Images show Kabul house where al Qaeda chief is believed to have been killed by US strike

The strike, which took place at 9:48 pm ET on Saturday and in the early hours of Sunday morning in Kabul, was authorized by US President Joe Biden following weeks of meetings with his Cabinet and key advisers.

It took out the 71-year-old al Qaeda leader who at one time acted as Osama bin Laden’s personal physician, and who rose to the top of the terrorist organization after US forces killed bin Laden in 2011.

The house, located in the Sherpur neighborhood of the Afghan capital, is surrounded by several houses and buildings to its north, south and west. Directly east of the house sits Omaid High School.

Just under 1,000 feet to the southeast of the house sits the United Kingdom’s embassy in Kabul. According to the British Foreign Office, all diplomatic and consular staff are “temporarily withdrawn” from the country.

The house is in an area called the Green Zone, where most of the previous Afghan government officials used to live.

Zawahiri was sheltering in downtown Kabul to reunite with his family, Biden said in his Monday evening address announcing the strike, and was killed in what a senior administration official described as “a precise tailored airstrike” using two Hellfire missiles.

Among the preparations was a small-scale model of Zawahiri’s safe house, constructed by intelligence officials and placed inside the White House Situation Room for Biden to examine as he debated his options.

The Sherpur area of ​​Kabul was an old military base, but during the years of civil conflict and the Taliban era in the 1990s it was left almost unused. In 2003, the Afghan Defense Ministry abandoned it and the government divided it into more than 50 plots, giving them to powerful people including government ministers and other high-ranking officials, plus warlords and drug lords. Their houses soon gained the nickname “Poppy palaces.”

After the fall of the Ashraf Ghani government in August 2021, the majority of the owners of Sherpur houses fled the country and their houses were confiscated by the Taliban.

It’s unclear who owns the house where Zawahiri was killed or whether it is one of those confiscated houses.