This is a special edition of the Daily Article podcast written by Dr. Jim Denison and narrated by Chris Elkins of the Denison Forum.

President Joe Biden announced from the White House on August 1st that a U.S. missile launched from a drone in Afghanistan had killed al-Qaeda leader Aman al-Zawahiri. Who was Al-Zawahiri? Why is his death so

significant? What can we now expect in the continuing battle against jihadist terrorism? How should we

respond to this news biblically? According to the Wall Street Journal, a U.S. strike targeted a safe house in a residential area in central Kabul, Afghanistan, just after 6 a.m. Sunday morning.

This is the first known counterterrorism operation in the country since U.S. forces withdrew last year.

A senior Biden administration official said Al-Zawahiri was killed by two U.S. health fire missiles fired from a drone as he stood on the balcony of his safe house.

The official also stated the U.S. intelligence community has high confidence that the dead individual is Al-Zawahiri.

The White House said no civilian casualties resulted from the strike.

Intelligence agencies had been aware for years of a network of individuals supporting the al-Qaeda

leader. They tracked several members of Al-Zawahiri's family, including his wife and children,

when they moved to Kabul. They then received confirmation that Al-Zawahiri himself was in Kabul.

U.S. spy agencies built a replica of the House where Al-Zawahiri was staying and brought it to

meetings with President Biden and his aides. They used the model to confirm the terrorist leader

could be killed in a missile strike without collapsing the entire structure

and killing civilians, including members of his family. In a July 25th meeting with his top

advisors, President Biden then made a decision to order the strike. According to the Washington Post,

and I quote, Americans knew him as Al-Qaeda's number two leader, the bespeckled, bushy-bearded

deputy to Osama bin Laden. But in reality, it was Al-Zawahiri's brains and blood-drenched hands

that guided the world's most notorious terrorist movements. End quote. Al-Zawahiri grew up in an

upper-middle class, religiously diverse suburb of Cairo Egypt.

His father was a professor of pharmacology, and his maternal grandfather was a president of Cairo University.

However, he was influenced as a youth by one of his uncles, Mufuz Azam, who was an impassioned critic of Egypt's secularist governments.

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