the US had killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike<\/a>, we tried to approach the area on a main road leading into the street threading past Spinney’s luxury supermarket and the Afghan Ghazanfar bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA single Taliban guard angrily crossed his arms to warn us away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From a side street, we reached the back of the villa on foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Guards and workers in adjacent buildings confirmed which house had been hit on Sunday; balconies protruding from the top floor were now covered with green plastic sheeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Had anyone seen any activity, any residents, at this place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The house was empty,” was the refrain. Was this a reply rehearsed in advance, an echo of the Taliban’s official statement?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Owners of nearby buildings told us they had been ordered, hours earlier, to shut their rooftops to everyone, even their own workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As news of Zawahiri’s killing shot like an electric current through social media, the scene of this explosive moment seemed strangely quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Traffic flowed on surrounding tree-lined streets on this warm summer’s day. But as minutes ticked by, more journalists arrived, more passers-by stopped, more Taliban guards showed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“If you don’t listen to me, I’ll speak to you through my gun,” one armed Talib warned a colleague as we stood on the main street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A group of Afghan and foreign journalists approached us, one journalist in tears after an angry altercation on the main road which led to the front of the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her equipment had been forcefully taken away. It was then returned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now what had only been whispers grew louder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was talk that Arabs had been seen, in recent months, moving through these streets. No one dared speak much about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A local journalist living nearby told us: “We’ve seen non-Afghan residents in this neighbourhood in the past couple of months. They don’t speak the local languages. We don’t know who they are.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now there are many questions, conspiracies and a range of possible consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top target on America’s wanted list, had been reported many times before including last year when he was said to have died of illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BBC News: The first signs of an operation that was months in the making erupted when an attack rocked the centre of Kabul in the early hours of Sunday morning: we heard two thunderous blasts on our street nearby. Speculation swirled around who or what had hit this “empty house” in Sherpur. It is a neighbourhood which became notorious over the past two decades for its garish multi-storey villas, mocked by Kabul residents as the stronghold of corrupt warlords and officials, a gaudy symbol of the spoils of an ugly war. Kabulis called it Choorpur, the town of thieves. The… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26138,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26136\/revisions\/26138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}