The Guardian Weekly

Afghanistan The killing of al-Qaida’s leader in Kabul

By Emma Graham-Harrison KABUL

The Taliban leadership said they did not know that al-Qaida leader Ayman alZawahiri had moved to the Afghan capital, Kabul, where the US president, Joe Biden, said he had been killed by a drone strike last month.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has no information about Ayman al-Zawahiri’s arrival and stay in Kabul,” the militants said, using their chosen name for their unrecognised regime.

Taken at face value, the claim is extraordinary. It suggests the Taliban have little control over the heart of their capital, including the heavily guarded area frequented by some of their most elite leadership.

It also implies they were unable to track or control a terror group whose status was a key part of the 2020 deal with Washington that paved the way for US troops to leave, and the Taliban to return to power.

Under the Doha agreement, the Taliban promised the US that Afghanistan would not host terror groups that threatened the US and its allies.

The interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, told an Indian news outlet two days before the drone strike that al-Qaida was a “dead” organisation

with no presence in Afghanistan. However, US officials have said the apartment where Zawahiri was killed was rented by one of Haqqani’s aides.

If the Taliban denial seems barely plausible, it was perhaps the only way out of a political bind created by Zawahiri’s assassination.

The Taliban are still seeking international recognition for their regime, hoping it may cushion an economic collapse by ending sanctions and releasing funds for aid and business. An aggressive response to Zawahiri’s death would not further that cause.

However, al-Qaida and its leadership are revered by many in the Taliban’s ranks, who are also likely to see a drone strike in the heart of the capital as an assault on their sovereignty. So they could not afford to ignore the hit on Zawahiri. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s designated delegate to the UN who is based in Doha, said the regime was investigating both whether Zawahiri had been in Kabul, and whether he had been killed, and would share its findings. “Investigation is under way now to find out about veracity of … both claims,” he said.

The Taliban also said they wanted “to implement the Doha pact”, and there was no threat to the US from Afghanistan. However, the statement condemned Washington for “invad[ing] our territory and violat[ing] all international principles” with the attack, and made a barely veiled warning that it would consider retaliation in case of future drone strikes.

Several members of the government, including Haqqani, still have bounties on their heads in relation to past terror attacks and reportedly live in fear of assassination attempts.

It was an open secret in many Kabul circles that the neighbourhood was full of “Arabs”, understood to refer to al-Qaida operatives and their families.

The balcony in Kabul where the head of al-Qaida was killed had previously been home to a US military veteran of the war in Iraq, who also spent years working as a civilian in Afghanistan.

“Reports said the CIA had intelligence that [Zawahiri] liked to stand on the balcony, and I thought, ‘Of course he would, it was a nice balcony,’” said Dan Smock, who lived there while working on a US government aid project. “When the Kabul smog lifts you can see the mountains in the morning, and it’s next to an open field,” he said.

The cream house, with its green-mirrored balcony walls, was in a neighbourhood famous for land grabs by the warlords and technocratic elite of the Afghan republic, which collapsed last summer.

As the war escalated, many of the villas they crammed into small plots of land were rented by the NGOs and contractors, such as Smock’s employer.

Smock’s old home had a distinctive external lattice feature between the floors that he first noticed in photographs posted on social media when it was hit by a suspected US drone strike. He was a little surprised and disconcerted to see the windows smashed.

“When I saw it I thought, ‘That’s my old house,’” he said. “These villas are garish as hell but unique and this one especially, it was built on such a narrow footprint. It’s an incredibly surreal thing. Things change, and things change quickly, but at that level? That’s a little intense. You’ve got public enemy No 1, with a $25m bounty on his head, literally living in the same space you lived in previously,” he said.

The CIA created a detailed model of the house, US media reported, to help understand how a strike might affect the structure, and whether Zawahiri could be killed without harming others.

The reason the area appealed to US government contractors is probably the same reason it was seen as a good place to host the al-Qaida leader. It is essentially a quiet, closed-off neighbourhood near the seat of power.

“Down by the [Ghazanfar] bank and Spinneys [supermarket], there are two entrances on either side. If you control those you control the whole neighbourhood,” said Smock.

He described a tall, relatively narrow house, set back from the security wall behind a paved garden area lined with shrubs. Smock moved in with about half a dozen colleagues – for security reasons, foreigners took jobs without families and were regularly put up in shared houses.

Biden hailed the drone strike as a counter-terrorism triumph, but to Smock the fact that Zawahiri had been there at all underlined how terribly Washington and its allies had failed in Afghanistan.

“[The western mission] failed so spectacularly that the people who took over in Kabul could do an Airbnb for the al-Qaida CEO in a house that had been run by USAid contracting dollars for a decade plus,” Smock said.

“It made me very sad. The news brought me the full weight of understanding. After all those efforts, the rock has fully rolled down the hill.”

A Week In The Life Of The World / Inside

en-gb

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/article/281925956786242

Guardian/Observer