![]() The US needs to come clean on justifications, first on its use of force against Afghanistan, and second how Zawahiri was qualified as a lawful target.Īfghanistan is not in the context of war it is in a transitional peace phase – or post-conflict, reconstruction, and reconciliation phase - thanks to a Qatar-brokered-Doha agreement between the Taliban and US. I only wonder what the British establishment was thinking, as Ben Wallace, the UK Defence secretary said he was prepared to launch drone strikes in Afghanistan following withdrawal. There were also a few US military academics, advocating for the use of over-the-horizon strikes as a counter-terrorism strategy moving forward in Afghanistan. In western media only a few legal blogs showcased interesting critical perspectives on the Zawahiri strike, namely Just Security and Articles of War. We must question why this is the case, and if the use of armed drones has now been normalised? Particularly following the inception of the Ukraine-Russia war. The last two decades of the Global War on Terror have seen extensive debates on the legality of killing the likes of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, and Qassem al-Soleimani in Iraq, yet the same level of introspection was not given to the Zawahiri strike. We must acknowledge that the Zawahiri strike came 21 years after the 9/11 attacks, which triggers some very uncomfortable legal questions on how it can be justified - under jus ad bellum (right to war) and jus in bello (law of war) frameworks. Nonetheless President Joe Biden boasted about the Ayman Al-Zawahiri strike as justice ‘delivered’. The use of armed drones for targeted killings is a complex discussion under international law. At the end of July, the United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike in Afghanistan.
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