The Taliban say they have not found the body of Ayman al-Zawahiri and are continuing investigations after the United States claimed they killed the Al Qaeda leader in an air strike in Kabul last month.
Speaking at a press conference in Kabul, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said "the results have yet to be clarified".
"The body has not been found there because of the rockets that targeted the area — the area is destroyed and nothing is left of it,” he said.
The United States said they killed al-Zawahiri on July 31, with a missile fired from a drone while he stood on a balcony at his hideout in the biggest blow to Al Qaeda since US Navy SEALS shot dead Osama bin Laden more than a decade ago.
The Taliban cast doubt on those claims, stating only that a US drone had struck a Kabul home.
While online images show some damage to the balcony, there is hardly a scratch on the rest of the building — no rubble and no scorch marks.
Some analysts suspect the CIA might have used the Hellfire R9X — a highly secretive missile sometimes called the "knife bomb", the "ninja bomb" or the "flying Ginsu" because it uses a series of rapidly spinning blades to kill.
The Taliban condemned the strike, claiming it was a violation of the US withdrawal agreement.
According to that agreement, signed in Doha in February 2020, the Taliban pledged their territory would not serve as a haven for Al Qaeda and would not be used for training, preparation or indoctrination by any terrorist organisation.
Al Qaeda, who shared a common ideology, found a safe haven under the previous Taliban leadership and used the country as a base from which it launched the September 11 attacks — which led to the US invasion of the country in 2001.
After regaining control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban repeatedly denied any ties to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
"The ground reality is that we do not allow any [group to stay in Afghanistan] who stands against the United States and other countries because that's not in our best interests," Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen told the ABC last year.
The killing of al-Zawahiri in a safe house in an upscale Kabul neighbourhood left little doubt about the continuing partnership between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Following his death, the New York Times reported that the safe house was owned by an aide to senior officials in the Haqqani network, a violent wing of the Taliban government.
Al-Zawahiri, a 71-year-old Egyptian doctor and surgeon, had been the leader of Al-Qaeda since June 2011, after bin Laden was killed by US forces in northern Pakistan.
Al-Zawahiri helped coordinate the 9/11 attacks in which four civilian aircraft were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York, the Pentagon near Washington and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people.
ABC/Reuters
