The White House said on Tuesday that it has no DNA confirmation that al-Qaeda’s top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul over the weekend and said it had confirmed his death by other means.
“We do not have DNA confirmation. We’re not going to get that confirmation. Quite frankly, based on multiple sources and methods that we’ve gathered information from, we don’t need it,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told CNN.
“We have visual confirmation, but we also have confirmation through other sources,” Kirby added.
President Biden announced the drone strike on Monday and said US intelligence had located Zawahiri earlier this year and that he recently moved to downtown Kabul. Zawahiri was reportedly living with his family in a safe house in Kabul’s Sherpur neighborhood, where the US embassy used to be located.
After Biden announced the drone strike, an administration official told reporters that US intelligence had “high confidence” that the person who was killed in the strike was Zawahiri. The US has a history of killing civilians in its drone strikes, but Biden said none were harmed, and there have been no reports from the Taliban of civilian casualties.
The Taliban have condemned the US drone strike and said it violated the Doha agreement, while the US said Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul meant the Taliban didn’t live up to the deal. The Taliban account of the strike matches the US account, although they have not confirmed that it was Zawahiri who was killed.
I’m guessing it’s a good thing our enemies don’t have the same drone capability we do- otherwise we’d be seeing a lot of ‘precision strikes’ every other day. We have an awful lot of people in Washington and elsewhere who have a lot to answer for.
Do you think it would be televised?…
no we are supposed to accept our masters’ official words as gospel, without evidence, no matter how ridiculous.
pretty funny that 9/11 mastermind al-Zawahiri had a secret hide-out in afghanistan but every one of the 19 9/11 highjacker guys were saudis. and we know they were saudis because quite a few of them saw their own names and photos on TV and news print and then yelled very loudly; “hey i didn’t highjack anything you bastards i am still right here!”
What were the identities of the involved folks that were blown to bits by the drone? When we take out a “target” we take out innocents.
How do you know if innocent bystanders were killed? If you go to an organized crime den,then you may risk your safety.
official story is that no one was killed except zawahiri because “a drone fired a special hellfire missile that rather than exploding, extends some swords outward at the last moment and cuts a single person to ribbons”.
and people thought that the 9/11 fairytale was stupid.
And where are the evidence…?
The only evidence needed is the U.S. badly needed a distraction.
Another false ALARM…?????
Each president has to have a trophy.
First, they have been wrong about leadership kills too many times before. They don’t deserve our trust for a claim for which they say they “don’t need” proof.
Second, if the US and Israel can do targeted killings in foreign capitals, so can their enemies. It is only a matter of time.
The more they insist they “got the right guy” the less I believe them. A sad state of affairs, when you can’t believe anything your own government says without hard evidence.
I wouldn’t be shocked if the Taliban set Zawahiri up in return for sanctions relief. They were willing to do more or less the same thing with Bin Laden, but Bush preferred to keep the boogeyman alive.