In what would be the biggest international prank since Andy Kaufman took the oath of office in January 2017, old-school terrorist group al Qaeda is planning to announce its leader has died of a sudden ailment. As The Daily Beast points out, the problem is, Ayman al Zawahiri was actually killed in a US airstrike last July, julienned by a six-bladed Hellfire R9X in an upscale Kabul neighborhood.
Al Qaeda, like Kevin McCarthy desperately trying to stay relevant in a changing political environment, reportedly made an agreement with the Taliban running Afghanistan to keep Zawahiri’s death a secret: the Taliban had promised the Trump Administration that they would not assist al Qaeda. However, they were continuing to shelter the group’s leader past the signing of the Doha Agreements, where Trump promised to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.