Taliban say they've not found body of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri

After the US claimed the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in an airstrike in Kabul last month, the Taliban announced on Thursday that they had not located his body and that they were still conducting investigations.

According to US sources, Zawahiri was taken down by a missile fired from a drone in July. This was the largest blow to al Qaeda since US Navy SEALS assassinated Osama bin Laden more than ten years ago.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, was targeted and killed in a drone strike in Kabul on July 31. On the other hand, the US security services are portraying this as a significant victory.

Al-Zawahiri, 71, and bin Laden were indicted by the US Justice Department as conspirators in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

The declaration that Osama bin Laden's life had ended in 2011 received an overwhelmingly positive domestic reaction and helped President Barack Obama gain re-election the following year.

On the other hand, the reaction to the announcement of the death of al-Zawahiri was comparatively subdued.

The US security establishment no longer viewed Al Qaeda as the most significant terrorist danger. The organisation has been replaced as a much more severe threat to the world by the Islamic State (IS).

Who was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda?

After Osama bin Laden's murder, Zawahiri, an Egyptian who had served as both his personal physician and a close friend, was 71 years old and had become a prominent international icon of the terrorist organization. He was descended from a prominent Egyptian family.

Rabia'a al-Zawahiri, his grandfather, was an imam at Cairo's al-Azhar University. Abdel Rahman Azzam, his great-uncle, served as the Arab League's first secretary.

He was an intellectually talented young man who was influenced early in life by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and philosopher who is credited with being one of the pioneers of 20th-century Islamist extremism, as well as by one of his uncles, Mahfouz Azzam, a critic of Egypt's secularist government.

According to his biographer, Muntassir al-Zayat, by reading the writings of the radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who had called for the complete reform of Muslim polities on the basis of pure Islamic norms, values, and practices, al-Zawahiri may have found comfort and an understanding of the catastrophe Islam faced as a result of the trauma of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war.

(With inputs from agencies)

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