Ayman al-Zawahiri was one of the most wanted terrorists in the world and the United States promised 25 million dollars for any information allowing him to be found. He had taken the head of the jihadist nebula in 2011, after the death of Osama Bin Laden, killed by an American commando in Pakistan.
President Joe Biden is due to speak at 7:30 p.m. (2330 GMT) for a televised address. Shortly before, several major American media, including CNN, Fox, the Washington Post and the New York Times claimed that the target of the American attack was Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he was dead.
Zawahiri, not found for more than ten years, was considered one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.
Al-Qaeda had already lost its number 2, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, killed in August 2020 in the streets of Tehran by Israeli agents during a secret mission sponsored by Washington, information revealed at the time by the New York Times.
- "No civilian casualties" -
Inheriting in 2011 an organization that had lost its luster, Ayman al-Zawahiri, 71, had to survive to multiply the "franchises" and the allegiances of circumstances, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
At the end of 2020, sources had once given credit to rumors that he died of heart disease, but he then reappeared in a video.
On Monday, a senior US administration official said the United States over the weekend carried out a "counter-terrorism operation against a major al-Qaeda target" in Afghanistan, without mentioning Ayman al-Zawahiri.
"The operation was successful and caused no civilian casualties," the 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.
According to a statement from the Taliban, taken up by the Washington Post, an American strike hit a residential house in a wealthy neighborhood of Kabul.
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.
On February 3, Joe Biden announced the death of the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qourachi during an operation conducted in northern Syria.
In a televised address, the Democratic president had warned the heads of jihadist organizations: "We are on your heels".
