Abdul El-Sayed Criticized US Drone Killing of 9/11 Mastermind al-Zawahiri as ‘Troubling’ and ‘a Fig Leaf’

Abdul E-Sayed wrote that it was "troubling" that the United States killed the al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri—who is widely considered the mastermind of 9/11—in a 2022 targeted drone strike. Killing al-Zawahiri was "a fig leaf" to cover up the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, El-Sayed wrote in 2022, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.

In the piece, "Projecting Strength Abroad Isn't Simply About Killing Terrorists. It's About Standing Up to Despots, Too," which was published in the New Republic on Aug. 5, 2022, El-Sayed spoke out against the CIA drone strike that successfully took out al-Zawahiri, a fellow Egyptian who'd joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager and ultimately rose to lead al Qaeda.

"President Biden is using the strike to bolster his approval here at home. It is troubling to watch yet another American president flog 'War on Terror' themes to resurrect a laggard term," El-Sayed sniffed in the article.

El-Sayed went on to accuse Biden of launching the attack on al-Zawahiri—who'd been on the FBI's 10 most wanted terrorist list for almost 21 years—as a way to arrest sliding approval numbers stemming from the disastrous United States withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"This strike," he went on, "offers the Biden administration a fig leaf, demonstrating that even in Taliban hands, Afghanistan is not off-limits for direct action against terrorist targets," El-Sayed wrote, adding that Biden did it in order to "project strength" for Democrats heading into the midterm elections that year.

Though he spent most of his career in the shadow of Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri is widely credited as the organizational mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

"He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11, one of the most responsible for the attacks that murdered 2,977 people on American soil," President Biden said in a statement after the strike.

Scholars of Islamic extremism say it was al-Zawahiri who came up with the intellectual rationale for al Qaeda striking American targets and was behind not just 9/11, but also a series of deadly attacks on Americans overseas in the years leading up to 2001.

"According to officials in the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., Zawahiri has been responsible for much of the planning of the terrorist operations against the United States, from the assault on American soldiers in Somalia in 1993, and the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th," added Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker in September 2002. Wright's book, The Looming Tower, about the origins of the attack, later won a Pulitzer Prize.

Al-Zawahiri became the emir, or leader, of al Qaeda after bin Laden's death in 2011, and was still its leader when he died.

El-Sayed has a long history of being squeamish about bringing justice to radical Islamists.

After President Trump assassinated Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani, El-Sayed warned: "one shouldn't kick a rabid dog."

When President Obama droned terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen operating in Yemen who was linked to multiple attacks on Americans, El-Sayed lambasted that decision as well, calling it an "extrajudicial assassination," in a Huffington Post article from December 2011.

In March of this year, El-Sayed was caught on tape saying "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today" after a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Free Beacon reported.

In addition to pooh-poohing the al-Zawahiri strike, El-Sayed's article said Biden should lend his weight toward freeing Asim Ghafoor, who had been imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates on "trumped-up charges" of money laundering and tax evasion. The UAE eventually let him out, but never overturned the conviction.

What El-Sayed did not mention in his article was that Ghafoor was a spokesman for the Global Relief Foundation—a charity shuttered after 9/11 for allegedly engaging in terrorism financing in Afghanistan.

"The Global Relief Foundation (GRF), has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups," the Treasury Department said in a press release in October 2002.

Ghafoor was also once a spokesman for Care International—yet another nonprofit which was shuttered for terrorism financing.

"Evidence presented during the 24-day trial proved that the defendants fraudulently used Care International to solicit and obtain tax deductible donations for the purpose of supporting and promoting the mujahideen (Muslim holy warriors) and jihad (violent armed conflict)," the Justice Department said in January 2008 during a trial of group leaders. As an attorney, Ghafoor also defended Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Long before 9/11, that brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifah, had been convicted in Jordan and sentenced in absentia to life in prison for his involvement in a plot to blow up movie theaters.

Khalifah was killed in a shootout in Madagascar in August 2007.

The news comes as El-Sayed continues to face questions about his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic extremism. Though he claims to have no affiliations, he signed a letter in 2012 calling on the terrorist organization that had seized power in Egypt to "purge" the media and police. His mother worked for a charity which was later shut down over its association with al Qaeda. Her home was raided by the FBI during the probe. El-Sayed's sister has posted on X that the family has long associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

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