# Whether anyone is still looking for Zawahiri > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "Whether anyone is still looking for Zawahiri," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/whether-anyone-is-still-looking-for-zawahiri/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *Asked in December 2019 why Ayman al-Zawahiri had never been found, John Kiriakou offered a speculation he was careful to label as an outsider's: that the United States might simply have stopped looking for him, because al-Qaeda had become largely irrelevant and attention had moved to ISIS.* - **When:** December 2019 - **Kiriakou's standing:** "No inside information… an educated observer" - **Suggestion:** "I wonder if we just walked away" - **Told to:** Bo Dietl, 23 December 2019 The subject came up as an aside during a discussion of the hunt for al-Qaeda's leadership. Asked about the man described as al-Qaeda's number two, still at large, and still unfound, Kiriakou did not offer an operational explanation.[1] ## The disclaimer He framed the answer with an explicit limit on his own authority. He had no inside information here, he said; he was speaking as an educated observer.[1] The distinction is one he draws often, and it is doing real work in this instance: he had left the agency fifteen years earlier and was reasoning from public facts. ## The suggestion What he wondered was whether the United States was simply not looking for Zawahiri any more.[1] The reason he gave was a judgment about relevance rather than about capability. Al-Qaeda, he said, is pretty much irrelevant now.[1] Attention had gone elsewhere, to ISIS, and maybe other groups, and the possibility he raised was that the Americans just did not care about al-Qaeda any more. *"I wonder if we just walked away."*[2] ## The shape of the claim Kiriakou did not assert that the search had been abandoned, and he did not claim knowledge of a decision. He offered an inference from an absence: an organisation that had been the object of the largest manhunt in American history had produced no result against its surviving leader for eighteen years, at a time when the strategic case for the hunt had visibly weakened. It is a characteristic move in his commentary, treating the allocation of intelligence effort, rather than the competence of it, as the thing that explains an outcome. He has made the same argument about analytic failure elsewhere: that what an agency looks at is a policy choice, and that the choice is rarely announced. ## See also - [Zawahiri assassination](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/zawahiri-assassination) - [Abu Zubaydah](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/abu-zubaydah) - [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) - [The two ISIs](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-two-isis) ## Sources 1. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 27:10. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=1630s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/ 2. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 27:43. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=1663s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/whether-anyone-is-still-looking-for-zawahiri/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt