeda leader.
No civilian casualties
A senior US administration official said the United States over the weekend carried out a "counterterrorism operation against a major al-Qaeda target" in Afghanistan, without mentioning Ayman al -Zawahiri.
“The operation was successful and caused no civilian casualties,” this source told reporters.
According to American media, Ayman al-Zawahiri may have been killed by a drone strike carried out in the Afghan capital Kabul by the CIA.
This announcement comes almost a year after the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, which had allowed the Taliban to regain control of the country twenty years later.
The United States had also announced in mid-July that it had killed the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, Maher al-Agal, during a drone strike, an operation which had "considerably weakened the capacity of the 'ISIS to prepare, finance and conduct its operations in the region,' according to a US military spokesman.
World
Al-Qaeda
Terrorism
Afghanistan
UNITED STATES
Joe Biden