Ayman al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian-born eye surgeon who will celebrate his 63rd birthday this June. That is if he does, in fact, make it to June, because he is a hunted man.
Al-Zawahiri has long ranked near the top of the 22 “Most Wanted Terrorists” list first compiled in 2001 after the 9/11 catastrophe, with a $25 million reward for his capture. , alive or dead. He has already had multiple close calls with death. Although he has so far escaped personally, his wife and two of his children paid the ultimate price for being related to him. They were killed in an air raid in the winter of 2001.
Ayman al-Zawahiri may well be the most wanted fugitive on the planet, as he is the alleged CEO of the militant Islamist terrorist consortium known as Al Qaeda. He is also the successor to the feared and unmourned Osama Bin Laden, who was assassinated in Abbottabad in May 2011 by SEAL Team Six.
The conventional wisdom, long expressed publicly and privately by American intelligence sources, is that Ayman al-Zawahiri is in a spider hole somewhere in Pakistan, just like many other al Qaeda terrorists. But Pakistan is a very big place; it covers some 300,000 square miles, the 37th largest nation in the world, a real estate that is ten percent larger than Texas.
Where in Pakistan could it be?
For starters, most analysts think it’s almost certainly in a place in Pakistan where there are women and children nearby, so a drone strike would be ruled out simply because of the number of innocents that would have to die with Al-A. Zawahiri if he to be seen and then blown up with a missile. That rules out most of Pakistan’s wild and woolly Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the North West Frontier Province near the eastern edge of the iconic Khyber Pass through the Spin Gar Mountains. This is a part of Pakistan where even the military often dare not venture, rocky lands controlled by tribal warlords who don’t accept central rule.
You’d think this is the perfect place for an outlaw to hide. It is, or rather was, until the recent deployment of drones. Drones have been used there deadly and effectively for years. Hundreds of terrorists have been killed.
Al-Zawahiri is much more likely to be hiding out in the urban capital of the North West Frontier Province, the fabled city of Peshawar. Why Peshawar? For starters, it’s one of Pakistan’s most densely populated centers, with nearly 40 million people crammed into a narrow valley at the foot of the great Himalayan mountain range that covers some 400 square miles. Its population density exceeds that of Hong Kong.
And since it is semi-autonomous, even Pakistan’s central “law and order” authorities have limited ability to control people and events there. It is, in effect, the Harlem of Pakistan – you go there at the invitation of the locals, otherwise you may not be welcome.
It’s also one of the most interesting parts of Pakistan, a melting pot of cultures and people, the perfect place for a sophisticated man like Al-Zawahiri to hide out without having to give up the comforts.
Al-Zawahiri is known to enjoy fine dining, and he could easily follow this hobby in Peshawar, a city of 10,000 restaurants. And unlike OBL, who at 6-foot-5 stood out like a walking telephone pole among his peers, Al-Zawahiri is 5-foot-9 and weighs just over 150 pounds, a perfectly unremarkable man. No one really knows what his face looks like, as he has sported a full, bushy beard for decades, as have many of his peers. Shave off your beard and who knows what’s underneath? He would be an easy man to disguise, to walk free in Peshawar. The only thing we can recognize are his eyes, and his eyes are easily hidden by colored contact lenses.
Given his almost certain presence in Peshawar, will he be caught? That depends on how much HUMINT (HUMman INTelligence, which stands for spies on the ground) the world’s spy agencies can muster in sprawling Peshawar to penetrate al Qaeda’s formidable secret. AQ leaders have learned to do without cell phones and computers. No tweets or cell calls from these guys to track. They use face to face to communicate, or notes written on slips of paper hidden in the soles of shoes. Spies in Peshawar take enormous risks, because if they are caught, the likely result is torture and death.
Much of the search for Al-Zawahiri takes place behind the scenes, and it is unlikely that we will learn much of the details of this exciting story until after the final chapter is written. But we have a template that suggests how it might happen, and that’s the June 2012 takedown of Abu Yahya al-Libi, an event that American observers still regard as America’s greatest success since the OBL was created. taken down the previous year.
The drones are capable of covering large tracts of densely populated real estate while resolving, with high-powered lenses, objects just inches wide. Given enough clues, from pocket junk found in smaller takedowns to chatter absorbed by the NSA through the ether, special analysts called “targets” at the CIA at Langley and at Liberty Crossing can use drones to target specific locations where they can get more visual clues. arise.
No US commander would launch Hellfire missiles on a city with a population density of 100,000 people per square mile, but drones can still prove effective in supplementing HUMINT’s intelligence by relentlessly flying over homes and other buildings where Al-Zawahiri may be hiding. . Unless, as an OBL, he is inside all the time, they will almost certainly find him.
There is always the possibility, too, that Al-Zawahiri will leave Peshawar to go rally troops in remote areas. That is what condemned Al-Libi. All the pointers came together and the drones, like ruthless, relentless and powerful birds of prey, circled his location at the right moment while he was on the move, then vaporized him in a wet pink cloud of mist with a precisely aimed Hellfire. . .
Death by Hellfire is instant. Yet that probably gives Ayman al-Zawahiri little comfort as he gazes up at the skies of Pakistan, wondering when the inevitable moment of forgetting him will arrive.