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.[1][2] Kiriakou contrasts the care taken here with the Obama-era drone strikes that “hit every wedding.”[3]
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.[4]