The Taliban are jumpy now in gaudy Sherpur, which has hosted warlords, US contractors – and the leader of al-Qaida
“We are familiar with these things,” said Saeed, who runs a travel agency just a couple of blocks from the site of the drone strike, which startled the office cleaner early on Sunday morning. “If there is someone [important] here, there is nothing we can do about it.”
“Given his location in a very busy area of Kabul, there is little deniability for the Taliban,” said Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Centre on Armed Groups and an expert on militant groups in Afghanistan. A decade earlier many of Sherpur’s vast and often garish “poppy palaces” – named for the opium money sloshing into the capital – were also rented out at inflated prices to American contractors getting rich from the war.By the time the al-Qaida leader reportedly moved in, earlier this year, Taliban ministers and commanders had replaced the elite of the Afghan republic and its allies.
They also pledged not to let Afghan territory be used for planning international terror attacks. Yet less than a year after the final US forces flew out of the city’s airport, Zawahiri was leading a global jihadi organisation from Kabul.
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