A Key 9/11 Plotter Is Dead. He Was Already Irrelevant.
Why Ayman al-Zawahiri’s killing won’t have much effect on global terrorism
The United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike this weekend in Kabul. I already kind of miss him. Zawahiri came from an older generation of jihadists—he was 71—and was in many ways the kind of terrorist one wants. For a decade or more he had no known good ideas. He told young upstarts to shelve their own good ideas, and never got around to them. He was a black hole of charisma. Whenever the Islamic
