The safe house used by al-Zawahiri is now empty.” “We have identified a concerted effort to restrict access to the safe house in the surrounding area for hours after the strike. The official said they were able to watch members of the Taliban try after the strike to conceal Zawahiri’s former presence at the location, swiftly removing his wife, daughter and her children to another location. We took every possible precaution to avoid civilian harm.” “We have no indications that civilians were harmed in the strike. They added that Zawahiri’s family members were present in other parts of the safe house at the time of the strike, were not targeted and were unharmed. We are confident through our intelligence sources and methods, including multiple streams of intelligence, that we killed al-Zawahiri and no other individual,” the official said. “Two Hellfire missiles were fired at Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed.
It was carried out at 9.48pm ET on Saturday by an unmanned aerial vehicle. The president eventually ordered a strike on the safe house at a meeting of key cabinet members and national security officials on 25 July. “He was particularly focused on ensuring that every step had been taken to ensure the operation would minimise that risk and he wanted to understand the basis on which we had confidence in our assessment.” Importantly, he examined closely the model of al-Zawahiri’s house that the intelligence community had built and brought into the White House situation room for briefings on this issue”, the official said.īiden sought explanations of lighting, weather, construction material and other factors that could influence the operation and reduce the risk of civilian casualties, the official added. The president “asked detailed questions about what we knew and how we knew it. Ayman al-Zawahiri, left, pictured with Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998.
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