The Lawfare Podcast: Dan Byman and Scott Anderson on the al-Zawahiri Strike

Jen Patja, Benjamin Wittes, Scott R. Anderson, Daniel Byman
Wednesday, August 3, 2022, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Another day, another leader of al-Qaeda is killed by U.S. forces. This time, it was Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed on his balcony in Kabul by a Hellfire missile strike. To talk about it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare’s foreign policy editor Daniel Byman. Is it a big deal? Is it kind of old news that we’ve killed yet another al-Qaeda leader? How badly degraded is al-Qaeda? Who's going to replace al-Zawahiri? What does it mean for the Taliban's promises not to allow al-Qaeda attacks on the United States to be planned from its soil? And what is the international and domestic law of killing al-Qaeda leaders 21 years after 9/11.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University, Lawfare's Foreign Policy Essay editor, and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

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