U.S. drone strike on al-Qaida’s leader raises questions about terrorist group’s future

Read the Full Transcript

• Judy Woodruff:

  We return now to the U.S. killing of Ayman al-Zawahri.

  President Biden last night announced the U.S. operation that killed the 71-year-old al-Qaida leader in Kabul.

  Nick Schifrin reports on Zawahri's background and where this leaves al-Qaida and the Taliban that harbored him.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Today, what used to be Kabul's most exclusive elite neighborhood, with some of the country's most wanted houses, this was as close as journalists could get to an area now known for housing the world's most wanted terrorist.

  In the heart of the capital on Sunday morning, a CIA drone launched dropped two Hellfire missiles that U.S. officials say destroyed the patio where Ayman Al-Zawahri was standing, these photos taken by a neighbor of the house that U.S. officials say Zawahri's family moved to this year.

  The intelligence community built a model of the house kept in a box in front of President Biden during a key meeting last month, before he authorized the strike on al-Qaida's leader.

  For three decades, Ayman al-Zawahri provided al-Qaida's organizational and inspirational backbone. He never had Usama bin Laden's wealth or charisma, but he gave bin Laden the vision of targeting not only what they considered pro-Western Muslims, but what they called the far enemy, the U.S.

  That led to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and 9/11.

  Hassan Hassan, Editor in Chief, "New Lines": What Osama bin Laden and Zawahri did was really internationalizing the idea of jihad, instead of focusing on local enemies.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Hassan Hassan is a longtime terrorism analyst and the editor in chief of "New Lines" magazine.

  He says Zawahri came a long way from this upper-middle class Cairo neighborhood where he grew up and trained to be a medical doctor. But he was radicalized young, and, in 1981, his organization, Jihad Group, participated in the assassination of then-President Anwar Sadat. He was arrested and held in a cage, then 31 years old.

  Aymnan al-Zawahri, Al-Qaida Leader: We are Muslims!

• Nick Schifrin:

  Zawahri vowed to make an Islamic State and claimed he was tortured.

• Ayman al-Zawahri:

  They kicked us. They beat us. They whipped us with electric cables.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Decades later, as head of al-Qaida, U.S. officials say he was no longer involved in day-to-day planning, but he continued to call for more attacks on the U.S., calls that Hassan says went unheeded.

• Hassan Hassan:

  For many years, I think Zawahri and Zawahri's messages never resonated on the ground. I think his greatest achievement over the past 10 years since he took over al-Qaida in 2011 after the killing of Osama bin Laden was really to stay alive. He lost control over the two biggest branches of al-Qaida in Iraq and Syria.

• Nick Schifrin:

  What is next for al-Qaida?

• Hassan Hassan:

  I think al-Qaida as we know it is over. Al-Qaida, this stays a name, but really it has almost zero effect on the ground.

  Both Osama bin Laden and Zawahri helped internationalize that cause. Before and after them, I think the core story of jihad will always be focused on local fighting.

• Nick Schifrin:

  For the Taliban, al-Qaida has always been local. And the strike made that clear. That home where Zawahri was killed was controlled by the chief of staff to the Taliban's acting interior minister.

  These days, that interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, walks openly through Kabul, despite a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, and despite the Haqqani Network targeting the city and Western troops for years.

• Laurel Miller, International Crisis Group:

  The symbolism of that fact of where it occurred is pretty hard to escape, even if it doesn't necessarily mean very much analytically.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Laurel Miller directs the International Crisis Group's Asia Program. She rejects the administration's efforts today to distinguish between Haqqani and the rest of the Taliban.

• Laurel Miller:

  The Haqqanis are definitely inside the Taliban government and are occupying key positions. There are reports of differences of view, including over the issue of girls education.

  But, again, differences of view don't necessarily mean that there are going to be some kind of splits within the organization that are going to fracture it and are going to weaken its grip on power.

• Nick Schifrin:

  And the Taliban's providing Zawahri safe haven could further slow already glacial Western movement toward normalization, despite a humanitarian crisis.

  Just today, the Defense Department watchdog said nearly six million Afghans face near famine, a 60 percent increase since last year.

• Laurel Miller:

  The biggest victim here is the Afghan population, because not being able to work towards a slight normalization of the relationship with the Taliban, that is just going to be further felt by the population that is in tremendous humanitarian distress.

• Nick Schifrin:

  But, today, it is one of the world's most notorious terrorist groups that's lost its leader, the man who helped guide it for decades.

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Nick Schifrin.