ISLAMABAD: Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, a leader of Pakistan’s ousted prime minister’s party, said on Saturday it was unclear whether Pakistani airspace was used in a recent US drone strike in Kabul, which according to Washington had killed Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
US President Joe Biden announced earlier this week that the “precision strike” last Sunday hit Zawahiri who he said was sheltering in the center of the Afghan capital.
Amid speculation that Pakistan has helped facilitate the attack, the country’s military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Babar Iftikhar said on Friday that Pakistani soil had not been used “for any such activity.”
Hussain, former information minister in the government of ex-PM Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party — which relations with the country’s armed forces have been strained since its leader’s ouster in a no-confidence vote in April — said on Twitter that the relevant ministries should issue a statement on the Pakistani involvement in the US strike.
“The repeated statement that Pakistan’s land has not been used is unclear,” he wrote. “It’s not a question of whether Pakistan's land was used in Afghanistan's drone attack. The question is, was permission given to use Pakistan’s airspace or not?”
Zawahiri, 71, an Egyptian-born physician, was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list with a $25 million bounty on his head. He had helped coordinate the Sept. 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks in the US that killed nearly 3,000 people, and took over the group when its leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011.
The Taliban did neither confirm that anyone was killed in the drone strike, nor that Zawahiri was in Kabul. The chief Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid only said that preliminary investigation found that the attack in the Shirpur area of downtown Kabul was “carried out by American drones.”
Suhail Shaheen, the designated Taliban representative to the United Nations, told journalists that the Taliban government and leadership “weren’t aware of what is being claimed.”