Zawahiri assassination
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The Zawahiri assassination is John Kiriakou's account of the drone strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two. The missile, he notes, carried no warhead, chosen deliberately to avoid killing the women and children inside the apartment. When Zawahiri stepped onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette, the missile was fired and "went completely through his body," with no explosion. Kiriakou contrasts the care taken here with the Obama-era drone strikes that "hit every wedding."

Kiriakou has separately noted, in passing, that a new al-Zawahiri podcast reportedly surfaced despite the U.S. having claimed to have killed him in a drone strike in Afghanistan the previous summer.

See also

- Tuesday morning kill list
- Anwar al-Awlaki
