The United States said on Monday that the leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, had been killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan.
The Americans do not give up when they have targeted a number of terrorist leaders who have committed appalling crimes in the United States”, explains the former operational reserve colonel, specialist in defense issues, Pierre Servent Tuesday, August 2 on France Inter, after the United States announced that it had killed the now ex-No. 1 of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Kabul.
Franceinfo: Is this American announcement a surprise for you?
Pierre Serven: It’s a surprise because obviously, no information could leak out that the Americans were preparing something against the new leader of Al-Qaeda. But at the same time, it is not a surprise, in the sense that we know that the Americans do not give up and that when they have targeted a certain number of terrorist leaders who have committed appalling crimes in the United States, they can ten years – that’s what happened with Bin Laden – or 20 years like this one, or even 30 years if there are other targets. So I was surprised at the time, but not fundamentally surprised by the American attitude.
What do we know about this operation?
So far very little. What you need to know is that before this type of operation, you have a whole intelligence chain that is implemented, which also involves satellite observations, drone observations, listening, and, above all, what is very important, but on this, we will not know anything for a very long time, of human intelligence which makes it possible to trace the course, the habits, the places where the target is. There, in this case, as is quite classic, it would seem that the CIA first identified the family of the Egyptian before going back to Ayman al-Zawahiri. Afterward, the CIA offers the American president several military options by evaluating the risks, in particular, the risks of collateral losses and collateral damage and this
Does that mean that it is a preparation of several weeks or several months?
Even several years. I think the Americans have not at all demobilized on this target and on others. Two years ago, the number two of Al-Qaeda, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, was killed in Tehran by an operation probably led by the Israelis but sponsored by Washington. These are operations that can require months or years of intelligence. This was also the case for the French. They put out of action or killed in action Abdelmalek Droukdel who was the emir of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqmi).
It was June 2020 and long before arriving at this elimination of this major leader of Al-Qaeda, there were months of intelligence, listening, tracing the environment of this character to collect this that the military call intelligence for action, that is to say, the cutting edge of intelligence that allows the action to be taken, after the green light of course, from the heads of the armies or the commanders-in-chief.
