Zawahiri Is Finally Dead, or Justice Delayed Just Doesn’t Feel The Same

Zawahiri more than deserved a splattering fate however, wherever, and whenever it came to him. But past that basic reaction…

News over night that a drone strike reduced al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri to several room temperature pieces was announced. After chasing Zawahiri for over two decades, this was the highest and many ways last of the 9/11 high priority targets.

Some background from our friend Nicholas Grossman:

Zawahiri was a founder of al Qaeda, an intellectual godfather of its version of jihadism, and the organization’s leader after an American special operations ground raid killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. An Egyptian doctor, Zawahiri embraced radical politics as a teenager, founded Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and spent time in jail as a political prisoner. He admired the Egyptian jihadist Sayyid Qutb, and advocated Qutb’s vision of offensive operations against apostate (i.e. insufficiently religious) Muslim governments.

That’s the philosophy he brought to al Qaeda as one of the founders in 1988. Zawahiri clashed with another founder, Abdullah Azzam, who argued that jihad was fundamentally defensive. A year later Azzam was dead, and while his killer was…