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KABUL — The U.S. drone strike that killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri here early Sunday morning also dealt a humiliating blow to the Taliban regime, which had secretly harbored the aging extremist in the heart of the Afghan capital for months but failed to he kept safe.
Just as the Taliban prepared to celebrate their first year in power later this month, the attack sparked a nationalist backlash against the beleaguered regime at home and jeering comments on social media calling for retaliation against the United States.
“If Zawahiri’s martyrdom is confirmed, then shame on you for failing to protect the true hero of Islam,” an Afghan man named Ehsanullah tweeted in response to a statement early Tuesday by the Taliban’s chief spokesman that the al-Qaeda leader was was killed in an attack by an American drone.
The killing of al-Zawahiri, a hero of Islamist militants but a long-wanted terrorist in the West, also crystallized the ongoing struggle between moderate and hard-line factions within the Taliban regime. Several leaders of the hardline Haqqani network, long denounced by US officials for directing high-profile terror attacks, hold powerful positions in the regime.
Now, some Afghan and American analysts said, the drone strike could harden the Taliban and push the regime toward an open embrace of the extremist forces it promised to renounce in its 2020 peace deal with the United States.
“The Taliban are now in deep political trouble and will be under pressure to retaliate. Their relationship with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups remains very strong,” said Asfandiar Mir, an expert on Islamic extremism at the American Institute of Peace in Washington. “I think we have to prepare for impact.”
Mir noted that while Taliban officials had hoped to gain international recognition and access to more than $9 billion in assets that had been frozen by the Biden administration, the group’s supreme religious leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, made the statement at a national conclave in May , “We are in a clash of civilizations with the West.
The US killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike in Kabul
There is a deep-seated hostility to the United States here that has intensified since American troops withdrew last year and the war economy collapsed, leaving millions of Afghans out of work. When Afghan officials belatedly confirmed that a US drone had killed the al Qaeda leader after initially insisting the strike was a harmless missile attack, many Afghans were outraged.
“We already have so much to worry about. For a whole year there is no work, no business, no activity. But at least the battle was over. The Taliban were in charge and there was good security,” said a resident of the Sherpur neighborhood where the drone struck, which was identified as Hakimullah. “Now suddenly this attack happens and everyone is scared again.”
Many Afghans seem to know little about al-Zawahiri or al-Qaeda. That’s partly because so many of them were born after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which U.S. officials say were orchestrated by al-Zawahiri and his associates, and partly because the al-Qaeda fighters who joined forces with the Taliban are residents of the Middle East, whose presence in Afghanistan has always been inconspicuous.
What the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri means for al-Qaeda
Until now, people here have been much more focused on the threat posed by a different Sunni Muslim extremist movement known as the Islamic State-Khorasan or ISIS-K. The group has repeatedly bombed mosques, schools and other sites in Kabul in the past, particularly during the Shia Muslim festival of Muharram, which began this week.
Among the most disturbed by the development are Afghan civilians, who have tried to establish a working relationship with the new Taliban authorities, encouraging them to develop moderate and practical governance policies rather than focusing exclusively on religion.
Faiz Zaland, who teaches governance and political science at Kabul University, expressed disappointment with the Taliban for not foreseeing the risks of bringing al-Zawahiri to the capital and concern that the US attack had doomed the chances of moderates in the regime to compete with hardliners religious figures at the top.
“The Taliban are now blocked and it’s their fault,” he said. “It will undermine the achievements of their first year and the people who care feel betrayed and scared.”
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