An example of the US Air Force’s MQ-9 Reaper multi-mission drone, similar to the one used as a launch pad for the Hellfire missile that killed Al Zawahiri. Photo: EFE
The two R9X Hellfire missiles were launched with the MQ-9 Reaper drone with the utmost precision: they hit Zawahiri in full in the early hours of last Sunday, right when he went out for a few minutes to get some air on the balcony of the house where he was hiding
The Hellfire R9Xs have been designed to shoot down specific targets without causing an explosion along the way, helping to avoid collateral damage and associated injuries as much as possible. How this missile is killed is no mystery; uses a laser system to aim at the target and just before the impact of the missile, this one he sets up the blades that cut everything in his path, including the victim. The amazing thing about this armament is that It has no explosives.
An image of the drone with the Hellfire missiles already loaded and ready to be launched.
The missile can be launched from various launch platforms, including land vehicles, ships, airplanes, helicopters and drones such as the MQ-9, an unmanned aircraft. This type of Hellfire missile, according to the BBC, is usually launched by specialized operators who observe what the drone sees through them. cameras to fix and block the target.
the device follow the path marked by a laser After flying over the target and nothing in its path, he manages to stop the blades. In addition to going through buildings, she is able to sink up to 45 kilos of metal, without harming other users or nearby homes by means of explosives.
The Hellfire missile has been used extensively by US military and intelligence agencies for the past two decades to hit targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
It can do enough damage to destroy most targets, such as vehicles and buildings, but not enough to raze apples and cause a significant number of civilian casualties.
Who was Al Zawahiri, leader of Al Qaeda?
the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, a leader without charisma At the head of Al Qaeda over his predecessor Osama Bin Laden, he theorized about the branching of jihadist cells, without going so far as to control them until his death this weekend in an American attack.
an old doctor which his fellow students have described as shybecame one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. Although he was one of the architects of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers in New York, “Zawahri’s greatest achievement is to have kept Al Qaeda alive”, According to Barak Mendelsohn, a professor at the University of Haverford in Pennsylvania.
But had to multiply the “franchises”, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. And accept that they are emancipated slowly.
The bushy bearded theorist and large glasses – iconic difference with his predecessor Bin Laden-, easily recognizable by a lump on his forehead, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 15 and survived more than 40 years of jihadsomewhat unusual, before dying at the age of 71 in a drone attack.
He was given up for dead or dying on several occasions, but it recently showed signs of life, with a video that tripped the Biden administration. This Saturday, while visiting relatives in Kabul, he was killed in a calculated Hellfire missile attack.
It also exhibits the apparition of Al Zawahri in the Afghan capital certain permissiveness of the Taliban regime which must respond to pre-existing agreements in this regard.
Despite his role in the 2001 attacks, which bear the signature of Al Qaeda, the assassinated terrorist never acquired the macabre aura of Osama Bin Laden.
Paradoxically, The United States offered $ 25 million for his capture., a record, and at the same time seemed almost uninterested in him. Until Monday, President Joe Biden himself announced his death as a “successful counter-terrorist operation” this weekend.
Childhood and decline of the last Al Qaeda leader
In 1998, Ayman al-Zawahri and Osama Bin Laden in, Afghanistan, in a message of terror. Both were US military targets. AP photo
Al Zawahri was born on June 19, 1951 in Maadi, near Cairo, the capital of Egypt, in one middle-class family (his father was a doctor and his grandfather a great theologian of the Al Azhar mosque in the Egyptian capital), and he was a surgeon.
His ideology was precocious. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was only 15 years old. He has been imprisoned for three years for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat.
He then traveled to Saudi Arabia, the United States and finally Pakistan in the mid-1980s, where he treated the jihadists like a doctor they were fighting against the Soviets. There he met Bin Laden. He has long been the head of the Egyptian and Islamic Jihad joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.
Washington put it on its “black list” for it supported the attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Biden also accused him of being the “strategist” in the 2002 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which resulted in about 20 deaths.
Was sentenced to death in absentia in his country for numerous attacks, in particular the one in Luxor in 1997 in which 62 people died, of which 58 were foreign tourists.
In 2002 and 2007, he was presumed dead but reappeared. became the Bin Laden’s right-hand man and also his doctor.
He “doesn’t care about fighting in the mountains. Think more internationally, ”said Bin Laden’s biographer Hamid Mir of him. With the, “Al Qaeda has become increasingly decentralizedand the authority rested mainly with the heads of its branches ”, which however gives it a leading role in the reorganization of many jihadist groups.
Ayman al-Zawahri, to the right of Osama Bin Laden, the two terrorist minds who led Al-Qaeda and who were killed by the United States. AFP photo
Since 2011 he lived hidden between Pakistan and Afghanistanlimiting his appearances to videos with monotonous sermons. Upon his death, he leaves a group at the opposite end of the international jihadist war against the United States that Bin Laden dreamed of.
Al-Zawahri in love with something much more mundane: visiting relatives in the capital of Afghanistan, where two Hellfire RX9 missiles ended his life.
Source: Clarin
